Tokio Hotel Viva TV Interview - Humanoid - Day 1- 02.09.2009

Viva : Now we're gonna talk about your new album, "Humanoid", will be released October 2nd. You've been working a year on it, now what do you like the most of the end result?

Tom: Ehhh, what do we like the most? Hehh, that is a difficult question. Actually I like the whole result. -laugh-

Bill: I just like the whole new sound. The album has a sound wich is kinda new, it dominates in the whole album - all of the songs. That is what i really wanted and it makes me happy when I listen to the songs. I'm very satisfied about that. And besides, yeah, the whole album is great, we've been working on it for a year.
We had a lot of songs, we didn't just write 13 or 14 songs to put them on the track. No, we tried a lot, deleted a lot. I think that's good.

Viva : So you're talking about a 'new sound', how would you describe it?

Tom: Its hard to describe, but the fact is; for the first albums we concentrated a lot on our own instruments :guitar, bass and drums. Because of that we always had a kinda straight rock-sound. Now we didn't only record our own instruments, there is a lot of electric stuff on it, we worked a lot with synthesizers. So you can say, our soundworld has grown. It became athmosperic.
There are still a lot of guitars in it, so people will still recognise 'Tokio Hotel'.

Viva: A highter level?

Tom: Yes.

Viva: The whole concept seems to be very futuristic, like your Homepage and the cover of 'Automatic'. Where did you get inspired?

Bill: I have to say that everything just developped by itself. When you're recording a song you always have a kind of visual image of it. You can imagine how the videoclip would look like.
We didn't try to just create a real concept, it just came with the time. So we didn't plan the concept and wrote songs to that theme or something. Everything came during the production of the album.
With time things came by and so we shooted the clip. You only know a visual image of it, so nothing was planned.

Viva : Are the lyrics in science-fiction-style too?

Bill: Yes, but we really aren't science-fiction fans or something. I don't know much of it. -laugh-.
But the style always accompanied us during writing the lyrics. There were always words wich made me think of it -things that don't exist here on the planet. And of course "Humanoid", the name of the album. That things always were in our thoughs.

Viva: The titel of the new album is "Humanoid". Did you especially choose for a name wich works in a lot of languages?

Tom: Yes, the cool thing about it , that is in fact the cool thing about "Tokio Hotel" , is that everything is the same. There is no need for a translation of the title, because it is exactly the same. It's only pronounced a little different.
But it was important for us to choose a name wich is everywhere the same. For the past albums it was difficult, because the one's name was "Scream", other "Room 483". It's cool that now we have the same name.


Viva: Are you going to record the record in English too?

All: We already did.
Bill: Yes, so we produced two albums, German and English. It's the first time we did it like this. For the past record, we picked our favourite songs to translate. This time we recorded English and German at the same time. That was a lot of work, a year. We translated everything and recorded in two languages.
And it was during the production we became to know how many work it really was to do things in two different languages. The video's will be in two languages too, so that things need a lot of time. But we really wanted to do it that way, we really don't want to do the one thing without the other. We fully decided to do things in two languages.

Viva: Is it more difficult to sing about your feelings in English, wich is not your native?

Bill: In the beginning it was really hard and weird for me. But now we return to the point we started. ( With Devilish ). We started with German and English
-and we are allmost 10 years together! *laughs* -
In the beginning we had German lyrics too, wich we translated to English. Our teachers did help with it, but that was such a bad translation, and such bad lyrics. But principal the two languages were our start.

Now I am totally used to it, I wouldn't be able to choose between an English or a German version of a song. There isn't any version I don't like to sing, I like both.