Born With A Hammer, the new solo album from Kai Hansen, is due for release in ten days time. Kai is currently in Costa Rica, and I would love to have said I went there and did a face-to-face interview. But I was happy enough to settle for an internet chat. The conversation ranged far and wide, covering everything from his pre-Helloween days right up to the here and now.
Kai says that Born With A Hammer is like a ride through his colourful, musical garden in terms of hard music. “It’s not what I would usually do, it’s something beyond it,” he says. “I guess that’s the purpose of a solo album. It doesn’t make sense to create a solo album that sounds like your original band, right?”
For the fans, even those who have known Kai for a long time, this will be something very new for them. “Quite a new experience for them,” he says. “There are some surprises, I would say, even for a fan of Gamma Ray or Helloween, or any of the other projects I’ve been involved with before. I hope so, anyway. It will be something else for sure. I’m definitely not getting boring.”
The Born With A Hammer album cover is definitely Metal but not hugely serious. It reminded me of the Little Angels, though this is not a band that he is familiar with and certainly not their album covers.
Kai Hansen is a serious musician, but his album covers are more light-hearted. It is “Absolutely” important that he does not take himself too seriously. “That’s what keeps my feet on the ground,” he says. “I like to make fun of myself as well, and not take myself seriously. I take my music seriously, but I like to do things with a wink of an eye.”
The second track on Born With a Hammer, Welcome To Life, has a reggae-sounding middle section. Reggae on a Heavy Metal album. Where did that come from?
“It is reggae,” he smiles, “and it comes from my liking of whichever place I’m at. I’m in Costa Rica, where the sun shines, there’s palm trees, there’s a beach and stuff like that, then I regularly don’t listen to Metal because it doesn’t really fit into this, so I always end up listening to reggae.
“Mainly Bob Marley, because it fits the atmosphere, and I really liked that. So when I was getting to that point in the song, it was just a spontaneous flash that made me do it, and I liked it. I thought, okay, yeah. I’m free to do whatever I feel like, so I did it.”
Another track that caught my ear was I Don’t Care At All, and it sounded to me like there was disco or funk in there as well. There is huge diversity in this one album.
“With Gamma Ray, we always had a bit of diversity,” Kai says. “We always tried to break out of the regular red line here and there. I always like to do little things that are out of the ordinary. But on this album it’s really extreme.
“I Don’t Care At All is a track that has this kind of disco Euro dance vibe to it, combined with Metal, and to me that was interesting. That was fun to do.”
There are two other guitar players on the album. One is friend and producer Eike Freese, and the other is his son, Tim Hansen. The bass player is originally a guitar player for Heaven Shall Burn, Alexander Dietz, and Dan Wilding joins on drums.
Kai and Tim have been working together for quite a while, “ever since he [Tim] got firm with the guitar. We exchange ideas. We send each other our demos. We criticise. We give each other input.
“I did some stuff for his band, singing on an album, but not guitar. Tim has played some solos on the Helloween Reunited release. We are constantly in touch in terms of music and doing things together. His working with me on this album made total sense because he’s a Hansen too. He’s also a really fantastic player, so I really appreciate him being there.”
The seeds of Born With A Hammer were sown during Covid. “I started songwriting then because I got bored,” Kai says. “There wasn’t much to do, in terms of music, and so I sat down in my studio. I had ideas, so I started working on them.
“There was a lot of diversity in these ideas, so I said, I’m just gonna spit them out and put them on a recording. In the end, I realised that there really was a lot of diversity. I wondered what I could do with it, because it didn’t really fit with Helloween or Gamma Ray completely. So I said, okay, I’m just gonna put everything on a solo album and throw it out.”
Kai Hansen has successfully mixed singing and playing guitar, two very separate skills combined in one. I wondered if this was something that came naturally.
“When I wrote my first songs, I used to sing along,” he says. “I had lyrics, and I had melodies. So for me, it just comes naturally. I can’t do it any other way. I cannot compose a song without having a vocal melody and lyric. It’s not possible. So I’m very used to it, and that’s developed over the years.
“You get more firm in it and have more experience in discovering your voice in various ways, so I’m faring fine with this. I just don’t like to spend two hours on stage being the frontman with guitar and vocals. That’s too much. I would prefer to have a singer onstage, and I would rather just play my guitar.”
Heavy Metal nowadays seems to be very much into genres and subgenres. Power Metal, Heavy Metal, Thrash Metal. “What I did with Helloween or Gamma Ray has been branded Power Metal by people, which, to me, I don’t really agree with,” Kai says. “To me, it’s just Heavy Metal, sometimes fast, more melodious, sometimes rhythmic, slower stuff.
“We have all kinds of Metal in there. But the definition of Power Metal that somebody gave me is like speed, double bass, and high vocals. Well, yeah, we have that. But it’s not completely true that we only exist in that. So to me it’s just Heavy Metal.”
It is fair to say that Kai Hansen has been around for a while now. Has it been hard to navigate changing musical tastes even within Heavy Metal? “There’s always some hardship involved in that,” he says. “When you get down to songwriting, I always try to reinvent myself without leaving my usual trademarks because I like them.
“Sometimes it comes easy and natural, and sometimes it’s like biting on stones that won’t budge. I guess every musician who has been around for a long time knows that, especially when you have been for an even longer time.
“You have put out so many ideas that it is very hard not to be repetitive. But then again, if you are inventive and try to create something new, then there could be trouble.
“There are fans who, if you do the same thing over and over again, well, some might like that, but you get criticised for that. And if you go too far out with your band, then you get criticised for that. But in the end, you can only do what your heart says.”
Released on 18 September via earMusic, Born With A Hammer is a burgeoning blast-bomb of raw, energetic Metal. MetalTalk will have more on the album soon, as well as the second part of this interview. In the meantime, get your pre-orders in via kaihansen.lnk.to/BornWithAHammer.
