LACUNA COIL singer Andrea Ferro spoke to “Party Time Excellent”, the Internet video podcast hosted by Elena “Lena Scissorhands” Cataraga of the Moldovan extreme metal outfit INFECTED RAIN, about how he and his bandmates have been spending their coronavirus downtime. He said (see video below): “We’ve done a little bit of everything. We’ve been trying to keep busy, although there wasn’t much you could do more than Zoom meetings with promoters and management. And even between the band, we couldn’t see each other for a little bit when the situation was more heavy. Everybody has taken a little break. I think Cristina [Scabbia, LACUNA COIL frontwoman] did a lot of video gaming and fitness. And she got in very good shape, actually, because of the lockdown. And Marco [Coti Zelati, LACUNA COIL bassist] was painting the Warhammer mini statues for the games. And then I was doing a lot of guitar playing, a lot of acoustic guitar. And I just started studying again, playing five or six hours every day.
“We didn’t really try to write music, because we didn’t feel it was the right moment,” he continued. “We felt more of a sadness of the situation and the frustrating moment of [not being able to] go anywhere and missing the job, missing the people. And so it was not very creative for us. It was more about working on yourself, working on what you can do. I started playing some video games, but then I didn’t even feel it was useful. I thought playing guitar was the best thing I could do and improve and use the time to learn something… I could always play three chords, just to accompany myself, but I really now improved my skills, although I’m still a long way before calling myself a guitarist. But at least I can sing along a little bit and then do most of the chords and stuff. I just took the time to learn something and be useful.”
Ferro said that he also took some time out to “try to fix the problems with the band, try to collect all the money we needed to collect from people who still owe us some money in order to plan the survival of the company. Because the band is also a small company, we need to make sure it stays afloat until we can start making some money again,” he explained. “So we tried to organize all of that. We’ve done some work, but mostly for the very far future. We started working on some projects, with music but also collateral to the music, for 2021, ’22. So we’ve been working more for the future and not on an actual new album or new song. That didn’t come spontaneously — we didn’t feel the moment [was right] for songwriting… There wasn’t the feeling of the songwriting. We are used to do certain amount of times where you don’t go out, you mostly stay home working on ideas for the songs, for the lyrics, so it’s not something completely new, too different to stay home for a while and don’t hang out so much. But this time the situation was too weird — we didn’t feel any inspiration. And also writing about the coronavirus is not something I would do. Maybe I could write about the reflection of this in the long term on our life, but not really the illness of the moment or the victims — it’s not something I would talk about right now.”
Last month, LACUNA COIL took part in “Black Anima: Live From The Apocalypse”, an exclusive streaming show featuring a full performance of the band’s latest album, “Black Anima”, for the very first time, including songs never performed live, plus special backstage/off-camera moments and more. The Italian heavy rockers played the concert from the Alcatraz Club in Milan. “Black Anima: Live From The Apocalypse” was hosted on A-Live.
