An Interview with Jake E of CyHra
When Delain roll into town they have a history of bringing interesting and exciting support acts with them and tonight is no exception. This time around they have the melodic supergroup CyHra with them and our illustrious leader Johann meet up with vocalist Jake E to shoot the breeze and discuss ABBA, backing tracks and being bigger than Iron Maiden.
“Great to meet you and welcome back to Manchester. I know this will be the hundredth time you have recounted it, but could you tell the Rockflesh massive in your own words how you came about, how did it all started?”
I used to be in a band named Amaranthe and I was one of the forming members and Jesper, the guitar player who is not here right now, he is on some leave and will be coming back later, who formed In Flames decided to work together. We have had Alexander Landenburg who is a well renown drummer joining us, he has been playing with more or less everyone, Kamelot, Rhapsody, Annihilator and so on, then Euge Valovirta from Shining and more recently Marcus Sunesson who was in Engel and The Crown.
After I left Amaranthe, I decided to do something else but wasn’t too sure what. Me and Jesper had been friends for 20 years, so we sat down and started writing some songs and very quickly we realised that we needed to do something real with this, so we asked Alex and Euge to join us and they jumped on board straight away and now we are 2 albums in. We started the band towards the end of 2016, we released our first album “Letters To Myself” in 2017 and our second album “No Halos In Hell” last year. It has been a fast run.
”How does it feel to start again after having all been in established acts?”
Obviously, it is hard. When I started Amaranthe, I was 26 years old, full of energy, no family, no girlfriend, no kids, you could just push all your attention into the band. It didn’t matter what time of the day it was, we just worked, worked, worked just to get your band to where we wanted it to be. Now with a new band, you gained the success, you’ve been to the big places, you’ve been in a secure environment where the shows were coming to you instead of seeking them, and all of sudden you are down at the bottom again. Luckily, we are not completely down at the bottom, we are probably somewhere in between but it is still a struggle, it is still a fight and sometimes you don’t have the energy and the time that is needed. I have 2 kids and it is the same thing with the other guys in the band, so it is much harder to work at the same level but we love it, it is fun and we would never do this if we didn’t enjoy it.
”With Amaranthe you had melodic Metal with Bon Jovi vocals and Jesper founded In Flames to be growling vocals with Iron Maiden guitars. What was your preconceived idea of what Cyhra should be or sound like?”
It was very funny when I sat down the first time with Jesper, we realised we were friends for 20 years and never wrote anything together except a theme song for a rugby team and that was it. We just said let’s rock and see what we come up with my approach and your ideas. I realised that as a songwriter you have your language when it comes to creating music and no matter what band you are in, you do end up sounding like you. Jesper and I have very melodic minds so maybe some of the songs in the beginning got to be a mixture of In Flames and Amaranthe. But we never had any discussions how we should sound, it just turned out to be that way because this is how we write songs.
“You are often described in the press as supergroup, what does it take to be considered a supergroup and do you actually consider yourself as a supergroup?”
To be a supergroup, you have to have a grumpy finn in the band! Isn’t that so, Euge?
Euge : “Yes!”
I think it is just down to the journalists, I guess the term is used because it may be a bit of click bait by drawing people’s attention in. We have never said that we were a supergroup. We are not trying to ride on our past successes in any way. But obviously, because we’ve had former success with past bands, it is what it is.
“If ”Letters To Myself” was mainly a contribution between yourself and Jesper. Did you approach the second album differently?”
On “Letters To Myself” we had all the time in the world, we had no record label, no pressure, we had no fans. We had nothing to live up to. We had no set timeframe so we put a lot of effort into the songs during the preproduction.
When we started with “No Halos In Hell”, we had already gained some success with”Letters To Myself”, we were touring and needed to get another album out so we were not as detailed which I have really liked. When Euge and Alex arrived into the band “Letters To Myself” was done so they could not contribute too much, but with “No Halos In Hell”, Euge was able to send some songs and ideas. Right until the recording, Alex was on tour with Kamelot so he didn’t have much time to go through the demos which made him more involved during the writing process in the studio and was free to create his parts, which in turns created way more dynamics in the songs. He was absolutely a team effort.
“No Halos in Hell” has quite dark, hard hitting lyrics melded to quiet light poppy melodic music. Was it a conscious decision to have that level of juxtaposition?”
I think the lyrics may have quite dark undertones, but the general concept behind our lyrics is that if you keep fighting, thing will turn out good. Maybe if was in ABBA, I would be very happy because they have all the money in the world..
“Are you saying that you would write more positive lyrics if you were in ABBA?”
I could never be in ABBA, no-one can be ABBA except the 4 of them! ABBA is a big reason why Swedish music sounds like it does. They have inspired so many people, like Max Martin, Roxette, The Cardigans. It is pretty amazing that a country with 9 or 10 millions people has so many big artists, it fascinates me. I have heard that Sweden and Finland have the most Metal bands per capita.
“In your compositions, they are a lot of layered keyboards and samples, how will you be delivering these parts tonight?”
It will be our sixth member, Mr ASUS as we like to call him, he takes care of the click tracks for Alex. He? It might be a she or a them. We have all the samples and keyboards on a backing track. We are not contemplating getting a keyboard player, right at this moment, we even have the bass on backing track since Peter Iwers left. We wanted him to be in the band but he couldn’t be but we didn’t go out there and say we needed a bass player. We just realised that when the day will come, we will find the right person because Cyhra is about the chemistry within the band and that is why we formed this band from the beginning. We all came from bands where we were playing songs but weren’t really friends with each other, where it was just a business and I didn’t want to do that anymore. I wanted to have friends that I could do other things with apart from being on stage together. That is really important for us. But to come back to your question, getting a keyboard player. It is layered keyboards, it is strings, it is an orchestra and samples, I don’t understand why do you have to prove that you can play those things live because we would have to have 6 hands or 3 keyboard players. If it was at the centre of our music, if all you heard was prominent keyboard melodies, of course I would feel that we would have to have a person behind that. But when you have only layered keyboards that are feeling up the background to create some kind of dynamic wall, I don’t see why you would have to have someone to play these parts. And if we would have to have someone, the truth be told, no-one would pay a band our size, if we were to add the cost of all the gear, all the transportation, all the hotels, the salaries for the musicians, the extra crew to deal for the extra musicians. You could do that if you are big enough and had the resources for it, but for us it is impossible.
“What are the future plans for 2020? Any additional dates to be announced?”
Yes, they are 3 festivals which are official now, there are going to be more presented soon. We are having something cool which can’t be revealed just yet but we are going to travel to some exotic part of the world, and have some tour of headline shows in the States around autumn. We all are really looking forward to it. It is so great that “No Halos in Hell” has been received with such a great feedback from both fans and journalists around the world although I got misquoted in Blabbermouth a couple of month ago which was really funny. Throughout my career, I have always said as a joke, “Our future plans is to have Iron Maiden as an opening act” and they misquoted me as saying “We are going to be bigger than Iron Maiden”. No-one would be happier than me but you would have to set your bar pretty high. I only say this because even if you are starting as a young band, you have to dream big so that at least you can get halfway there, but if your big goal is at the bottom of the ladder then it can be easily reached when there could be so much more.
Tack så mycket Jake!
Interview and photography by Johann Wierzbicki