Star: So it is a war, it is a battle, but it’s a personal battle.
VNV Nation: A personal battle, of course.
Star: Right, yes. That’s all I was curious about.
VNV Nation: You need that strength, you need to come out attacking. I mean I came out attacking but at me, at the world, but I’m not an aggressive, I’m a pacifist in many ways, but aggressively and a positive aggression, a very focused and channeled aggression to take control of my own life and to take control of my own destiny.
Star: Well with that metaphor, moving on to the other albums, going in to Future Perfect & Empires where you had to see a progression between Advance & Follow where your calling yourself to action, Praise the Fallen you're reflecting on, you know, the self that you found and the struggles that you'd gone through to get that person.
VNV Nation: Re-birth I would say, or re-finding yourself.
Star: OK. Re-finding one’s self, and then you have Empires, the building stage.
VNV Nation: It was actually my analysis of using… to be honest, I never wanted to be analyzed because I never thought we would be, so I guess a lot of this…
Star: I’m sorry…
VNV Nation: No, that's not what I mean. What I mean is I never thought the album would be popular enough to be analyzed in such detail because I was doing a lot of things that were private reference to me but only perhaps I might understand them. Like with Praise the Fallen, I had people writing to me and saying I spotted a reference in that lyric, doesn’t that come from the Kabala, or doesn’t that come from Greek philosophy or Greek mystical thoughts. And I would say well yes, OK, and there were people out there who had spotted these things. and I thought OK, good, good, good,
Star: And it’s nice people thinking…
VNV Nation: Tons of references and tons of symbolism on albums, there always has been. There’s people who called, actually there was one guy in Germany who wrote a review and called Matter and Form a simplistic watered down version of what we are. And yet when I had an hour-long conversation with him I said, I’m going to go through a list of the symbolism on this album and when I’m finished with you will you tell me this is a simple watered down album I’m going to kick your butt and send you to a library. Because even… I said OK, let’s start with the artwork. And he said yes, what about it? I said what do you think the artwork is, go and have a look at the cover and tell me what that is. And he went I don’t know, it’s just some clever styling. I went, look closer, there are a couple of symbols on the cover, does that give you any clue? And he said no, I said right, well the album is about transition, the album is about turning the potential in every creative person or every person that has an ability that might not know this, we all have these great abilities and we don’t actually use them. I found mine, I’m lucky and I’m so ever thankful for that. I found my calling by accident, because I was a corporate guy doing… I was a Project Manager in a major company, I was doing the… towing the line to be what other people would expect me to be, but at the same time I believed working was my… this wall that allowed me to bounce back, so that when I left work, that was my time, that was me. And that’s what forced me to use that time effectively to write my music. So I said on the front you’ve got alchemical symbols, there's sulfur and mercury, and he went yeah. Do you know anything about alchemy? He said no. I said do you know what alchemy is? He said turning gold in to led. And I’m sorry,.. turning led into gold, I went that's actually a metaphor in itself to hide it from heretical witchdoctors and Christian belief, in Italy in the 16 and 1500 and earlier. Alchemy comes from the idea of changing the spirit, transforming the spirit, and that has its origin in Islamic thought or Muslim thought if you want to call it that, because that’s where it hails from in a way, and before that I think Greek and before that from Egyptian times. It’s the transformation of the pulp, from flesh and form into spirit. And I said OK, amusing reference for me, I see this album as my… I’m using alchemy as another metaphor, it’s just another representation of transition. All these things are different pictures which describe transition and change from one state to another, like the songs are, and I mirror those references and I parallel them. In alchemy the three sacred symbols are mercury, sulfur and salt, salt is the balancing factor and mercury and sulfur are the two extremes of alkaline and acidic, and they're the three main symbols. So instead of salt I put our logo, it’s a stupid, silly little reference because I see us in this album as the balancing force.
