Back in 2001 Ayreon mastermind Arjen Lucassen threw his growing fanbase a curve by temporarily abandoning his trademark rock opera approach with a project in 2001 dubbed Ambeon. The album, Fate Of A Dreamer, featured 14-year-old Astrid van der Veen as the lone vocalist, marking the first of several musical experiments Lucassen would make outside the confines of the Ayreon universe even as his reach as an artist with a penchant for epic theater-esque productions continued to grow. He assembled an ensemble cast for Star One in 2002 and toured to support the debut, Space Metal, in 2003. This in turn was followed by the founding of an actual band, Stream Of Passion, in 2005. Lucassen’s fans have since gotten used to his forays outside the Ayreon box, making his latest outing Guilt Machine more of a welcome curiosity than a monumental break from tradition. Once inside, however, hints of Ayreon classic Into The Electric Castle’s atmospheric moments and the heavier aspects of the revered tour de force The Human Equation are readily apparent. Even so, it is anything but an Ayreon rehash under a different name.
“It’s funny you say that because I’ve done some interviews where people are asking me why I didn’t call this an Ayreon record because it’s exactly the same,” laughs Lucassen. “So I think every person perceives Ayreon in a different way, and that’s because Ayreon has so many different styles. People who like prog with think of it that way, people who prefer metal will consider Ayreon a metal project. It’s strange. Guilt Machine doesn’t have the real bombastic parts that you get with an Ayreon record - all the stuff people would call cheesy (laughs) – so I understand what you mean. I think this album is a bit more consistent. It could be that certain people like certain aspects of Ayreon. Maybe they find the science fiction stories too cheesy, maybe they don’t like all the different singers, so Guilt Machine might be for those people. Guilt Machine is sort of like a more mature Ayreon. That’s not meant in a negative way, but I think this is a little bit more grown up both musically and lyrically.”
Part of this comes from Guilt Machine’s compact nature. The project features only four players in total and lacks the larger-than-life Ayreon approach. A complete about-face for Lucassen in the wake of the last Ayreon record, 01011001, which was easily the darkest and densest – and ultimately the most difficult – album of his career. Whether Guilt Machine comes off as Ayreon Mark II or not, the debut On This Perfect Day seems to be the album Lucassen should have made following The Human Equation.
“Definitely, yeah. I was kind of lost when I wrote and recorded the last Ayreon record. I had that Anosmia shit going on, and I made some mistakes. In fact, I think it’s the first Ayreon record where there’s stuff on it that I don’t like. There are too many singers, it’s just too over-the-top. When you have great singers like Daniel Gildenlow (Pain Of Salvation) and Bob Catley (Magnum) and there’s not enough room for them to shine, that hurts. People often tell me that certain singers sound better with Ayreon than they do with their own bands, but on 01 that just wasn’t true.”
“It was kind of a relief doing Guilt Machine, I think, because I always get very nervous when I have to come up with a big story for Ayreon,” Lucassen admits. “It either comes or it doesn’t, and when it does it’s easy. But if it doesn’t it’s horrible, like waiting for an operation. With this album, because it’s a new project I wanted to do it differently. I didn’t want it to be science fiction and I didn’t want it to be part of the Ayreon story. I wanted Guilt Machine to be more cryptic and I can’t write cryptic lyrics. It’s like, if you listen to Porcupine Tree or Fish and you hear those lyrics and don’t know what they mean, yet you try to figure out what’s being said, I’ve always like that. I can’t do that myself. If I write lyrics I want to make things very clear for people.”
Lucassen turned to ex-Stream Of Passion guitarist Lori Linstruth for assistance, and she ended up penning the entire album. The reins were given up gladly, but were there any moments where he second guessed that
decision?
“Not at all. When my mind is set on something I stick to it. I was already looking forward to not writing lyrics when I started this (laughs). I don’t like to write about myself because who the fuck is going to be interested in me? I put some guide vocals on a song because I wanted to send it to Jasper, and I just asked Lori if she could just write anything, something quick. She did and I was like, ‘Wow! This is what I’m talking about. How about you write the whole album?’ (laughs). She wasn’t sure at first because she’d never done anything like this before and didn’t know if people would like it. But, I liked it, and I told her that if she enjoyed writing she should do it.”
Likewise, Lucassen trimmed things down to only one voice; Jasper Steverlinck, the frontman for the Belgian band Arid. Something of a relief given the organizational hell of the 01 album.
“It was a relief, very much so, because I didn’t have to go through the whole circus and logistics of arranging things for all kinds of singers. No big story, no deciding which singer I needed and which voice needed to go where in which song. I was completely free this time to write whatever came up. I could just ease back and let the inspiration come. And it’s easier this way, of course. Jasper lives an hour away so I didn’t have to arrange flights and hotels and shit like that. He’d just come over and work on a song, and if it didn’t work out he’d come back the next day and try again. It was so much easier to do it this way.”
“We first worked on a song for the Ayreon compilation album last year, Timeline, which was very Pink Floyd. Luckily those are the magic words for Jasper (laughs), so you can see that as the tryout for what became Guilt Machine. He came to the studio and we clicked personally, we clicked musically, so the steps to asking him to do Guilt Machine were small.”
Steverlinck’s performance is what one expects to hear on a traditional Ayreon recording, very much in the same vein as Devon Graves (Deadsoul Tribe) and Mikael Åkerfeldt (Opeth) on The Human Equation. And the vocal similarities between Steverlinck and late Queen legend Freddy Mercury are uncanny.
“That was one of the reasons I asked him (laughs). I get mails from fans every day suggesting I listen to this and that singer, and 99% of the time those singers aren’t for me. This time, however, I listened to this Belgian band, Arid, and I was blown away. They’re not a prog band, but I heard Jasper’s voice and it sounded a bit like Freddy Mercury, and bit like Muse, a bit like Radiohead, and I was interested. I checked them out live and he was even better than in the studio. Very powerful and very emotional voice, and it sounded great. That was the kind of voice that I needed for Guilt Machine because I wanted one voice that could do it all.”
Wanting and getting are two very different things, of course, and Steverlinck wasn’t interested when first approached about working with Lucassen.
“He didn’t know who I was, and it’s always hard to convince them, especially when they find out Ayreon is part of the metal and prog world,” says Lucassen. “Two dirty words for other people; that’s why I’ve not been able to get people outside the prog and metal world on the Ayreon albums. He had the same reaction; he told me he was an Iron Maiden fan when he was a kid but that he wasn’t a metal singer. I told him that was why I’d asked him. He was afraid he’d have to sing in a metal way, but I told him that if he did that it would be like so many other metal albums. That’s not what I wanted at all.”
With Steverlinck firmly in place now, however, there’s the obligatory question as to whether Lucassen plans to bring Guilt Machine to the stage…
“Jasper is generally unknown to people, but in Belgium and France he’s a big star. I’ve been to his place and his walls are full of Gold albums. So, it would be possible but he’s playing live a lot. He’s extremely busy, and (drummer) Chris Maitland is always busy because he’s been doing the Mama Mia stage production tour, so that would be a problem. But beside that, playing live just isn’t my passion anymore. I’ve done it for 15 years, I’ve lived that rock n’ roll life and I enjoyed it, but it takes up a lot of your time. What I like most is being creative in my studio, composing stuff and fucking around with my synthesizers (laughs).
Official GUILT MACHINE MySpace:
myspace.com/guiltmachine
Arjen's Official Website:
arjenlucassen.com/
