SOILWORK Guitarist Says He May Form Side-Project With Drummer HENRY RANTA

SOILWORK guitarist Peter Wichers recently spoke to Wormwood Chronicles about the band's unstable drum situation, a possible new project involving Wichers and former SOILWORK drummer Henry Ranta and conflicts with CHIMAIRA. A couple of excerpts from the interview follow:

Wormwood Chronicles: One other thing that people are going to notice about this album is that there is a different drummer on it. What happened with Henry that he decided to quit?

Peter Wichers: "Well, I can't go into real detail because him and I are still close as friends, but the official thing was that he wanted to focus more on his private life and he didn't really enjoy touring as much as [the rest of us]. There was more and more touring going on and he didn't really like that. At that time, the financial [situation] wasn't really that well off. We'd come back from tour and not know how much money we had. We didn't even know if we had the money to pay for rent and stuff like that. You have to kinda have the personality to deal with that, and he didn't really have that. He chose not to continue and to me it was a really great loss. But he's still doing drums and we might do something in the future. We have been talking about it."

Wormwood Chronicles: Is there any details yet about this new project?

Peter Wichers: "I don't know yet. All I can say is...the vocals will probably be a little more different than in SOILWORK. Probably more melodic vocals than in SOILWORK. I'm not really sure; I'm just starting to write stuff right now. I'll let you guys know. But Henry's moving over to the States because he married a girl from Chicago, and I already live in the States now, so we'll probably jam when he gets over."

Wormwood Chronicles: Getting back to the drummer situation, what happened with Richard [Evensand]?

Peter Wichers: "We did Korea, Japan, and Australia, and then we did a tour of the U.S. On the second U.S. tour we found out it wasn't really clicking personal chemistry-wise. It's not a major thing, but if it doesn't really work out personal chemistry-wise; if you can't really communicate or if there's a lot of misconceptions and you can't really work, because when you're on a tour bus you live so close to each other that the slightest problem could become the biggest problem. That's probably what happened. Essentially, he moved to Australia just a few days ago and he's going to start a career as a recording engineer down there, going to school stuff like that. We'll probably see him. We're still really good friends; we ended our relationship on good terms."

Wormwood Chronicles: Reason why I was asking about that is because there was the thing with him leaving to join CHIMAIRA [which didn't work out due to visa problems. Now CHIMAIRA is working with Kevin Talley, formerly of DYING FETUS and MISERY INDEX]. Was there ever any sort of beef with CHIMAIRA over that whole incident?

Peter Wichers: "Uh, well, I'm good friends with most of the guys in CHIMAIRA and I don't really have a whole lot of bad things to say about 'em. The only thing that kind of hurt me a little bit is that we kinda knew he was going to take the spot in CHIMAIRA because Andols quit on that tour. The only thing that we didn't want to surface was the fact that we were a band without a drummer. Because we had our upcoming headlining tour in Europe and that was bad publicity for us, so I asked them if they could keep quiet about it until we had talked [to Dirk Virbeuren, of SCARVE] to see if he could do it or not. But they went on the Internet saying he was a permanent member of CHIMAIRA before we had even announced that he had quit SOILWORK. So that was the only thing that was kinda hurtful, but I'm not pissed, it's all gone now. We're still friends; I talk to Chris and Matt [Spicuzza and DeVries, electronics and guitar respectively] of CHIMAIRA all the time, so it's no problem."

Read Peter Wichers' entire interview with Wormwood Chronicles at this location.