2017 has really been a shitshow for Ghost's whole "let's keep all our identities secret" thing, huh? From the revelation of one Nameless Ghoul, to the revelation of many, to the lawsuit against frontman Tobias Forge / Papa Emeritus, to Emeritus ultimately breaking character to talk about the timeline of Ghost and the lawsuit against him.
Now in an interview with CBS Philadelphia, where the band recently played on its tour with Iron Maiden, Emeritus explains that he's the one that writes all the music. Which is great, he says, because it's that much easier to teach touring musicians how to play everything.
“I have been in the band since I started the band. I started writing songs for it in 2006.
“Nowadays there’s a handful of very new members, yeah. But there has been about ten to fifteen people now going in and out of the band, so there’s been a lot of rotation.
“It’s always an inconvenience when you’re changing people in a band. You have to get someone else in there and you have to teach that person from scratch everything. We’re not doing twelve-bar blues here, so it’s not something that you can just pick up on. And luckily for me, since I’ve written most of everything, of the patterns, I can teach anyone coming in, ‘This is how the bass line goes, and this is how the guitar riff goes, and this is how the keyboard goes and this is how the drums go.’ So it’s not very hard for me to make my stamp rub off on anyone coming in and playing that instrument. But that also adds to the friction over the years. Because it’s never really been a band in the classic sense that you have someone who plays his or her instrument and that she or he is the only person in the world that can make it sound like that. People have a tendency to want to feel that they’re very important for something, and if it’s not crucial that they’re there, there will also be a little bit of a friction there.”
When asked about if he views Ghost as a band or as a solo project, he says it's ultimately his project alone.
“I actually refer to it as the earlier of the two options. Even though I’ve never wanted it that way, but at the end of the day, that is what it is. So I think it speaks clear for itself. I mean, I started it in 2006, and no one that was ever in the band in 2016 was even on the first record. Call it solo, if you want to, but I call it a project.”
Is anyone really surprised at this point? Emeritus / Forge is the one giving most of the interviews, fronting the band with the only identifiable face, and has writing credits for every single Ghost song.
