Ville Valo

I like to listen to mellow stuff on the road like Travis, as we are constantly surrounded by rock music on tour and so its nice listening to mellow stuff. Obviously back at home I listen to a lot more rock music.

It’s like that with what sort of ideas people outside of the band have of HIM. They all see it through a different lens as well which is beautiful. Hopefully, it makes it an endless topic of conversation.

Art is always criticized and always an outsider gets the blame.

Music’s always been really cathartic. It’s the best drug for me to get away from the everyday pressures just for a second via a good song.

Music for me is an emotional thing and it really does make me happy. It’s not a tool for me to get fame or see my face in the papers or anything like that. It’s about the fact that I really do enjoy it.

The guys in Kiss use some make up too so at first it was exiting. I’ve almost stopped using make-up nowadays.

I love Johnny Cash but I don’t love country music that much.

I’m a huge fan of James Dean, that got me started. Nowadays I smoke four packs in a day.

Los Angeles and New York are the big centers of the music industry worldwide so of course it can be hard for newcomers who don’t know what to expect from the music business.

Yeah I’m still writing. I’ve got about 14 tracks now. But we’ve been on tour so we haven’t had time to get back to a rehearsal place.

I have never acted in one and I’m not at all interested to do so either.

It’s the same with visual arts, you have some really cool, wonderful striking images that make you think and then again you have wonderful striking images that just take you away from the existing world for a second. And I like the latter a bit more.

I think if we keep on doing good music and people like us and they buy the magazine because we are in the magazine then they cant basically hate us hopefully.

I’ve got asthma. When I was 17 I forgot to take my medication and was taken to a hospital for almost two weeks. After that I’ve taken better care of my illness.

We’re trying to have the band create something beautiful that hopefully one day, 20 years from now, can be picked up by a kid and hopefully have the same effect that Neil Young had on me, or Led Zeppelin or Black Sabbath.

Unfortunately we just toured the East and West coasts so we didn’t run into any rednecks.

Talking about covers, whether visually or sonically, if a particular combination of notes struck a chord in your heart in a way that you want to be a part of it by covering that song, then there’s nothing wrong with it.

Hopefully it will be possible to get all our other albums in American shops one day so if people are interested they can hear it but I’m hoping that people are going to be interested in what we are going to do, not just what we’ve done.

I’m a collecting maniac and I buy a lot of books and records. I have over thousand cds.

There’s always reasons to make mistakes. Because then you do new mistakes next time. So they’re beautiful mistakes.

That music and the lyrical aspects of Razorblade Romance is so personal to me that, now with me being grown up a bit and meeting new people and doing new things, it makes me look at the same things I was writing about back in the day through a different colored lens.

Some genres I’m not a huge fan of but there are always exceptions that break the rules. There are always a few people doing it in a way weird enough to grab my attention.

I haven’t travelled that much before so this is the first time I get to see the big cities of Europe. I’ve never even been to US.

We started playing music from an early age and so we wasn’t really aware of that side of it, the weird thing is the more successful you get the more free booze and drugs you get, they should be given to the bands who don’t have the money.

Women are always beautiful.

I’m living my dream right now. I get to make music, perform and travel.

I’ve always been a huge reggae fan.

So basically, I think music at its best can be everything. It can be totally stupid and very intellectual and emotional at the same time. I don’t think all those things shut each other out.

Even at school I studied ethics instead of religion.

Well, for us, it’s always better not to have too many expectations and to just go with the flow because then it’s always a big plus no matter what happens.