Interview by Martien Koolen
The last studio album of Southern Germany prog rockers RPWL: World Through My Eyes was very colourful and therefore it was almost impossible to top that aspect. Now the band had to decide whether they would embark on another musical journey or leave the things as they were. The band decided to explore new musical and lyrical dimensions and so a brand-new CD called The RPWL Experience came to life. Martien Koolen puts some questions to Yogi Lang, vocalist and keyboard player of RPWL.
Silenced, the opening track is one of the best RPWL songs I have ever heard, how did this song come about and who composed it?
Yogi Lang: Thank you for that compliment. Silenced was one of the first songs we wrote for this album. While we were thinking about how we had to go on after our previous album, which was kind of spiritual, we came up with ideas for this song. We wanted to return on earth with the new songs, or to use a cliché, we wanted to get back to our musical roots. As I said The World Through my Eyes was influenced by India, spiritual things and we used other musicians, now we wanted to do realistic things again. As we were thinking about the lyrics and the fact that they had to be more realistic we also came to the conclusion that the sound of the band would have to be harder, and rawer. If the lyrics are harder then you cannot use the rather “dreamy’, spacy guitar riffs/melodies that we used on the previous album. The significance of our tracks is based on a tight interplay between words and music. We use music as our second language and therefore we used some rather outspoken lyrics on this new album, again...
Yes, I know that you were rather “frustrated” about the fact that lots of people took no notice of your lyrics on the previous album...
Well, frustrated is a huge word! But yes, it kind of bothered me a bit, ha ha…. Now on this album we again used some really critical lyrics, but always with a smile... Take for example Choose What You Want To Look At which is mainly about the shit you can watch on the television every day. If you watch a lot of TV and especially advertising you are being manipulated all the time. It is always done in a very subtle way but advertising is not really about a product anymore, or about giving information. It is about feelings and emotions, about a certain lifestyle. If you do not wear this brand of clothes then you do not belong to the in-crowd. If you drink Guinness then you will have lots of friends, and that is of course bullshit. It is manipulative, you do not have friends drinking Guinness, wake up, everybody. The mass media use advertising as a sort of religion. We dealt with religion on the previous album and we asked ourselves why do we need religion? The mass media have taken over religion and their “religion” is brands, Nike, etc. Belonging to the in-crowd is the new religion of our time and this is not good of course.
The lyrics of the song: This Is Not A Prog Song ironically deal with bad press reviews; again I hear a little bit of frustration...
No, really, not, ha ha……Chris wrote this song and it turned out great. You know when you read some of the reviews of our previous albums you cannot believe that some of the critics even listened to that album. The best one was a critic who wrote that the singer of the song Roses had to take some lessons in English pronunciation!!! You know that Wilson sang that song, so what the hell does he mean?? This is in fact hilarious and so I think that some critics listen to albums for not more than 10 seconds and then form their "humble" opinion... So, we decided to write this song about those reviews, you should however not take it all too serious. Most prog rock fans tend to be rather too serious, by the way. We can laugh about those reviews, so the critics should also be able to laugh about This Is Not A Prog Song.
What happens at the end of the song?
Well, an old English friend of mine shouts out 4 of those idiotic reviews and he really SHOUTS! It will probably annoy some prog fans but it is a joke of course, do not take it all too seriously.
In that song you also refer to the fact that RPWL is often labelled as a Pink Floyd clone. To add to this presumption Karlheinz plays a typical David Gilmour solo in the song Masters Of War, why do you do this?
Good question again. Of course we are influenced by Floyd, but who cares? Any band is influenced by someone and everybody "steals" things from other bands. That is no problem, as long as you have your own musical style and RPWL definitely has its own musical style!!
Stranger and the Bob Dylan cover Masters Of War are both songs dealing with war; is there a connection between the songs?
Not really although they are both anti-war songs of course. I have always been a huge Dylan fan as he is a real story teller and a great composer and musician as well. Both songs deal with emotional depth and human feelings. Stranger is also about the war in Iraq and the reasons why the soldiers are supposed to be there.
Your country, Germany, did not send soldiers to Iraq; do you think that your government made the right decision??
Difficult question, but I think that they did the right thing. It caused a political change in our country and that was good. People opened their eyes and they thought about what to do.
There is actually one song on the new album which I absolutely do not like and that is the acoustic ballad-like track River.
Good for you, ha ha… I really like that song as it has an acoustic intro and the end is rather bombastic. The song kind of flows like a river; you should listen to it more often.
You will be going on tour with Threshold, which is a rather heavy prog metal band. How is that going to work?
Well, we will see how that turns out. But we will only be playing with Threshold in The Netherlands, in Germany and Belgium it will be a RPWL night only. We love to come and play in Holland again as we have lots of friends over there. In September and October we have already planned the second part of the tour.
Which band would you like to go on tour with?
That would be a 100% female band so that we would have more fun during the tour ha ha...
The Spice Girls?
No, no, that would be too soft! No, I really would not know…. Too difficult… Pink Floyd???
Will there be a RPWL DVD soon?
Our hard disk is full but we would like to make something special, not the ordinary live DVD of one of our concerts like so many bands release nowadays. The DVD is in development and you will have to wait and see when it will be ready and released.
Last obvious question, what is your favourite song on the new album?
River, of course, ha ha ha... No, that was just to tease you. But I think it is a great song, especially the lyrics. My other favourite songs of the CD are Silenced and Masters Of War, although it is a cover.
LINKS:
RPWL Official Website
RPWL MySpace Page
InsideOut Music
DPRP Review of RPWL - The RWPL Experience
DPRP Review of RPWL - World Through My Eyes
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