Amon Amarth’s Jomsviking Started as a Screenplay by Johan Hegg

A couple of years back, Johan Hegg, vocalist for Amon Amarth and celebrity spokesperson for Under Armour, acted in a movie a called Northmen: A Viking Saga, which was a saga about vikings. I’ve never seen it, but I guess the experience must have gone well, because it seems that Hegg subsequently caught the movie bug.

In a new interview with Kaaos TV, Amon Amarth guitarist Olavi Mikkonen shared this tidbit regarding the band’s most recent album, last year’s Jomsviking:

“I don’t know if the listener is really gonna hear it too much, but we had a different approach on the album. Johan [Hegg], the singer, he wrote a movie script. So we saw the whole thing as a movie. So we basically took the movie script and cut it into ten pieces. And then we [were], like, ‘All right, this is one song. This is one song.’ And then we started to work against that. We had already ideas for, let’s say, five or six songs that we easy to match in where they fit musically. But then we had a lot of gaps where we had a really aggressive lyric but we didn’t have any aggressive [musical] ideas. So we just had to work towards making aggressive ideas. That’s something we’d never done in the past. In the past, we always [used] whatever [musical ideas] we had and then we made lyrics that fit the song. So now we had to fit the lyrics. And that was really cool; I think it was exciting. And I think that’s the album that we’ve been bouncing ideas back and forth the most as a band unit.”

I did not pay very close attention to the lyrics of Jomsviking, but I assume that, like the viking saga Northmen: A Viking Saga, Jomsviking: The Motion Picture also would have been a saga about vikings. That’s just a hunch, though. Maybe the whole thing was really a horror-comedy about a wiseass blogger who gets what’s coming to him. I guess we’ll never know.

https://youtu.be/2fO_it5dvDE

[via Blabbermouth by way of Metal Injection]