Crystal Eyes: Mikael Dahl Interview

I met Niclas Karlsson at work in 1990 when we both played in different bands where we both were band leaders and songwriters. We realized that we had the same musical goal and shared the exact same favourite bands and we decided that we had to work together in the future and that’s what happened in 1992 when both our previous bands broke up. My band was called PAINTED SKIES and his MAYDAY and both names came from CRIMSON GLORY songs so it was just meant to be. We both loved the music from the 80’s by bands like Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, Black Sabbath, Accept, Manowar, Helloween etc and that was the kind of music we wanted to play.

It also felt very important for us to keep that legacy of melodies in Heavy Metal because it was almost gone in 1992. We had a lot of ideas for a band name but in the end it was ARTIFICIAL DREAM or CRYSTAL EYES. Both ideas came from Niclas but we decided to go with CRYSTAL EYES since it sounded better. It really didn’t have any meaning until I wrote a song called CRYSTAL EYES in 1993 about a man who could see the future with his crystal eyes. More important is probably the logo which our good friend Andreas Götesson painted for our first official demo in 1994. This is the logo we have to this day and the only change was made in 2000 when Kristian Wåhlin repainted it to the cover of IN SILENCE THEY MARCH.

I’m still stuck in the eighties and I always aim to write music as it was in the eighties. That was the goal when we started the band in 1992 and that hasn’t changed a single bit. The most important thing is that I write music that I want to hear myself and I’m not satisfied until I can listen to it over and over again. If a song makes me happy then I’ve achieved my goal and then hopefully someone else will like it. I’ve never  had a goal for a complete album but just to write song after song until there was enough to start recording and hopefully that it would sound like a best of album. For many years I presented complete demo versions of the songs with guitars, bass, vocals and programmed drums and what ended up on the records was pretty much copies of those demo recordings.

With the new line-up I felt it was time to involve the others because they really wanted to take part in the process so I presented unfinished song ideas which we tried during rehearsals and arranged everything together. The main song ideas was always mine but everyone was involved with trying different beats, moving parts around, taking away anything unnecessary or adding some stuff here and there etc. Since we listen to the same music and had pretty much the same ideas it was just fun and a great experience of getting input from 4 different people. There was not a single argue over anything and we tried everyone’s ideas and I think the result is that the songs feel more complete than before. This is absolutely how we will work in the future and the next step will be to start jamming and just see what comes up.