Ghost mastermind Tobias Forge recently spoke about his anonymity officially entirely disappearing after he was sued by former members of the band, explaining to Blabbermouth how much damage the whole thing did and what he whole thing ultimately taught him:
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“I haven’t felt very anonymous for many years. I don’t feel very bummed by that. I can feel bummed about the reasons why it was revealed. [Laughs]
“But, it didn’t do much harm. I don’t feel, in any way, like a loser here and it didn’t seem to do a lot of harm. No, especially with a little bit of hindsight and couth. It’s fine. I feel good. It’s going well. I’m out here working. I made a record. [Laughs]
“You know, it’s always alarming, obviously, when you have people, and some of them used to be close to you, working diligently to destroy your life. That’s always a bummer. That sucks.
“Sometimes that happens in all parts of the world: at workplaces, in schools, in families, in relationships and friendships. There’s nothing new about it; it’s perfectly natural. It’s a sad avenue to ride down on, but it’s a part of life and it’s fine.”
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Did the lawsuit make the new album ‘Prequelle’ more difficult to make?
“Actually, no. It wasn’t that hard to write because there was a lot of other things that were also off my plate. So, in a way, I felt together with Tom Dalgety, I think we were both very determined – this might sound crazy – not to phone this shit in.
“I think we both felt the urgency. Going into it, we already knew that we had a ton of material to work with. So, we knew we had this song, that song, that song and that’s going to be great, then we have that song – yes!
“But, still, ‘Let’s really put time into making sure that this record is everything it can be,’ because we didn’t want to mention it every day, but, of course, at the end of some days, it was ‘My life is depending on this record. This is a moment of truth.’
“I think also for him as a producer and a close friend of mine, he also felt very connected to that, that it’s like, ‘If we pull this off, we’re definitely doing it against the will of a certain bunch of people who really want nothing but for us to fail.’ That alone was actually quite a good motivator rather than a negative.
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“But that depends on how you’re wired. I always strived to have an easy life. But, I’ve never really achieved that because of how I am wired and how I do things and I’m come to accept now that I seem to be working better under pressure.
“I don’t follow apart easily, I don’t give in easily and I’m way more competitive than I ever thought I would admit. So, people trying to fuck me over is just going to make me worse. [Laughs] They proved that, so thanks! Thank you, guys!”
Tobias added about his former bandmates:
“I think many business people who have their own pizzeria or grocery or a bar or whatever, I think you learn that you need to be very cautious who to bring in. You should hire people because of their abilities and not proximity.
“You usually learn the hard way, unfortunately. I learned that. [Laughs] So, lesson learned! It’s all good. I’m never, ever going to do that again.”
Overall, Forge concluded he’s quite happy with the band’s growth and new lineup, which now added more backing vocalists to its roster, allowing him to get rid of the backing track he “loathed.” He said:
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“My plan has always been to have a band of this size and ensemble. We just couldn’t. We didn’t have room. We didn’t have money.
“There wasn’t time for it yet, so I reluctantly, since I wanted the music to somewhat reflect the music on the records, I think a lot of the vocal stuff I had done on the records were pretty much of a staple.
“I wanted it to be multiple harmonies and that sort of AOR [album-oriented rock] choruses, basically. If you don’t have people in the band singing, the only thing you can do, technically today, is to have it on back tracks, which is something I always loathed. I never liked it at all.
“It was the only way to make it happen. I was very, very happy when we finally made this move this year just getting people and remove at least the majority of the back tracks. You still have intros and outros, things like that. But that’s normal. Everyone does that.
“But, not to have a lot of things being played through back tracks – I’m not even personally a fan of bands who do that. It’s just a possibility that you can use and it makes everything sound a little bit bigger.
“But, now being able to recreate that with the band feels so much more genuine, so much stronger. I think that translates. I think it’s better.”