Star: Well I mean I’ve always wanted to be… I don’t know, it’s hard to explain. I just kind of, something in me has wanted to blend, to see if I could do it. I mean I’ve always been different and I’ve always been afraid that because of it I haven't been able to really touch somebody or really connect…
VNV Nation: Who is the issue here, because I think it’s the lack of acceptance on a bunch of people who see things in very simplistic terms, who see us as freaks. I’m not a freak, I mean look at me, I don’t have tattoos, I don’t have piercings…
Star: Oh, and they make you freak…huh?
VNV Nation: No, no, what I mean, that's the more obvious stereotypical thing, but I’m not, I’m still called a freak because I’m somewhat different. As a teenager I was like mental hair, mental clothes, I wasn’t trying to piss people off, I was trying to express myself and fighting for acceptance. I think my problem always laid in the fact that it was the others who I thought were ignorant morons because they saw the world through very simplistic eyes, because that is what allows them to life this normal, like a so-called normal existence. This existence of congeniality, where there are no threats to life, everything is safe, everything’s nice, you’ve got the house, you've got the wife, you’ve got the car. It’s a blood façade. I've known so many of them who are grossly unhappy and have no understanding of their life, but they don’t know of an alternative, they don’t know that there are other ways to be. And they struggle with that and they would rather sink than swim. I mean it’s like, you know, in the 90s, through movies and through TV we found out that, you know, in the 50s this picture of happy America, under it lay a very, very sinister world which we weren’t told about because it’s covered up with this nice smiley image of this is how perfect we are. I think those people probably have more problems than we ever will, we deal with them, we confront them, we come out with them, we wear them, we sing them, we shout them and we deal with them and it makes us clear to people. And I think that's, creative people… when you look at all the greatest creative people, they’ve always been shunned by their own society or by their peers, but it drove them further to become what they are. And they found their acceptance through others like themselves, because there are millions of us and there are people who are just as… What I’m sating is, we don’t all have to dress the same, but we all are somewhat creative and it’s not an elitist thing and it’s not like I’ve got the same boots as you, oh great, I’ve got the same dreads and I’ve got a pair of goggles. It’s not about the image to you, its are our minds are in tune, do we think alike, are we somehow celebrating that or are we actually dividing ourselves up, because that's what breaks us up and that's what allows oppression to take place to kick the ass of the alternative culture. I very much… going back to this Praise the Fallen thing, Advance and Follow, by the way, just to answer that, was a collection of songs going back the previous ten years that I’ve been writing on and off and I assembled into an album, and once you get that album out of the way, every band has that with their first album, once you get it out of the way, you're on a clean pallet. I wrote Ascension from Praise the Fallen on the day I finished the studio recording for Advance and Follow, and I was at such a leap with musical style and musical ability, and then I went on, I wrote Honor, I wrote Precession, I wrote Joy, Solitary was written the day before I went into the studio. It just, it was in me for weeks, the lyrics were pounding away but I had no idea how to write the song or how it should sound or what sounds I should use or what kind of beat it should have. And I ended up just writing it the day before I went in to the studio, but I’ve never been happier with the song for a long time. I mean there have been songs since I feel like a victory, but here I go using militaristic terminology, but the album was not about war and the people saw it like that, it’s like people who took Honor as a war song. Honor’s an anti-war song, it’s about a veteran if you will, because it’s a long dissertation. I didn’t ever want to write a simplistic album. It’s a long dissertation to explain to people what that metaphor, how it was being used. Like, one track, track 11 is a minute’s silence, it’s a symbolism of remembrance, because when on the 11th of November at eleven minutes passed eleven in most allied countries, there was a minute’s silence to remember the dead. It was called Schweigeminute because Germans, that's what they call a minute’s silence, they don’t have it at eleven minutes passed eleven on 11th November because they're, you know, dissuaded from honoring the war dead. To me it was a parallel between all the people I know who have struggled to be who they are and lost and failed.
