Rock News: March-April 2000 Nº16

Hello friends, today is 3-2-2000 and I am writing this in Barajas (Spanish Airport) while I wait for my airplane to Helsinki. My promotional tour of our new record Infinite has finished. In the next months is going to happen many things with Stratovarius.

We are about to facing our bigger and extensive tour until now, included many festivals. I would like to comment you something about the new record and how I feel with it: this is our eighth disk of study and I am really happy with how it is finished. I have put in it all what I know about music, production and recording, and also all my heart. It is in great size, the record that I always wanted to compose. The themes of the lyrics in this record are very important for me; they vary from the personal growth to the environmental problems that we are confronted nowadays. Some days ago I was in Milan and I went to see a concert in a club. Some people brought near me, asking me for an autograph or taken a photo with them. I said no because I respected the band that was there playing and I thought that it was the best, although at the same time I thought that I basically was going to look like an idiot for refusing. Then a boy brought near me and he said: "What are you doing here?", he sounded extremely annoyed and hostile. I answered him: "Well, I have come to see the band". Then, he said me: "Stratovarius is false metal." I stayed so hallucinated with this that I didn't know what to answer him. Could you believe that there are people that doesn't accept that somebody is going to see the concert of a band simply because "he plays false metal"?

What I experienced in that club is a version in miniature of what in my opinion is happening in the world nowadays. There is so much arrogance, hate and greed in our world that I sometimes feel really sad. Some people think that they have the absolute truth, who has a right to destroy a life or begin a war. It isn't much respect or tolerance in the world nowadays. Every second are spent 25 millions dollars in weapons while 400 children starve to death every two minutes. Thinking of these things, Stratovarius and the "false metal" or the "true metal" lose importance. But in any case, calling any band "false metal" is something terribly proud. Equally, saying a person that the music that he listens to is false or bad or wrong is something very proud. This of the Heavy Rock began at the end of the sixties with the group Black Sabbath, who were who planted the seed. What nowadays is the metal has grown until it has became a pretty tree with very different branches and all of them belong to the same tree. The Sioux Indians had a saying: "no tree has so stupid branches that fight between themselves". Think about it, please.

What I would like to say is that we, the humans, have total liberty to do what we want with our life. This liberty implicates a great responsibility. Each human being is born free and should have the liberty of expressing like him/she wants. But elevate you above the rest and say that any music is false makes you to look like a kind of God. There is not in reality false music; bad or mistaken. Simply there is music, and likes and different opinions. In the new record there is a song called Celestial Dream. It is an anthem of peace that I composed and in what I try to imagine how could be our planet if does not exist the arrogance nor the hostility. It is a very pretty dream but I am convinced of that any day it will be real. We could not change the other people, but we could change ourselves. And if everyone changed themselves that we respect the values of peace, love, comprehension and tolerance with the rest, this planet in which we live will be a place even more pretty. The love is the most powerful force in the universe.

Peace, Timmo Tolkki.