TIMO KOTIPELTO - Remote Control! Page 2
by Martin Popoff

What are some of the lyrical themes on here?

"Well, they're mostly about my personal life, how I felt between last August and December. There were a lot of not so nice things going on in my personal life. I broke up with my ex-girlfriend and we were five years together, so that was a hard thing, and then just a few months later all this band shit started to happen. So some of the songs are about those things. But then some songs, for example one called 'Around', is about what I've seen on tour, and in normal life is well. There are some more positive songs, like 'Journey Back', which is about going back to my hometown, which is about 400 kilometers north of Helsinki, where I live right now. So all of the songs are basically about my own life."

I asked Timo the difference between assembling Coldness versus, say, the last two Stratovarius albums, the Elements pairing. "It's totally different. If you're in a band, and you have five guys, you can ask at least some of those guys to help you. But if I'm doing this on my own, I have to do everything. All the studio stuff, and of course, I don't even have to talk about composing the songs and writing the lyrics; that's on top. There's also a lot of work because you are responsible for the album coming out on time. And of course you have to tell all the other musicians where to be and when, so everything goes well. There are a lot of things. And I think that stuff is as much work as the actual composing process (laughs)."

For the Elements albums, were there already problems in the band?

"Well, I would say that all started six years ago, when we had a tour called Destiny, and then the other Timo was drinking heavily after every show. And then just a couple of weeks later, when we came back to Helsinki, I didn't see him at all and I didn't hear anything from him. And then I met one of my friends, who happened to know him better than me, and then he told me, already back then, that Tolkki had said that he's thinking about quitting the band. And that was six years ago. And also, at that time, when we came back from the tour, he started doing this therapy. And since then, he's been doing this therapy and I don't know... probably therapy works for some people, but I don't know if in this case it has been that good. It's called something like primal therapy, whatever that means. The therapy is putting the person down, completely down. I don't know; I've never been there so I have no idea."

TIMO KOTIPELTO - Remote Control! Page 3