Interview By Alison Booth
Legendary multi-instrumentalist and vocalist SNOWY SHAW (well known for his work with KING DIAMOND, DIMMU BORGIR, THERION, NOTRE DAME, DREAM EVIL and more) is preparing to release his first solo album “White Is The New Black”, due for release on 23rd of May in Europe and Japan, and digitally worldwide. The album is all written, performed and produced by Snowy Shaw for Wunderwurld Music & Films.
Snowy will be hosting a release party for the forthcoming album, which is set to be live streamed to the world on Saturday 21st April. I recently had a long chat with Snowy about the album, release party, tour news, glam rock and more! Check out some excerpts below and the full interview can be heard on the audio player:
Snowy revealed the following details about his live stream release party:
“It will reach out to a lot of people, because people feel it’s nice to interact with the artist and get to know them more personally. A lot of bands in the past might throw a release party at a local rock club and invite a couple of hundred friends and that’s fine. But I decided to do it a little bit more personal, so I am actually inviting the whole wide world potentially, to my own home.
I will be interacting with people during the whole evening and we’ll play live, there will be Q and A’s, we’ll be selling the albums, I’ll be signing stuff and we’ll be partying! There’s gonna be a lot of friends that I’ve invited to my house, famous faces from the area of Gothenburg – which has tons of bands like In Flames, Mikkey Dee, Hardcore Superstar. We have a professional film team here, so it’s gonna be like Big Brother – those overview cameras placed in various rooms in my big house. So it’s gonna be in the basement, in the studio, in the drum room. I’m going to introduce you to our dogs – it’s definitely something you don’t want to miss.”
Discussing his solo work, Snowy explained:
“Life itself has a tendency of putting a lot of obstacles in the way, things take time. For me, I mean I’ve been with so many bands over the years, ranging from everything from black metal with Dimmu Borgir to Triple X which is like glam rock, more seventies style and everything in between – you know like progressive doom metal and doom and so on. It’s not a coincidence that I’ve been in all those bands, it’s because I like the diversity and variation and if I do something for too long I tend to get sort of fed up with that and need to move on to something else, new adventures and challenges and so on. I’ve also been in a creative mode in many of those bands and been writing the bulk of the material and so on.
So now when I decided to go sort of under my own flag with my namesake so called band, I couldn’t really make up my mind exactly what I wanted to do. I tend to be so intense that I sort of overdose on it or something (laughs). The ideal situation for me would be to have say, four different bands with different musical direction and lyrical concept and sound and all that. But then I remembered how difficult it is to pull that thing together with four or five people these days, so I ditched that idea for the moment.
Then I figured what stops me from doing it all under my own name and different projects and allowing myself that complete artistic freedom to do that. I wrote independently and went into those different little worlds and that’s basically what this album is all about. Let’s say they are samples, let’s say it’s twelve songs in total and it’s two songs from six different albums with different directions. So this is like samples from albums that are gonna be released every year from now on. It’s the ‘Essential Snowy Shaw’ or ‘Greatest Hits’ in reverse.”
Snowy‘s “White Is The New Black” album release party will be available to see on his official YouTube channel at this location from 21.00 – 00.00 midnight CET on Saturday 21st April. You can also join the Facebook event here.
Metal Shock Finland (World Assault ) 