"There's actually a symphonic EP coming in the fall."

Metal Covenant met up with Danish singer Ronnie Atkins as he came to Stockholm, Sweden for a few days for rehearsals before going out on a 5-date mini tour.

Make It Count album lineup:
Ronnie Atkins, lead and backing vocals
Chris Laney, rhythm guitar and keyboards
Allan Sørensen, drums
Pontus Egberg, bass
Morten Sandager, keyboards
Linnea Vikström Egg, backing vocals
John Berg, lead guitar
Oliver Hartmann, lead guitar
Pontus Norgren, lead guitar
Anders Ringman, acoustic guitar

Live lineup:
Ronnie Atkins, lead vocals
Chris Laney, guitar and backing vocals
Allan Sørensen, drums
Pontus Egberg, bass and backing vocals
Morten Sandager, keyboards
Linnea Vikström Egg, guest vocals
Rob Marcello, guitar

Tobbe: A question I just have to ask: How do you feel right now?

Ronnie: I feel okay. Well, you know, I've been through a lot of illness the last two and a half years. But I guess it's kind of status quo at the moment, so actually I feel okay. I got the music. I got to set goals for myself all the time, because of being in this thing.

And now my next goal is, you know, to go out and play a couple of shows. I'm actually gonna check myself out now with these forthcoming gigs, because I've lost some lung capacity. You know, 20 percent of my lungs are gone, psychically. My voice is okay, but it's more like the breathing thing, you know. It's a thing I got to check out on stage. It's one thing sitting back at home and it's one thing being on stage.

So besides that I'm pretty okay. I just got scanned. I haven't had the answers yet. It's always, like, every third month, you know. That's part of the deal. It's not so funny 'cause you never know what they're gonna tell you.

Tobbe: About this decision to play a couple of live shows this year. It's normally a very little step for you, but now it has become a big step instead, just to play a couple of shows.

Ronnie: Yeah, it is, 'cause it's gonna be my first time on stage, really, for… I mean, I did two songs recently for Ukraine at a theater, you know. But the first show. It's like starting all over again, you know. It's my own stuff. Of course I'm gonna play some Pretty Maids songs. Yeah, I got to learn, like, 15, 16 new lyrics. Even though I wrote them myself. And we have never played as a band and I never met the guitarist, Rob. You know, I'm meeting him for the first time today. Just spoke with him on the phone. And I've never played with Pontus. Of course I've played with the previous Pretty Maids members. But not all together.

Tobbe: I was actually gonna ask you about Rob.

Ronnie: He was actually recommended by Chris Laney, who played with him before, you know, so. We were looking for a guitarist. And in fact, John Berg, who's playing on the album, was actually supposed to play, but he couldn't. So Chris suggested Rob, and I think he's a furious guitar player.

Tobbe: You and some other musicians have chosen to share a little bit of your life recently with sicknesses and stuff. Do you feel that it's something you wanna do to set a good example that you can still live your life even if there are hard times ahead of you?

Ronnie: Yeah, but I mean, the thing is when I've got hit by this, in August 2019, which was actually the first time I was told I had cancer, we had a whole tour. We had a new album coming out with Pretty Maids [Undress Your Madness], so we had a whole tour set up in January in Europe and some gigs around Christmas. Promoters asked me to go out and say why we had to cancel, you know. And, you know, from there on I've just been pretty open about it. I mean, I don't tell people everything every time.

But I've been open about it and I can see on some of the messages I get back on the social media and in my private Facebook that I inspire other people, you know. Which is great. Meant a lot to me. So I'm using actually my music and my lyrics in these two albums as some kind of a therapy to me. Some of the songs are more personal than anything I've done before, you know.

Tobbe: How are the lyrics related over the two albums? Or in some cases maybe unrelated to each other as well. Can you tell me a little bit more about the lyrics?

Ronnie: I'm just writing them. I mean, I don't think to much about it actually. I'm just writing as ideas come along. At some point I had to say that I got to get away from this topic now and I can't keep writing about illness and shit. But I try to give it a positive twist, you know. It's pretty much about me, how I feel, how it has been going through this, and trying to find a little light in the dark, and stuff like that, you know.

Some of the songs are about climate change and stuff. But I've written about that for 40 years, really. And there's nothing new to it. Unfortunately it's still as relevant as ever and not much has changed. Actually there are things that have become much worse. I always liked to write about things that the normal you and me, the human being, can relate to.

There's a lot of bad things going on in the world, you know. But I was never a big Dungeons & Dragons or sci-fi writer or anything like that. But yeah, a lot of the lyrics are about what I've been going through and stuff like that.

Tobbe: If this tour works out well, this little tour with those few live shows, could you go out with Pretty Maids for a couple of shows as well?

Ronnie: Well, hopefully I could. But right now we're not even… Pretty Maids is dysfunctional at the moment, you know. Me and Kenny [Hammer, guitar] have some issues between us, which we've had for years. So we're not really talking. I mean, the band is not broken up or anything, and I guess at some point maybe we'll meet up. And I think a lot of people wanna see the band again.

And I also think that we, as individual members, kind of wanna do it again. But now I've done these two albums and now I'm gonna try out and play some of that stuff. And Kenny is working on different projects as well, you know, so. Let's see what the future brings also from my side. It's difficult to plan too far out in the future, because I seriously do not know where I am in six months from now. I can live with this disease maybe for a year, two years, five years; I don't know. I certainly don't know.

All I know is that it's incurable, and I am on life prolonging medicine treatment, you know. So planning is difficult and I live in intervals on three months, from scan to scan. It sounds crazy, but that's the way it is. And the only way I can live with that is to keep myself occupied and do something positive, and the positive for me is music.

Tobbe: Is it something you could get used to, to live, like, three months at a time? Or is it always hard to start a new period?

Ronnie: I have to. You know, I don't have any choice. So I have to. I try not to think about it, you know. But I mean, then again, that said, it's in my subconscious 24/7, because every day you get constantly reminded about it. Either you meet somebody at the grocery store or something like that, or Facebook, or television, whatever.

I mean, you just get reminded about cancer. You hear about this actor or this guy who got cancer and shit. You get reminded about it. You can never put it away. So it's a game changer in every sense of the word. My life will never be the same, so I just try to get the best out of it. And I might suddenly get sick, you know. Really sick, and then that's it. You know, then I might not be so much in public. It's just difficult to plan.

And even when I'm gonna travel I got to seek the permission that they call S.O.S. member. To be insured, you know. I got to show the journals from the oncologist for the last eight weeks and if I've just complained about some stomachache or a headache or something, then they won't insure me. So everything is a lot more complicated. Hopefully, if this goes well, I'm gonna do some gigs with Avantasia this summer as well.

Tobbe: And about having some friction with Ken. I don't find that so hard to believe. You have kind of lived together for so many years. Of course there's gonna be some friction from time to time.

Ronnie: I met him last fall. We did release the book [We Came To Rock!] and stuff like that. We hung out for a couple of days and did some promotion and stuff. It's not that we can't sit down and have a coffee, or a beer more likely I guess, and have a laugh. We've been through a hell of a lot. We've had so much fun for the last 40 years.

But you also know how a marriage is and sometimes you grow apart a little bit, you know. There's some friction, right. Now there's some issues and I'm pissed off, you know. So these things have got to be sorted, at some point, but it'll take a long time. That's where it's at. I don't wanna go in detail about anything. It's just the way it is, you know.

Tobbe: So, back to your solo stuff. You know, you released One Shot last year, you released the 4 More Shots EP last year as well, and this March you released the new album Make It Count. You have been pretty active with your solo stuff in 2020 and in 2021 in the studio.

Ronnie: Actually the whole thing started when I got sick. I wasn't able to sing for quite a while, because I was coughing so much, for three months. Every time I went for the high note I coughed. But then Chris asked me. He was doing this At The Movies project, you know, and he said, "Hey, man. Do you wanna be a guest singer on one of the songs?" and I said, "Yeah, maybe it will be good to do something.". And he just sent me We Don't Need Another Hero and I said, "Well, I can try to sing it. If I can't reach the high note you got to get somebody else to do that.". There are other singers in that project, you know. But I could, and I did two to three takes and that was it.

Then I learned that, "Hey! I can still pull it off.". The pipes are still working, you know. I know my lungs are not so good as they could be. So I did that, and I think a lot of people were kind of surprised because I just announced I had cancer, like, six months before. [Laughs]

And then I had a lot of ideas and I was writing a lot on piano at the time and stuff, and Chris said, "Why don't you just send some of the songs to me and I'll do a demo of it?". And that's the way we work, you know. And at the same time it was Corona. We couldn't do anything else, really, you know. So I wrote a lot for a while.

And then, on top of that, while I was doing the last album, me and Erik [Mårtensson] spoke about doing a new Nordic Union album. So I was doing that simultaneously, you know. It was done actually quite a while ago. It has been sitting for quite a while, you know. We talked about it for years actually, but it had to fit in our schedule, and then I got sick and all, so. I never thought I'd do it, you know.

Tobbe: Would you oppose if I would say that your solo stuff is kind of a light version of Pretty Maids?

Ronnie: Well, I've always been a bit of a pop animal. Therefore the T-shirt, right? [Unveils an ABBA T-shirt under his unbuttoned shirt.] I'm basically writing the same way as I've always written, you know. The melodies are very important to me. So it's not as heavy maybe as Pretty Maids. When I write with Ken, we just only D-tune a bit, and of course for him a good riff is essential, you know.

So this is more based around the melodies, and the riff. I mean, he needs to play something interesting for him. It should be fun to do, you know. So I don't have any arguments with anybody, you know. But sometimes it's good to have an argument about stuff. So it's very much based around what I write either on acoustic guitar or a piano.

If you got a good song, you got a good song. If it sounds good on the piano or on acoustic guitar, then it's a matter of how you pack it in. I mean, a lot of the stuff on these two albums could have been on Pretty Maids albums as well.

Tobbe: It must be great to work with Chris Laney, who you know really well now at this point. And also considering that he's like a chameleon and is able to write so many different kinds of music, you know.

Ronnie: He's the most super easy-going guy to work with and he's a super nice guy, you know. And he has been there for me since I got sick, like cheering me up and stuff like that. I also wrote a few of the songs with him, you know. I basically send up the stuff and he does the whole instrumentation and send it back to me. And then I did the vocals. The last things we did were the drums and the rest of the instrumentation. Particularly on the first album, you know. Actually the same on the second one.

But I didn't know how much time I had. It sounds dramatic, but, you know, that's why we did the vocals first. We did the vocals to a demo when we had agreed on the arrangement and everything. But when I did Make It Count last year I guess I kind of learned how to cope with my situation. 2020 when I recorded One Shot I was in grief, I was in panic, I was in shock, kind of. That's the main difference.

Tobbe: Did any other guy really contribute to the songwriting, or did they just lay down their stuff in the studio?

Ronnie: No, they just lay down their stuff. I mean, I wrote two songs with Chris. You know, like, we sat down together. Besides that it's all based on my ideas. Chris has a great set of ears and we're on par. He's great at arranging and he has got great ideas usually, like, you take the title track, Make It Count, it basically started out as a piano ballad, and I heard it like a power ballad. I mean, all the pieces are exactly as I wrote them on piano. Then he came back with this kind of late '70s disco kind of stuff, you know, so.

Tobbe: How does it feel to write stuff under your own name? It's Ronnie Atkins albums.

Ronnie: You know, the funny thing is that people a lot of times ask me, and I've been asked before, to do a solo album. Often by the record company and stuff. But I've never had any interest in that. I've had enough in Pretty Maids, I was doing Nordic Union and I did this Avantasia thing. That's enough for me. But, as I said, Corona, I got sick, I had a fallout with Kenny, and I just got to do something, and they wanted me to make a solo album.

It's not that I have any need, or special desire to promote my, you know, ego ways or anything like that, 'cause, I mean, if I hadn't got sick and if I hadn't had issues with Kenny I probably would do a Pretty Maids album. So it's kind of a coincidence. But also the Corona thing had its part in it.

Tobbe: Moving quickly forward. Do you have any songs for a third album?

Ronnie: I have a lot, you know. I haven't been writing recently and now I'm concentrating on doing this, you know. And I released so much stuff within a year and a half, you know. There's actually a symphonic EP coming in the fall. With some of the songs. But it's just an EP, you know. I don't know if it's gonna be a physical release. I have ideas enough for a new album, but I haven't finished the songs and I haven't made up my mind what I wanna do.

What I wanna do this summer is I wanna concentrate on live, so if I wanna do a new album I start doing it in the fall. But I mean, it's not that I need to put an album out every year. Sometimes you can overexpose yourself, you know. But I got, like, 450 ideas. That's bits and pieces, you know. Sometimes, if I need a middle 8 or a bridge for a song, I'll go through it and, "Oh, this is great! I will use this one.".

But normally it's, like, we start writing the song, that's the best thing, and then you finish it off. When you record something, and put it away and say, "I'll leave that to rest and then I'll pick it up later." then sometimes it's hard to pick it up again even though you think it's good. But then I may use it as a bridge part or a middle 8.

Related links:

www.facebook.com/ronnieatkinsofficial
www.instagram.com/ronnie_atkins_official
www.prettymaids.dk
www.facebook.com/prettymaids