Simone Simons, best known for her soaring and powerful vocals in Epica, recently sat down with Metal Wani’s Carl O’Rourke to talk about the bands upcoming book, ‘The Essence of Epica’, their soon to be released ‘Attack On Titan EP’, writing new material for a follow up to The Holographic Principle and more.
On what fans can expect from their book, ‘The Essence of Epica’, Simone offered,
“We’ve gathered quite some cool, some funny, some sad, some crazy stories over the past almost sixteen years now.” “All of us have storied different memories, because sometimes Mark [Jansen], he can tell you like ‘Oh yeah I remember this venue and this guy did that’, and i was like, shit, do I have a lot of headbanging damage? Because I don’t recall any of that!” “It’s cool to dig up those stories and put them in a book, because fans love everything behind the scenes. Of course we show some stuff on social media, but we definitely still have some treasures buried in our boxes in the basement.”
[metalwani_content_ad]
Simone was also adamant that fans can expect a very honest retelling of the bands career.
“I have some stuff I found a couple of days ago because I was cleaning up my house, and I thought oh, this is going to be perfect for the book. Of course we’re going to go really in depth about many things. It’s going to be honest. No politically correct answers or sugar coating anything here. It’s going to be really raw and real.”
With regards to Epica’s upcoming EP, ‘Attack On Titan‘, having already been released in Japan and comprised of songs rewritten by the band for the anime of the same name, Simone gave some further background to the EP.
“We were given very basic English translations of the Japanese lyrics. We had to rewrite it completely because it was a very direct, one on one translation that didn’t fit the vocal lines anymore. The flow has to be correct; the emphasis and the right syllables.” “We kind of had to start from scratch, but we all knew the big lines of the story, we knew the theme of the song, and of course from the translation we could derive what was the gist of the story. And then we were given almost full freedom to rewrite the lyrics. We had to send them in for approval, the same with when we were finished arranging the songs. But everything was approved. We were lucky because the composer from these songs, from Linked Horizon, he is an Epica fan and he was the one that wanted us to do the cover version, which was an honor for us.”
[metalwani_content_ad]
Asked if she had begun to write any material for the next Epica album,
“I’m looking forward to gathering inspiration. I get a lot of inspiration from watching movies. If i hear a cool line I just write it down and I wait until the guys have some music and then I can start writing lyrics. But we’re all pretty, not burnt out, but we’re all pretty ready for a little break and don’t want to think too much about writing the next record. But we know that eventually the creative juices start flowing and we will be productive, but we want to come up with a great quality product, but we all think we deserve a little break after working our asses off.”