In celebration of our 25th anniversary, we’re bringing you strictly limited merch bundles for every studio album we've ever released. Here’s WILL TO POWER, which comes with a signed card! Get your bundle now: http://bit.ly/AE25Years!
Enjoy the last part of our series “Arch Enemy 25th anniversary - random fun facts & memories with Michael Amott”!
"After having a very exciting (and long!) run with the “War Eternal” album, we were kind of wondering how we could top that. But ultimately, you can’t really think like that…you just have to try to write the best songs you can, one by one, and hopefully end up with something that is kick ass in the end.
We always write a lot of material and keep circling back around to songs, constantly improving on them. The first song we wrote for this record was “The World Is Yours”, which was already there in demo form while we were still out on the “War Eternal” tour. We had accumulated a fair amount of music, fragments of songs…sometimes just a melody or a riff. But everything needed a lot more work.
In order to get away and focus on putting it all together, and hopefully come up with some new cool stuff as well, Daniel and myself rented a house in Mexico for a two week songwriting session. I know that might sound crazy but “The Eagle Flies Alone” was written by the Gulf of Mexico. I guess the Scandinavian darkness is deeply embedded in our hearts and souls - we don’t actually need to be physically there to create the music that we do. After these two weeks of intense writing sessions (with a few margaritas thrown in for good measure) we had amassed most of the material that became “Will to Power”!
Once we had the instrumental demos finished, Alissa and myself wrote lyrics and discussed vocal arrangements etc. This process was smooth as well.
We basically decided to repeat the exact same recording and mix procedure that had yielded such great results three years earlier on the “War Eternal” record. So we went about recording in various studios on the southwest coast of Sweden and once again mixed and mastered in Örebro by Jens Bogren.
On the song “A Fight I Must Win” we once again got an exquisite orchestral arrangement and recording courtesy of Ulf Janson and Stockholm Session Strings. Legendary Swedish keyboard player Jens Johansson (Yngwie Malmsteen, Stratovarius etc) graciously accepted our invitation and played beautifully on “Dreams of Retribution”, “The World Is Yours” and a few other things. Always a pleasure to have guests come in and add their spices to the dish, so to speak. This was also Jeff Loomis’ recording debut with the band after touring with the band for a couple of years. What a great guitarist and dear friend, Jeff has really enhanced the stability and harmony within the band.
We shot two videos with director Patric Ullaeus ahead of the album release. Both “The World Is Yours” and “The Eagle Flies Alone” got an astonishing amount of YouTube views. Especially “Eagle” has taken on a life of its own and become quite the anthem for us.
We did a lot of press, promoting the album as much as we could, and that, along with the relentless touring we’d done seemed to pay off in a big way actually. Will to Power was/is our most successful album to date, and how many bands can say that this far into their career?
We hit the road hard, as usual. It was our biggest and most ambitious tour to date and this time we could really feel that Arch Enemy had reached another plateau. I guess you could say it is well-deserved (depending on your perspective obviously)…one thing is for sure though, it certainly wasn’t an overnight success!
Looking back. I wouldn’t change a thing. There’s been highs and there’s been lows. All valuable lessons that we’ve taken something from and grown. It’s been an absolutely incredible journey so far, and we’re all very excited about the future and the new music we have for you (coming soon!). "
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