Throughout seven studio albums, Haken has evolved into one of the top progressive metal bands in the world. Their 2023 release Fauna was near the top of every Best Of list in the genre. The band is about to return to US stages with a brand new stage show. Founding member, guitarist, and writer Rich Henshall recently took some time to talk about what fans can expect from a very special night with Haken.
Please press the PLAY icon below for the MisplacedStraws Conversation with Haken –
On feeling a sense of validation with the success of Fauna – It’s always an honor for us to get any positive feedback. With Fauna, we put a lot of effort and time into it. I feel like it took us maybe two years from the point we started writing to the point we got the finished master. So we put a lot of love and passion and energy into it. So, you’re waiting to hear back. You kind of lose perception by that point, you kind of lost the idea of, “Is this any good anymore?” because you’ve heard it so much. You’ve been writing it for a few years, then you’ve recorded it over the space of a few months, so you’re kind of desensitized to it, to a certain extent. So to hear positive feedback after all of that is always a great thing. Primarily we’re just writing music that we want to hear ourselves. It’s always just a bonus really and other people want to listen to it as well, but luckily there are some people out there that want to hear us play. We get to travel around and play lots of shows around the world, so it’s always a great honor for us.
On what drives them to evolve their sound with each record – I think it’s generally a reflection of what we listen to as a band we’ve got a very eclectic taste. I grew up listening to Michael Jackson and Queen, and then I got into hardcore metal bands like Madball and some UK hardcore bands, like Stomping Ground and Knuckle Dust, metal bands like Soulfly, Sepultura, Metallica. Then on the flip side of that, we listen to a lot of indie rock stuff like Bombay Bicycle Club, Everything Everything, and then you’ve got jazz as well in there. If you imagine all of these influences are thrown into a pot, the end result is, I guess you could say the music we come out with, the Haken sound.
Also, our tastes are evolving as well over the years. Back in the day during the Aquarius and Visions era, I feel like those two albums were very influenced by kind of cinematic sounds. But now our sound has evolved as our tastes are evolving. It’s not like we set out to say “This album needs to be different from the last one”. We just try and keep the whole process as organic as possible. Now that we’re all writing together as a band, I feel like that’s really broadened our sound a lot since some of the earlier albums, and now, because we’re all writing, there’s so much going on, maybe a bit too much, but we enjoy it.
On bringing Peter Jones back into the band – Pete’s a great guy. He was on the demos way back in the day, around about 2007 and 8, we kind of released those. I say released, we actually just burnt them onto a disc and just handled them out to people at shows. That was way back and we kept in contact. He went off to study theoretical physics and we wished him well on his journey. We stayed in contact and we were still great friends. Pete and I also played in another band called the Nova Collective, which is more of a jazz fusion instrumental project. So also, musically, we stayed in contact. So when we parted ways with Diego (Tejeda), he was a natural fit, socially and also musically. He’s got very similar tastes to us, but he also brought a new sound to the mix. He’s very into his electronic stuff. He has a project called Nested Shapes, which is kind of like evolving ideas, so you’ll have one core idea in a song and it just evolves throughout the whole song. Which is a really cool concept to bring to the Haken sound.
With Haken, there’s lots of different ideas going on at the same time. But sometimes it’s good to focus on one singular thing and let it grow a bit. So we tried to do that a bit on Fauna and he has a jazz influence as well, which he’s brought to the table. But aside from all of that, it’s just been great reconnecting with him touring, just hanging out on the tour bus, and all of that stuff, which is a major part of being in a band. But yeah, it’s been great. Looking forward to getting cracking on a new album with him now.
On what fans can expect on the upcoming US tour – It’s always a pleasure coming over there, we have some of our best tours in the US. We get to eat lots of cool food as well, which is always a pleasure. But we try and mix it up. If we’re going to do two tours in one area for an album, we try and mix it up. This time we thought it’d be cool to do An Evening With type setup, which we’ve never done before. They’re kind of regretting it now because it’s three hours of music. So we’ve been preparing like crazy for the last three or four months, just every day going through the songs, making sure our muscle memory is fully processed.
So what we’re doing is we’re playing the whole of Fauna for the first set, then maybe another song at the end there to finish off that set. Then we’re going to play a bunch of our fan-favorite songs in the second set. So it’s kind of like almost a “Best Of Haken” in the second set. Three hours of music and it’s just going to be us and it’ll be a seated show. The fans aren’t going to lose their position if they want to go to the toilet or go to the bar. It’ll be a new experience for us. We’ve never done a whole tour where everyone’s sitting down and really focusing on what we’re playing because that’s going to be an interesting experience for us. Maybe it’ll be more enjoyable for the fans because they can just sit and just watch what’s going on rather than getting tired legs by the end of the night. It’ll be fun. We’re all around America and Canada as well.
On songs from Fauna they are particularly excited to play – We’ve done a bunch of them already. Maybe just over half the tracks over the last year or so. We did the singles, then we did “Elephants Never Forget”, which has been a really fun one to play. Probably the most quirky song on the album, and you can see that gets a real cool reaction from the crowd. So that one will be fun. For me, a personal song would be “Eyes of Ebony”. I wrote the lyrics about my father, and it’s a very personal song for me. So that one will be a really special one to play live. I’m looking forward to seeing that. That’s the song that closes the album and it has this big emotional kind of climax at the end. That’d be quite epic to play live. Aside from that, the other ones we haven’t, oh yeah, “Beneath the White Rainbow”, that one’s, it’s kind of crazy. It kind of feels to me like a love child of Korn and Tigran Hamassian. It’s got kind of jazz influences in there, but then it’s also got this really heavy low guitar stuff going on. That should be fun to play. There’s some really tricky rhythmic sections in that, which will be fun to try and pull off live, and a few chaotic moments for Ross (Jennings) which will be fun as well. So we’ll see how that one goes. But yeah, playing the whole album in its entirety is going to be fun. That’s essentially how you write music a lot of time. We do at least. You want it to be performed as one long piece of music, which is quite typical, I guess, in prog. A lot of the time rather than a collection of single songs, it’s just this big, long piece of music of returning themes. So yeah, it’d be fun to see how that goes down.
On if they will write on tour or wait for downtime – A lot of the time we’ll work individually, then maybe one of us will pen down an idea, just a core feel of an idea, and then we’ll send it to the other guys, and then that next person will develop that idea and then send it back and then someone might say, “Well that sounds cool Maybe we could try this here”. They’ll take the project and work on it. But more and more over the years, we started to collaborate in small groups. A lot of us live in London so we’ll meet and we’ll just hang out and just see if we can grow some ideas organically to see if it has a different feel at the end of it all. I found it feels more natural that way and when you come to playing it live It kind of falls under the fingers more naturally because a lot of time when you’re writing on your own, it could be quite calculated and you’re kind of programming parts and you don’t really have that back and forth emotional connection that you do when you’re writing as a group.
We have tried to write on the tour bus before we’ve kind of set out the back room of the bus into a makeshift studio, which was pretty cool. That experience was great because we’re all there on the bus. So we can be just hanging out, just sharing ideas. I think it was on the Devin Townsend tour. We were wrapping up the Virus writing that we set out the whole back room as a studio, and we had a microphone in there and we were just kind of passing the mic around or sharing ideas for vocal lines, and harmonies. By the end of the tour, we had it all mapped out and it was a lot quicker doing that than bouncing ideas back and forth online because sometimes someone might be busy for a couple of days then you kind of lost the flow a bit. We will try that on this tour because we’ve kind of penned down some initial ideas for the next album. It’ll be the perfect time for us to be all together in one space. We’re all dotted around the world so it’s quite hard to pull that off a lot of the time.
On being able to play tracks with complex layers live – It’s definitely a tricky one because. We always take a lot of inspiration from the likes of Gentle Giant and King Crimson and I feel like especially Gentle Giant. They’re perfect at having a multi-layered approach. If you listen to each instrument, it doesn’t necessarily sound that complicated, but it’s all syncopated against like a steady beat. But every part is syncopated with each other, and the whole tapestry of the sound sounds a lot more complex than it actually is. So that’s a lot of, that’s a big inspiration for us. That’s the way we try and approach the music alot of the time. We’ll have individual parts, which aren’t necessarily tricky, but together they sound a lot trickier than they are. So when it comes to doing a tour, we’re all just pretty meticulous as musicians, anyway, pretty anal about things. We will just spend months, just learning our parts, like exactly as we’ve played them on the record. So hopefully when we get to the point, we’re about to start the tour, it should just lock into place. Luckily because we’ve recorded the parts, we have all the stems at home. So we know exactly what we played. So that’s the plan. Because we’re not really in the same city most of us will have to kind of meet and just rehearse before the tour for like a day. On the last tour, we rehearsed on the day of the first show. We booked out the venue for the whole day and we basically woke up at a stupid time and rehearsed on the stage for maybe two hours before the tour, and that’s the only rehearsal we’ve had for these new songs. It was a bit of a bit of a crazy thing to do, but we. pulled it off because we’d all planned ahead of time individually and got everything down.
On how Haken joined Mike Portnoy in Shattered Fortress – It was such a big thing for us, as you can imagine. We’ve come from this world, this progressive metal world, which Dream Theater has essentially established. They’re, they’re the ones that paved the way for all of these new bands to do their thing. We kind of grew up listening to Dream Theater, going to watch them in London. I saw them countless times at the Hammersmith Apollo, and then at Wembley as well. Those gigs were such memorable nights for me. They kind of really formed the basis of my wanting to start Haken with Ross and Matt back in the day. When we got kind of a message from Mike saying he’s really into Haken, really into the music, would you guys be up for kind of doing this with me to celebrate his 50th birthday? The first show was on Cruise to the Edge, which is a cruise ship essentially, which is a festival on a cruise ship which was hosted essentially by Yes and he’s always there. Mike’s always on the boat, and he has his hand in choosing the bands that play on the boat. So he asked us if we could do this one-off show to celebrate his 50th birthday. Obviously we were like, “Yeah, of course, this is a great, great experience, and a great opportunity for us to play with one of our heroes”. From that, it kind of stemmed outwards onto like a world tour essentially. We did Australia, we played in South America, then we did Europe, and we did maybe New York, I feel like, but only one show. Getting on the stage with Mike and then playing the “Twelve-step Suite” alongside a bunch of songs from Scenes from Memory, which is one of my personal favorite albums. It’s an incredible piece of work. It was such a great experience. I just vividly remember the South America shows, especially just being in the room with such fanatical people. Singing along and I was a fan. The rest of those guys on the stage were all huge fans as well of the music. So we just felt like we were one with the fans. It was a great experience and we’re always totally grateful to Mike for that. It’s great to hear that he’s back in the band. It just felt, felt right. I’m looking forward to seeing him back on the stage with Dream Theater and doing his thing. He’s a great, great guy and we’re very grateful for that experience he gave us.