Public trials are very unsupervised and extremely swift and speak to the most primordial parts of us.
The original idea of being anonymous - it was a great, naive idea on paper in 2008, not knowing to what degree we'd be touring or to what extent this was going to be a professional operation. That regimen is very hard to live by. What I hadn't foreseen was the fans and their willingness to embrace that and play along.
As long as I don't go onstage completely normal and then jump into character onstage, I assume that most fans would be able to accept me as the creator. I can comment on the work the same way a director would on his movie.
Technically, a Ghost song could just be piano and vocals, but it could also be full, pounding, heavy-thrashing hard rock.
There are many artists that I know exactly where they are born and what their names are and where they live, which are still very, sort of, hidden. Even Nick Cave, who has a film about himself nowadays, is still someone who I would claim to be utterly enigmatic.
Even if people would know who we are, or you could click on a Wikipedia page saying my date of birth, it does not necessarily mean that I have to go out on social media and tell you where I'm eating.
I've liked Kiss from when I was three years old. I've seen them, the real deal, with all the original members when they came back in '96 and all that, and that's fine.
Ghost has always been about make-believe.
If you ever want to play bigger places, you need to have records that sound like you're playing in big places.
When I was 8 years old, I was already very interested in music.
As long as I've been doing Ghost, at least, I've been very keen on maintaining not necessarily an anonymity but a low profile. But on the other hand, I spent 25 years not doing Ghost, where, 20 of those years, I wanted to be nothing but a famous rock musician.
Even though I like speaking freely, I don't really have a desire anymore to profile myself as the individual wanting to be recognized.
I enjoy the idea of being able to sort of flip-flop between being recognized and not being recognized.
If you'd asked me when I was six, 16, and 26, I wanted nothing more than to be a big, recognized rock star. Especially when I was six and 16, because I thought that if I was a known guitar player in a known band, only cute girls would talk to me.
At the end of the day, one of the biggest misconceptions of Ghost is that it's just about the devil. It's always been about mankind and living.
I think that it's crucial. I think that playing live, if you want to be an artist - that's what artists do.
With Ghost, I never really foresaw that it was going to take off the way it did.
I never, ever, wanna see 'The Conjuring' again - ever. I don't wanna see 'Annabelle' again.
I'm a big fan of the first one, but one of the first horror films I ever saw on my own was 'Halloween II.' That was my first real experience of Halloween as a concept because in Sweden in the Eighties, we didn't celebrate Halloween.
I'm a band dictator.
