With his band Ghost achieving arena-headlining success, multi-platinum certifications and near global brand recognition, Tobias Forge surprisingly opted to step back from the group earlier this year. Outside of this week’s theatrical premiere of the band’s latest live concert film ‘2 Big To Rig‘, and the live soundtrack that just released for it, Ghost are currently on the backburner.
Forge, who has adopted various front personas in the Swedish occult rock group through the years, and effectively serves as its main shot caller, recently spoke to Kerrang! about stepping away at the height of the band’s fame, for now.
Forge in part spoke of the scale the band has grown into, with their touring production employing some 106 crew members, complete with 22 production trucks and six crew buses. According to Forge, he’s become cognizant of the pressures that being the linchpin of such a big operation come with — a realization which in part led him to want to take a clear break:
“There’s a lot of people depending on you, let alone all these people buying tickets. For most of my career, I’ve been very triggered by that, in a positive way. But now, with a lack of a clear direction of where to go, I don’t want to have that responsibility on my shoulder. I can carry that when I’m there, but when I’m not there, it’s too tiresome.”
Forge went on to describe that exhaustion had also set in as years of grinding with the band and the increased responsibilities as they grew also caught up with him at the expense of his family and social life. That said, he remains proud of what the Ghost achieved with their Billboard 200 topping album “Skeletá” and the extensive touring that followed it. He said of bringing that album cycle to a definitive close:
“When you’re done with the big wedding, you’re not gonna get married again immediately after! I don’t want to call it a bookend, but it serves as a great finale. I feel like, ‘If this is it, I’m pretty pleased. This is a fucking great repertoire, great band, they sound phenomenal.’ We managed to do this awesome show most of the nights, and I couldn’t be happier.”
As for how life has been since stepping away from the band, he stated:
“Everything was great up until the moment when I was sort of eyeing the end of a tour and not knowing for the first time in our career what to do next. And that was kind of the get the fuck out of Dodge card, which is: I’m not gonna just go back to make an album or force myself to make an album for no reason. I need to want to make a record. I need to have something to say.
Every other record has been very inspired and there’s been a clear thought, there’s been a purpose. And that was completely generated by my passion to do so – it was never contractual fulfilment or whatever. It was nothing like that. And this time around it was just like, ‘I don’t have an idea.’ I just want to do other things and it doesn’t really mean anything other than that, but it also means that, no, we don’t have anything in the books, and yeah, it’s just a normal hiatus.”
Asked later if he finds himself happy taking some time away, he offered:
“I am. The big difference is how I’m able to talk to friends. For the last 15 years, I’ll come home [from a Ghost tour] for, like, two weeks, and the first week I’m sick, and the second week, I have to be with my family. I have to take care of people in a proximity level, with the closest ones first.”
Forge went on to speak of his passion for getting into filmmaking outside of Ghost and revealed he has a number of projects in various stages, something this pronounced downtime has allowed him to devote more time to. He went on to sum that up, “When you’re in your dream-come-true band, it’s all-consuming in terms of time and energy. I’m very happy that I’m able to commit to other things now.”
