Top 50 Tobias Forge Quotes

I’m a big fan of a lot of prog music. As a record collector as well, I won’t throw anybody or any band under the bus, but a lot of the records are fun to collect, are not necessarily very good. There are a lot of prog bands out there that it’s a really cool record, but it’s, like, not really there.

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.

I was told before that one of the hardest jumps to do, painlessly, is the one from playing clubs into playing arenas. I am completely aware of that now.

It’s always ideal if the production that you’re taking out on tour is the one that you spent two weeks rehearsing with, and you just do the same show thirty nights in a row.

I grew up watching a lot of film.

The belief in something bigger and supernatural is not the same thing as linear religion.

I always hate starting tours, especially when it coincides with an album coming out.

Ghost has always been about make-believe.

My first records were KISS’s ‘Love Gun,’ Twisted Sister’s ‘Stay Hungry,’ and Motley Crue’s ‘Shout at the Devil.’ That had immense influence on me.

I’m an okay drummer, I’m an okay bass player, I’m an okay keyboardist, and I’m a quite good guitar player.

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.

Public trials are very unsupervised and extremely swift and speak to the most primordial parts of us.

Not only did we read a lot at home, we also watched a lot of films. So I had already seen a lot of films that were about the crucifixion and the temptation of Christ, like Bible history and the Ten Commandments – stuff like that.

Technically, a Ghost song could just be piano and vocals, but it could also be full, pounding, heavy-thrashing hard rock.

‘Dance Macabre’ feels like one of those songs that you want to play forever.

My ability maps my own writing. I haven’t spent a whole lot of time biting licks from the really quick masters. That’s why I’m not very good at that sort of super-fast, shreddy sweeping. So I’ve never considered myself a traditionally good, fast-playing guitarist.

I was 29 when we sort of broke through with Ghost.

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.

I grew up in Sweden. It’s a profoundly Americanized country. We have a strong tradition of Americana and always had non-dubbed American television, and embracing American culture a lot, so I always knew that I wanted to go to America.

When I was 8 years old, I was already very interested in music.

The problem with religious doctrine, as with politics, because of its ability to give people authority, it has a tendency to attract people that want authority for all the wrong reasons, and that is what it has done across all time.

I like horror movies that have a degree of coziness to them.

For us, if you’re a rock band, there’s no way around it. You have to tour. You have to tour a whole lot.

Once you get people’s attention, you have a greater responsibility to tell them something of value.

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.

I have a fascination for well-produced ’70s and ’80s rock with a lot of harmonies. AOR bands like Journey, Jefferson Starship, Toto, Kansas, Boston.

I think very cinematically.

I think that it’s crucial. I think that playing live, if you want to be an artist – that’s what artists do.

I am an old-school guitar player. I’m not an ’80s-’90s sort of shredder who plays a million notes a minute. I am way more ’60s-’70s kind of style, and I write very ’60s-’70s.

My mom is very liberal. She has never been religious… spiritual but not religious.

There are people who just love to destroy other people. It saddens me to admit that, I think, at whatever state of human civilisation we arrive at, the will to destroy other people is something that is innate in some people.

Even in my hometown of Linkoping where I grew up… the church we had was very lavish – very boasty. So it ticked most of the boxes of big, imposing Christianity. And I love being there if I’m in town… because it’s just this haunting place.

So many people have opinions based not on fact but spite.

You don’t accidentally turn into a big band. Not even Nirvana accidentally turned into a big band. They toured – they wanted to become a big band. They didn’t necessarily want to become that big of a band, but they still wanted to make a really good record and wanted to come out and tour.

I am not a big artist myself. I am, I guess, a somewhat successful songwriter now, but I think that my value is Ghost and my writing via Ghost.

If you come in like a typical modern drummer who is used to playing only with tricks and double kick and, like, big, big, big, fast rolls, but you can’t play a swinging shuffle, then you can’t play in Ghost whatsoever.

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 love playing arenas; it’s the best thing.

If we see someone, an artist who just does magnificent art, and especially if they’re already doing Ghost-related art, we just reach out and start collaborating. But when it comes to the record sleeves and the tour posters, I’m usually quite particular.

Most bands that don’t want to become big at all, they don’t play. If you don’t want to be known, if you don’t want to make it, don’t play. That’s the easiest way not to do it.

A band which plays songs such as ‘Death Knell’ or ‘Prime Mover’ can’t just stand on the stage with a shirt and jeans-jacket. It must be more awesome than that.

As a young teen, Satan and the idea of some sort of world that you could be in touch with that could empower you was very much the symbol for freedom.

I’ve had a very, very forgiving and a very, very supportive mother who never really gave me a hard time for going in and out of slackerdom.

I like the fact that my work in Ghost is famous, and people know it, and we have our crowd. But I am not as antsy about getting recognized on the street as I might have once been.

It would have been easy to try to make ‘Opus Eponymous II’ and just stick with a routine. But it just felt like, if this is going to go anywhere, we need to take big steps every time.

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.

The music comes first. Final lyrics are usually written very close to recording the vocals.

If you’ve followed us from when we started playing live in October 2010, you will notice that there has been numerous changes over the years.