Tobias Forge recalls how one song gave birth to Ghost

The praised Swedish Metal band Ghost was formed by the singer Tobias Forge in Linköping, Sweden back in 2006 and since the band’s debut album in 2010, they have became bigger and bigger. In an interview with Rolling Stone (Transcribed by Ultimate Guitar), Forge recalled how one song he composed back in the early days gave birth to what Ghost would be.

Tobias Forge recalls how one song gave birth to Ghost

“Originally it was just an experiment. When the seeds of Ghost were planted, it came in a very pure form of a song. I think most songwriters recognize this; you sort of just play around with ideas, and sometimes you come up with ideas that feels slightly detached from your current band. But they still might feel inspiring. This song, at the time, had some power to it that I really liked. And then, it ended up being ‘Stand by Him’ on the first album.”

“What ended up happening was that I didn’t have a studio myself. A friend of mine who I’d played with in previous bands, both in Repugnant and Crashdïet and Subvision. But at the time in 2006, we weren’t in the same bands anymore.”

“And I just asked him, ‘Can I come by in the afternoon, just record something?’ And you know, very quickly, like, ‘Oh, here’s the drum beats that I want. Just give me the bass, give me the guitar.'”

Tobias Forge continued:

“And it was just a quick sketch of the song. And he said, ‘This is great! Can do a band again.’ And I said, ‘Well, this song came so intuitively. It’s so odd.’ Or it feels, in my mind, sort of revolutionary odd.”

“So in order for me to feel like that is a great idea, I need to write a few more songs and see if there’s more where that came from. And eventually, there were. And I think what really got me to continue writing and eventually choosing to set all the other projects aside and focus on this one thing was the fluency of writing. It felt like it was really combining a lot of the things that I like.

“My playing background comes from very extreme, very noisy music. But I grew up with a lot of melodic music, and not only rock. It was of all kinds of pop stuff, everything that was on the radio in the ’80s I’ve digested. I’ve always had you know, a fascination for big vocal music. With that, I mean everything from Toto to gospel music. Everything that has a lot of strong, well-sung vocals with harmonies. Look, I like Johnny Rotten too, but I wanted to combine that evil-esque music but with sort of an AOR vibe,” Tobias Forge said.

The band

Ghost became in the last decade one of the most successful new bands in Rock and Roll music. Mixing Rock, Pop and Heavy Metal often with satanic imagery and lyrics, the band gained millions of fans worldwide, including many famous ones. They have released 5 acclaimed studio albums and also won the Grammy in 2016 for Best Metal Performance.

Their latest release was “Impera” (2022) and has successful tracks like “Kaisarion”, “Spillways”, “Call Me Little Sunshine” and “Hunter’s Moon”.