It was like a jam, but then there was a song called “Happy Never After” and a song called “Don’t Block The Sun”, which didn’t end up on the album. The last song on the album, “Hands Are Tied”, was not gonna be on the record. We recorded it in Stockholm in two and a half weeks altogether, but before that, we had some stuff from the demos we did… we had decided pretty much what songs we were gonna do before we went into the studio. We did a lot of pre-production ourselves before we went into the studio to actually record the album. I mean, these days you can record almost anywhere. Michael: I don’t have the luxury of doing that. Metalshrine: When you’re working on an album, are you the kinda guy that records a whole lotta stuff and then picks from that? That’s how the songs came about and we chose the songs we thought were best suited as a whole. Eventually, the album started shaping up and I love being self-contained as a band.
and then we had four days in a studio there. Wrote some ideas and laid down some demos and after the tour, we finished at the Whisky A Go Go in L.A. Before the American tour, we went to Steve‘s rehearsal place in New York for four or five days. Someone lives in New York, another one in Amsterdam, Dregen in Stockholm and me in Finland, so whenever we were gonna tour, we booked some extra days before and after the tours, to write some stuff and play some demos. We’ve been touring a lot the last couple of years and writing songs over a period of time, like a year or so. Michael: Well, for this record, we just decided to write some music and see what came out of it. When your making an album, is that something you can get a sense of? That you really have something going here? Metalshrine: The album’s been a huge success - Number One in Finland. Only people punish people, so nobody has to burn. I just know it, but it’s certainly not a god like the church describes it, one that punishes people. I know there’s a god force behind all this, but you believe what you wanna believe. The church is a government and they wanna keep people ignorant so they can control them and that’s the way government acts. Religion, to me, is just another government. Michael: There is some of it, of course, but not in a religious sense. Stuff like that with kinda religious connotations. He said, “I think I’ve got it! How about ‘Horns And Halos’?” So at first I thought it was too obvious to consider or too religious, but when you think about it, the album has songs like “Eighteen Angels”, “Soul Surrender” and “Ritual”. That’s genius!” I thought of it as the name for the album right away, but then I thought that maybe it was sort of religious, but as it turned out when all the rest of the songs came together, Steve brought it up again after we’d thought about all these different titles. Dregen suggested it and I thought, “Nobody’s ever used that before. It was just a great title because it covers everything - yin and yang, black and white, angels and devils, light and darkness. Metalshrine: title, “Horns And Halos”, makes me think of those old cartoons where the character’s got the devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other one. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below. Niclas Müller-Hansen of Sweden’s Metalshrine recently conducted an interview with former HANOI ROCKS singer Michael Monroe.