IN HIS BAND Tribulation, guitarist Jonathan Hultén hurls himself around the stage with manic abandon, more creature than person. But on his debut solo album, Chants From Another Place, he’s embracing the warm tones of choral and folk music while singing about being human. It’s a world away from his day job.
“It’s really different,” he admits. “Musically, this is so much about stillness, and in another way, it’s about vocal precision. Whereas in Tribulation, it’s mostly about letting yourself expand, explode, working yourself into ecstasy. It’s like going temporarily insane and really expressing yourself as much as you can physically, until you don’t even know you’re yourself - you’re just one with the music.”
Chants From Another Place is all about Jonathan Hultén being himself. A desire to write this type of hymnal music awoke in him age 15, when he covered a song by Dutch-born Swedish troubadour Cornelis Vreeswijk in music class. But by his late teens he had fallen in love with the likes of Iron Maiden, and decided to focus solely on metal. Yet even as he progressed with Tribulation, something gnawed away at him. A sense that something wasn’t right, and would never be right, unless he composed his own, stripped-back songs. “The more I procrastinated, the worse I felt,” he sighs. “And at 25, I thought, ‘I need to start trying to do this now. Because if I don’t, I will wither away from the inside.’”