“We’re seven really good friends traveling the world” – interview with Marco Aro (The Haunted)

Marco Aro is the vocalist of the legendary band The Haunted. They performed at Wacken Open Air this year and we had the chance to chat with him about the festival and more.

I’m here with the amazing Marco from The Haunted. How are you doing today? 

Marco Aro: I’m good. Really looking forward to the show. As I said, we did a really long drive yesterday from Düsseldorf to Hamburg, which is like four hours, but when you’re really tired and it’s pitch black on the Autobahn, it’s not really fun. So, we got to the hotel at two o’clock and just looking forward to play a show.

Oh my goodness. And you’re playing a show on the 35th anniversary of Wacken Open Air. How does it feel to be playing in this?

Marco Aro: It’s good. And also, you always tend to forget how big this whole thing is. It’s huge. And I heard it’s about 80,000 people this year. We played here a few times back in the early days as well when it wasn’t this big. So, now just when we were driving up here, you have to drive to get to certain places. That’s huge. Hellfest is not that big. The backstage thing is not as big as this. For artists, it’s a lot easier at Hellfest than here because this is just too big. This is enormous.

So, since you have a lot of experience in playing live performances, but also you have experience in working on the studio, do you think that the life of an artist is a lonely life?

Marco Aro: Not lonely. I usually say that it’s a blessing that you can go in your 50s, travel the world with your best friend, doing many times very childish things. But don’t think it’s a lonely life. It can be tough and straining, but you tend to forget those. Like that we had a 13-hour drive from Shanghai to Beijing because of the typhoon in the middle of the night just to catch our flight to Japan. Those things are already forgotten. So, no, it’s not a lonely life because you have four of your best friends. Or actually, we’re seven because we got Dave and our sound engineer as well. So, we’re seven really good friends traveling the world.

I think it’s more lonely for my wife than for me. We’ve been married for almost 30 years now, I know that could be very complicated. I built a house for my mom and dad on my area because the kids already moved out. They don’t live at home anymore. She’s got my mom and dad there as well because she doesn’t have any parents. So, she has those, but she likes to complain about the loneliness. We’re not doing long tours at all anymore. We stopped doing that because we all have jobs and families and all that. And also, we’re not willing to put down the effort to start all over again to get back to where we were when we were younger. Where we actually had this for a living.

Because now we don’t need it for a living anymore. Now it’s just for all the right reasons to have fun, that’s the whole thing. That’s what we said when we decided to do this again. As long as it’s fun, we’re all aboard. But once it becomes a must, that’s when we have to start talking about it. So, we decided to do a lot more than we originally said that we’re gonna do. But it’s because we can travel in the comfort that we want to now. We’re not riding around in a minivan in fucking Eastern Europe. We’re not sleeping over at punk rocker’s house with their shoes as pillows. Now we can actually pick and choose what we want to do as well.

Marco, thank you so much for taking the time to do this interview with me. Is there anything else that you want to add to our readers and viewers?

Marco Aro: No, not really. Expect us a lot more in the future than we’ve been doing because, as I said, it’s a lot more comfortable now. And we don’t depend on so many other things anymore. So now we can just pick and choose. Like we did Naples. It was really, really fun. Crazy hot. It was insanely hot. Not even the breeze from the sea we felt, but it was a good festival. Fun. Really good fun.