PETER DOLVING’S PHILOSOPHY CLASS
About two hours before I was scheduled to interview The Haunted’s Peter Dolving at the 2009 incarnation of New England Metal & Hardcore Fest, Van Arseface gave me a pot cookie. The homemade kind that’s loaded with green oily goodness and stinks up the entire room. I ate one. And then I pulled the classic “this isn’t working, let me eat another” move after half an hour… and so I ate another. And thirty minutes after that I was flying. FLYING. The kind of flying you experience only from eating too many pot-infused desserts, where your brain turns to mush and you feel it actually disconnect from your body. And I had to somehow keep it together to interview Dolving, the man I was most looking forward to speaking to at the whole festival, in less than an hour. Yikers.
I’m really not sure how the fuck I held it together — perhaps some kind of soberfying instinct kicked in, like a shot of adrenaline when you see normal dudes lift up cars to save a trapped pedestrian in those corny PSA videos — but I did, for half an hour, on The Haunted’s tour bus. And the resulting interview not only came out coherent, but pretty interesting, sort of like a metal philosophy session. If and when I have the opportunity to speak with Dolving again I see no reason to talk about music at all; the dude’s at his best when he’s talking about other subjects. The things he’s got to say… about life, depression, family, Sweden, America, art, you name it, are always well-informed and well-articulated. You could say the guy’s got smarts, and you’d be correct. And that’s precisely what angers the knuckle-dragging metal Internet public so greatly. His MySpace blogs, which used to regularly cause a brouhaha on Blabbermouth, have come to a slow grinding hault lately; I wish he’d start writing them again.
Check out the above interview, recently conducted by Metal Storm on the band’s recent opening trek for Slayer in the UK. Whenever the interviewer asks Haunted-specific questions related to the music, Dolving gives an obligatory one or two liner before diverging into abstract philosophical or deeply personal territory, and that’s when things really get good. I love his very deliberate style of speaking; you can tell that he’s carefully considering each word before uttering it to make sure it conveys the proper meaning. I’d imagine he approaches writing music the same way.
The Haunted will release the Road Kill DVD next week and hopefully a new album by the end of the year / early 2011.
-VN
