Today, we sat down with Sanity to talk their inspiration to write music, type of music they listened to growing up, and much more.

Interview:

What is your inspiration to write your music? Is it your
surroundings?

Over the past three decades I have come to observe that suffering is a necessary ingredient to creativity. I feel most inspired when in sorrow and distress. I also listen to my inner self and find that quite often music pushes outwards and wants to be composed. For instance, I wake up with a melody or hook line in my mind and am almost driven to sit down to write it down and record it.

What type of music did you listen to growing up?

I was growing up in a strange type of musical home. My parents being born during World War II and having suffered bomb raids, displacement and separation from their families longed for a peaceful and silent haven to build a family. Imagine an austere Bauhaus-type house, filled with collector’s pieces and antiques, silent in its core, with classical music the only kind to fill the white painted halls every other fortnight or so. We did not have any TV, nor was there any radio culture. I was a clean slate when it came to popular music. First mixtapes from classmates featuring the classic eighties quickly lead to discovering rock music and I was already playing in a cover band at the age of thirteen.

After having seen The Offspring’s “Come Out and Play” on MTV during a family vacation in the United States I was hooked. The song was not yet known in Germany and so my twin brother and I decided to cover it. That was the beginning of  “Sanity” and it was 1994. Over the first year, the band’s musical focus shifted to death metal, heavily influenced by bands like Orphanage, Death, Paradigma and Septic Flesh. It was all about expressing ourselves. On our second and third album we journeyed into the realm of symphonic black metal, inspired by artists such as Arcturus, Obtained Enslavement, Covenant and Bloodthorn.

Is there someone you looked up as a hero?

I always related to the underdog type of hero. The guy who is somehow different and who tries to sort out how to fit in. Salvatore’s Legend of Drizzt series of a dark elf who acts against the drow stereotype, favoring friendship and peace over hatred and violence is a fantastic read. It’s a story about a moral dark elf who fights the dark traits that are inherent in the drow. I can very much relate with Drizzt, even though I know it’s only a fictional character.

If you weren’t a musician, would you be doing today?

I don’t think there was ever a chance for us not getting into music, this is how we expressed our inner self, the emotional turmoil were we going through back in the nineties (and maybe still today?). Some of my friends used sports to blow off steam, others created drawings and paintings to cope with their situations. Any yes, some succumbed to drugs and lost all their drive. But not us. Composing music is a cathartic experience for me, I wouldn’t have made it without music.

What advice do you have for our fans out there that want to create
music?

My advice to the the young artists: stay focused, reliable and stable. Don’t quit. You need years of playing together to become great. Two years in a band is nothing.