HELLOWEEN: In Pre-Production Mode

HELLOWEEN guitarist Michael Weikath recently spoke to the group's webmaster, Tony Webster, about the progress of the songwriting sessions for the follow-up to 2003's "Rabbit Don't Come Easy", tentatively due in early 2005 via the group's new label, SPV Records. An excerpt from the interview follows:

Q: So what is the band up to?

Michael Weikath: "We are at rehearsals and collecting material and such. Citing some of the stuff we have and we are listening to the demos everybody has. We are in the middle of arranging stuff. This is kind of the pre-production that we [are] actually doing this time around, and on the November 20th, Charlie [Bauerfeind, producer] will come around and do an actual pre-production of the album with what we have so far.

"I don't know how many tracks we have total. So far we have around 9 songs done and we will continue two and a half weeks more. We will have around 13 tracks for the album and this time everybody is convinced that these songs are great, unlike when I gave the interview for 'The Dark Ride' because we now have good stuff everybody in the band likes. Sascha [Gerstner, guitar] had some great stuff, in fact everybody came up with great stuff for this album and everybody likes everybody's compositions for the album. I also like the stuff I came up with. We're just working on these songs.

"Charlie will come in soon and tear everything apart and do a pre-production before the actual production. We also have a new keyboard player here to come up with good ideas and some atmosphereic ideas and he is trying to find an approach of how we work and what we do. He has been playing in bands in Germany for 30 years, he never got famous or anything but he is a top-notch keyboard player. He's just like very very clever with what he knows about music and knows a lot about music and he also has produced other bands and projects and he is a friend of Sascha and he said we should ask him to help us. He was also in a German band in 1981 which went to Japan and had great things going for them, they won some contests etc. They were in the English metal charts for 2 months and then they became unlucky because the producer was interested in other things. So this band, which began with some much hope and had been so strong, did not come along because of stupid misunderstandings and timing or whatever. It's odd but they could have made it, from what I know, and it's odd that band never emerged and now we have the keyboarder of that band. His name is Friedl."

Read the rest of the interview at this location.