Quest To Conquer Hearts
Many critics compare Sharon’s vocal styling with Evanescence’s Amy Lee: definitely more “no” than “yes”. Having listened to the new album repeatedly for two weeks prior to the show I can say the only distinct similarities I heard were they are both female and they can both sing really well. Within Temptation takes a much different approach to metal, mixing in opera and classical, with a heavy influence on the latter, based on a foundation of heavy guitar riffs, swooping dynamics and drum beats along with Sharon’s Freddie-Mercury-esque vocal range layering and bringing each song together with delicacy and grace. While at the show, Sharon was kind enough to sit down for an interview and spoke about the tour, their first in America, with fellow Europeans Lacuna Coil, the new album, and their reluctance of fame.
RM: The new album The Heart of Everything is fantastic. Tell me about the first track on the record “The Howling”.
SDA: We wrote that song for Chronicles of Spellborn, an online Internet game. It’s a Dutch company that approached us because they are fans of Within Temptation and we were excited about it because it is a fantasy game and we are big fans of fantasy books (smiles as she holds up a large fantasy book sitting next to her). So it matches together very well. They came to us and asked us to write some songs for them. It’s very similar to your World of Warcraft and should be coming out at the end of June.
RM: How about “What Have You Done”?
SDA: This is a song that was written at the end of 2005 and was one of the first songs we recorded for this album. At first I was singing this song with Robert (Westerholdt, guitarist/songwriter and long time boyfriend of Sharon’s) doing the harmonies but then when we were in the studio recording it with just myself we knew we needed to bring back the second vocal. So we thought who can we ask to sing on the song? How about we call up Keith Caputo (of Life of Agony) and see if he can sing? We are big fans of his and he comes to Holland on occasion with his side project Freax. So going through our management companies, we called him and sent him a demo of the song to see if he would be interested. Most of it was written already including the vocal line and he called back and said, “Sure, I think I can work with it” and he brought so much more to the song, more of himself. He brought more aggression to it and gave an extra set of balls that were needed in it. He did that; he has a very charismatic voice.
RM: And “The Cross”?
SDA: This is one of my favorites. This is a very personal song and has a lot of history to it because it’s one of the songs that I wrote with Martin, our keyboardist. We wrote the song in late 2005 but didn’t get onto this album until the last two weeks of recording. It didn’t have the rhythm I wanted at first; I was searching how I wanted it to sound and I heard a song on the radio and explained I wanted the same type of rhythm. Something fast and aggressive but also kind of funky sounding too. After Robert and the band listened to the song, they all found their place and understood what I was looking for. Everybody brought something special to the song. We experimented a lot with this song, even bringing in a mandolin, and I think, more or less, this is what the next album is going to sound like.
RM: Have you always had the large orchestral backing in your music?
SDA: Yes, we’ve always had it but we never had the budget that we do now so before it was artificial, with sound samples and things like that, but we’ve always wanted to have a cinematic feeling to our music. We’ve always wanted that epic sound and only on the last two albums have we had a real orchestra and a really big choir. A lot of it before was a lot of overdubbing (laughs). The choir was about 100 people and we knew it was going to be a big project but we didn’t know how big. I think the reason The Heart Of Everything came out more orchestral was because we had to choose between heavy guitars or orchestra being the focus, and since we worked with a real orchestra this time, we went toward that. With this album, in regard to the heavy riffs, we thought less equaled more.
RM: So why are you so reluctant about fame?
SDA: (With a wide smile and laugh) Because we’re Dutch! We’ve been around for such a long time, success and fame have come step by step; our name didn’t become big overnight in Europe, we had to work very, very hard, and we loved every single minute of it. Coming from Holland, not a lot of bands get the same opportunity, and we realize this very much, and are so thankful, but we just got bigger and bigger and bigger and we were just doing it for the music; this was a hobby-band that got out of our hands somehow.