When Prog checks in with Roine Stolt, he’s in fine form. The Flower Kings mainman is anticipating the release of his band’s 16th studio album and he’s just recently seen friend and collaborator Jon Anderson’s Close To The Edge 51st anniversary live show in his native Uppsala.
He has much to say about their ongoing work together (of which more later). He also has comments about the apparently defunct Transatlantic’s swansong tour and rumoured last ever concert, recorded for posterity as The Final Flight, plus The Flower Kings’ reissue programme.
But amid arrangements he’s making for his primary band’s autumn tour, he’s buzzing about the new album Look At You Now and reacts with delight when told this writer’s eight-year-old described the record as “forest music, because you’re surrounded and there’s lots of different things to look at.”
“That’s beautiful,” he says with a smile. “I think that’s really interesting. Kids have no filter; it’s from the heart.”
Look At You Now is the fourth album under the banner of The Flower Kings since the group’s 2018 relaunch, making an average of one album every two years since 1994, despite gaps in activity. Quite the work rate. “I guess I’m just a guy that writes a lot of songs,” Roine considers. “There’s usually a pile sitting there, some to use now and some five years from now.”
Combining material from different eras helps to bring diversity to the albums, partly due to Stolt being in a different headspace. “Things change and the way I wrote songs 20 years ago, or even four years ago, was quite different,” he affirms.
However, in the case of the latest record, the musician has stretched way back: “On this album’s opening track [Beginner’s Eyes], there are elements written before the very first Flower Kings album! The first chords are from something I wrote 30 years ago. When we’d recorded it [the rest of the band] said, ‘That’s a great opening track for the album. It has a positive vibe.’”
But it’s not all positive vibes in Flower King Land. Many fans and critics commented on themes of isolation in 2020’s epic Islands and increasingly darker preoccupations on last year’s By Royal Decree, and Stolt makes no apologies for this.
“That’s the way I write now because of everything around me. It could be music, art, the shape of the world, wars, uncertainties [such as] global warming. There’s the polarisation of politics and countries in Europe turning to the Right. That comes into the lyrics, one way or another.”
There’s often been a plea for peace and understanding in the band’s output, but that’s also more pronounced now, he says. “Why don’t we come to our senses and try to be nice? Let people exist: if they want to dress different or be a different sex, let people be whatever they want to be.”
Much of this hoping for a better and more tolerant world feeds directly into second single, The Dream. The musician explains that, as the title suggests, the song actually came from a nocturnal manifestation: “Sometimes I dream music. You wake up and you think, ‘This is so damn good, I’m gonna remember this.’ Then you wake up again later, at whatever time, and it’s gone.
“But this time, it was probably around 5:30 in the morning and I was dreaming about writing this song and remembered some words. So I got up and went into my studio here at home and I thought, ‘I better play it, to not forget it.’”
Although Stolt is Swedish born and bred, he writes mainly in English. Did he dream the lyrics in the language he writes in, or his native tongue? “Ha! The reality of it is, there are so many people I work with these days, such as Transatlantic and Jon Anderson, and one year touring with Steve Hackett, you start thinking in English. It’s probably harder for me to write in Swedish these days.
“We did a reunion album with [Stolt’s earlier band] Kaipa and sang in Swedish. I enjoyed that, but over the last 25 years, my brain has been set to think of music in English because of all the music I grew up with: Beatles, Buffalo Springfield, Vanilla Fudge, Frank Zappa, Yes, King Crimson – great lyrics in English. So I dreamt The Dream in English.”
Prog wonders if that song’s hopeful sentiment also fed into the album title, which doesn’t appear elsewhere on the record? “The title came by coincidence. I had the artwork sent to me and I just wanted to show it to the guys with The Flower Kings logo on. I just put in a fake title, which was Look At You Now.
“And then when we started talking about album titles, we looked at the song titles and phrases from the lyrics. But someone said, ‘The title you had on the mock-up is really good!’ It can mean us looking at the audience, the audience looking at us, or all of us looking at the world the way it is now.”
It’s not just the album’s title, but the cover art – showing a giant eye surrounded by petals bursting from a heart – that came about by happenstance as well. “This guy [Joey Tessier] sent some of his own artwork and told the story about his father [Gino Tessier] who’d been a huge Flower Kings fan and had worked as a stunt flyer, flying planes with smoke coming out. He wasn’t trying to sell me something. The story was in honour of his father and everyone in the band liked the artwork, so why not?”
Stolt has regularly played keyboards on The Flower Kings’ records, and ended up playing most of the lines on Look At You Now. “We brought in Lalle Larsson, who used to play with Karmakanic, and when we had Agents Of Mercy, he was the keyboard player with us in that. So we’ve known each other for a long time. It dawned on me that we could bring him in to play a few keyboard solos because I’m not a great solo guy.
“I play the majority, but Michael [original bassist and Roine’s brother] plays a little bit too. On the tour, we’ll have Lalle again. We had an American keyboard guy [Zach Kamins] for a couple of years and it proved to be impossible because of Covid restrictions and flying someone over from California to rehearse, so we just had to part ways.”
In addition to creating new material, Stolt has also been overseeing an extensive reissue programme of Flower Kings albums. It’s been well-received by fans and critics, and includes first-time vinyl issues for some items.
I wasn’t 100 per cent happy with Adam & Eve or The Rainmaker… listening to them now, it struck me how good they are
“The label [InsideOutMusic] asked if we would look at the back catalogue. I said, ‘I’m fine with that, but if we do vinyl, I’d like to look at the recordings, the mixes and the mastering because some of it sounds a bit harsh now, a bit too compressed.’ I thought I could do better with the equipment I have now.
“But then I had to look for the original tapes!” he says with a laugh. “The very first albums, Back In The World Of Adventures and Retropolis, they were recorded on reel-to-reel. I needed to find them, to see if they were in good enough condition.”
Once located, some of the tapes had to be heat-treated to become playable again. So did Stolt send them away for state-of-the-art restoration? “I did it in my kitchen!” he laughs. “I went online and there was a studio guy saying, ‘You don’t need to send them anywhere, do you have an oven? Do it overnight and you’re good to go!’ Chef Roine! It worked out.”
Since unearthing his back catalogue, the bandleader has been pleasantly surprised by albums he didn’t originally rate back in the day. “I wasn’t 100 per cent happy with Adam & Eve [2004] or The Rainmaker [2001]. But listening to them now, it struck me how good they are – really strong songs and also the recording and playing.
“The drummer [on Adam & Eve] – Zoltan Csörsz – plays great. He wasn’t really there in spirit because he didn’t really like progressive rock, but he did a great job. And some of the first albums with [former bassist and current Steve Hackett sideman] Jonas Reingold, he played great bass. So those albums are better than I thought.”
Could he imagine working with Reingold again? “It’s absolutely possible, but as it is, he’s out with Steve Hackett doing all those Genesis albums: The Lamb..., Selling England..., Foxtrot.” Stolt smiles mischievously. “Hey, maybe even We Can’t Dance! Although probably not that one!”
On the subject of reissues, the Anderson/Stolt album Invention Of Knowledge has just been dusted off to great renewed acclaim. Is there any chance of a belated follow-up? “When we met the other day, we were saying, ‘We’ve got to finish our album!’ Just a month ago, he sent me something and I worked on it. And I’d forgotten that I’d sent him this big symphonic piece and suddenly, he sent something back that was spoken word over that.
“We started working on album number two before he went back to do [2019 album] 1000 Hands: Chapter One and I went back to Transatlantic. So I think I just need to step in and just finish it. It can be done, hopefully.”
Even if not for Anderson/Stolt and his outstanding track record with The Flower Kings, Stolt would still be a prog hero to many as a member of supergroup Transatlantic, which must have been a fantastic experience.
“It was, but the last tour was a little bit under-rehearsed, to be honest. Once we got to Europe it was sounding better. The very last show we did in Paris was really good and the live album and video is very good. I remember standing there in Paris at the Olympia, knowing that we’d played a good show and that it could have been different, could have been a disaster. But we played well and the audience reaction was fantastic, so it was a good bookending.”
No fan ever wants to believe it’s ever finally over. Is there any chance Transatlantic could take off again? “When I look at all the projects we’re all working on, chances are slim,” he says. “But never say never.”
For now, though, Stolt is continuing to bloom with The Flower Kings. And just look at them now.