Ghost is currently supporting Iron Maiden on the second leg of their Book of Souls North American Tour. Since the initial tour announcement, speculation behind who’s behind the Swedish rockers increased due to frontman Papa Emeritus, widely believed to be Tobias Forge, receiving a lawsuit from his former bandmates. We haven’t heard too much since then aside from the dispute report leaking on social media. It’s interesting now, a few months later, Forge returns with an opinion semi-similar to what his former bandmates once called him out on. It seems the group went through more lineup changes in the last seven years, than say, one would change a pair of pants.
Forge recently spoke to CBS Philadelphia as a Nameless Ghoul, explaining how members are essentially, replaceable:
“I have been in the band since I started the band. I started writing songs for it in 2006. Nowadays there’s a handful of very new members, yeah. But there has been about ten to fifteen people now going in and out of the band, so there’s been a lot of rotation. It’s always an inconvenience when you’re changing people in a band. You have to get someone else in there and you have to teach that person from scratch everything. We’re not doing twelve-bar blues here, so it’s not something that you can just pick up on. And luckily for me, since I’ve written most of everything, of the patterns, I can teach anyone coming in, ‘This is how the bass line goes, and this is how the guitar riff goes, and this is how the keyboard goes and this is how the drums go.’ So it’s not very hard for me to make my stamp rub off on anyone coming in and playing that instrument. But that also adds to the friction over the years. Because it’s never really been a band in the classic sense that you have someone who plays his or her instrument and that she or he is the only person in the world that can make it sound like that. People have a tendency to want to feel that they’re very important for something, and if it’s not crucial that they’re there, there will also be a little bit of a friction there.”
When asked if he views Ghost as a solo project with a rotation of guest musicians coming in or if he sees it as a band, he revealed:
“I actually refer to it as the earlier of the two options. Even though I’ve never wanted it that way, but at the end of the day, that is what it is. So I think it speaks clear for itself. I mean, I started it in 2006, and no one that was ever in the band in 2016 was even on the first record. Call it solo, if you want to, but I call it a project.”
Check the rest of the podcast below:
(transcribed via Blabbermouth)
