Your next album, Ultraviolet, will be out on October 5. Tell us about the idea behind the album and where it fits into your discography.

Yes, our album release is just around the corner. It’s just super exciting. Ultraviolet is the second part of our third album trilogy. The album deals with the unseen world, the ultraviolet spectrum of light, which can, at times, be harmful. It’s all that which we are not aware of, but which still affects us and influences us in our daily lives. How we perceive things and how we make choices and act based on those perceptions.

A super-charged crowd under the POTF spell at Nazrul Mancha on August 28, 2012 Telegraph archive picture

Story behind the song

Tell us the stories behind three of your big tracks — Carnival of Rust, Locking Up the Sun and The Ultimate Fling.

Marko Saaresto: Do you have a week and a hundred pages?! Maybe one day I’ll write a book about the stories. There are stories about how the songs were written and where the ideas come from, and about the topics and meanings of these songs. I can maybe open up the topics just a bit.

The stories of the Carnival of Rust album, and thus Carnival of Rust and Locking up the Sun, deal with disillusionment, the before and after it and the power of love.

The Ultimate Fling goes more into love and its rotten side, the aftermath of a fight, a disagreement in a relationship, which when expanded takes a look at the way we tend to react to adversity.

We don’t usually go too deep into opening the meanings of the lyrics, because we prefer that everyone hears them in their own way.

What: Bacardi NH7 Weekender Express, Calcutta, and Bacardi NH7 Weekender, Meghalaya

When: November 3 and 4 in Calcutta and November 2 and 3 in Meghalaya

Where: Nicco Park, Plaza — III in Calcutta and The Festive Hills in Meghalaya

Tickets: Rs 2,500 (for both days) in Calcutta and Rs 1,250-Rs 2,500 in Meghalaya

Lineup for Calcutta: Poets of the Fall, Switchfoot, Pentagram, Tiny Fingers, Lakkhichhara, Mahesh Raghunandan, aswekeepsearching, Ape Echoes

Lineup for Meghalaya: Poets of the Fall, Guthrie Govan, Switchfoot, Shankar Mahadevan: My Country, My Music, Pentagram, Zero, Avancer, Mohini Dey, Tipriti Kharbangar and the Clansmen and more

The first time Poets of the Fall (POTF) landed in India in 2007, some 3,000 students of IIT Kanpur and other colleges rocked along so hard that the hearts of the Finnish band melted. They kept returning to India and to bigger crowds. After their August 28, 2012, outing, they said on their Facebook page: “The show in Kolkata was one of our most surreal experiences ever.” The band, comprising Marko Saaresto (vocals), Olli Tukiainen (guitar), Markus Captain Kaarlonen (keyboards and production), Jaska Makinen (guitar), Jani Snellman (bass) and Jari Salminen (drums), is returning in November as part of Bacardi NH7 Weekender Express in Calcutta and Meghalaya.

Here’s what the Marko Saaresto, founding member of the band, told t2 over email.

You play before packed stadiums as well as clubs. What kind of venue do you prefer? Does it make a difference to the way your music gets presented?

It’s an interesting question to think about. We’ve played at small clubs in the past with a very restricted access, and had some amazing experiences, and then we’ve done the same in stadiums with crowds going as far as the eye can see and everything in between.

My view is that you can get a really good vibe going on with either, big or small crowd. Sometimes the venue affects too. But when there’s a good sound system and a stage high enough that people can see and fans who are really into it, and ready to have a good time, you can make an amazing night of it regardless of the size of the venue.

That said, we do prefer the bigger arenas though, because a shared good experience heightens it for everyone, makes it something even more memorable.

Do you find that the crowds in India enjoy and analyse your music differently than in Finland?

We get a lot of feedback from our fans all over the planet, so from India and from Finland as well. Whether we express our enjoyment of the music inwardly and outwardly, like say at a live concert, our experience is that music does not discriminate between man-made boundaries of nationality and so on. It can cross over cultural, and even language, barriers. We see that people all over have a comparably similar way to enjoy and analyse the music. The individual interpretations may vary, but the overall experience can unify us. We think that’s really great.

You have visited India several times...

India is a land of endless fascinating stories. We can’t see how it wouldn’t have inspired us creatively. We gather life experience as we go along, wherever we go, and, that in turn, becomes the music we weave.

It’s the disquiet in our hearts that causes much of the turmoil in our world. Probably most of it. It is an issue of the human condition. Whether it stems from a lack of resources or from an ever-present yearning for validation and fulfilment, it’s sometimes hard to put a name on.

While we are not what we’d call a political band, we are artistes, we make art, we still try to work towards the solutions, not the problems. We think it is vital to be a force of good in the tumultuous world of our time. At least do our best to be so. In our opinion, more awareness equals less fear. The less we fear, the better choices we usually make. The healthier we become, the healthier environment becomes.

Being from Finland, what made you choose to sing in English? Does it help you express yourselves better?

We grew up speaking English and Finnish, and listening to mostly English music, so the choice was quite natural. Both languages are very expressive, in their own ways, so you can do cool things with either, but they don’t work exactly the same way. So you have to know both pretty well. It also reaches a wider audience globally, than singing in Finnish would’ve done.

Can you take us through the process of writing songs?

You have an idea. Pop, it’s in your head. Can you hear it? You go with your gut, following where your intuition takes you, as far as melodies and chords and lyrical ideas are concerned. You record that, so you don’t forget it. Sometimes the ideas pop in your head just when you’re falling asleep at night, so in order to not mess up a perfectly comfy falling-to-sleep feeling, you hum the thing into your recording device, which you keep with you at all times. You then get back to it in the morning and see how far the idea and the consequent influx of thoughts, feelings and intuition take you.

After that you begin the painstaking process of trial and error to finish the composition. Then you pretty much repeat the process with the production of the song, until, hey presto, you have the song finalised. The whole process can take anywhere from a few days to a few years, depending on the song. Sometimes they “come to you” almost done, and you kind of just “type it down”. On other occasions, you really have to work on them.

We are living in an era when Spotify is striking up deals with independent acts, taking the power away from music labels. How is the business of music affecting the creative process?

It’s an interesting time. Things can change quickly and you have to do your best to ride the wave with the business side of things. Creativity on the other hand is a completely separate entity. Remove the business side, and the music would still flow. The important thing is to find a way to combine them, yet keep them separate.

Your music instantly appeals to those following the rock scene. But do you ever want to go beyond the natural boundary to attract newer audiences?

That’s what we have done in the past, and have actually taken onto ourselves with the new album, Ultraviolet, to do even more. Mostly, it’s about keeping the music fresh and interesting for ourselves, to assert ourselves as the driver of this crazy train. Often we come across the question, “can we go this way”, “can we write a song like this”. It’s a balancing act, when you’re thinking of a specific artiste, like Poets of the Fall. But one of our mottos has always been to not restrict ourselves genre-wise too much. We obviously still want to have an identity as Poets of the Fall, but it’s more engaging to stretch the boundaries when and where we can, to keep things interesting. We can’t very well dictate how our music, boundaries tread on or not, will attract new listeners. If we knew how to do that, well, that’d be a story. But we hope that by doing what we love, others will also find something of value there and will want to listen to the music.

Initially, the band (like most bands) had financial troubles. Can you walk us through the years of initial struggle and looking back, how do you see those years?

Sure, when we started out, I gave up my job, my home and sold my car to have the time and money for us to make the first album and do promotion at the same time. We ran out of that money four months before the release of the album, without knowing if it was going to be a fluke or something great. It was a stressful time, for sure, not having your own fridge to go to when you were hungry, even though I had the blessing of going to live in my parents’ basement for that time and well, eating whatever was in their fridge. But it was also an exciting time, full of potential and possibility.

That year our music started to play on radio, like a lot. We’d hear it everywhere. Then Signs of Life (2005) was released, and here we are still making music this very day. What we have learnt from this is... that whenever you start something, if you’re not already in possession of a great amount of money or connections or influence, it’s a great learning experience. It’s also hard, but not disheartening. At least you’re doing something you want. It doesn’t really matter in the end if you make it or not, you’ve tried. You can try again, and again. Although if you do try, I sincerely hope you do make it.

After a decade and a half, you have created a sound that’s uniquely your own. But has there been any artiste who makes you sit up?

Every now and then there comes along someone who piques your interest. And we’re happy about that, because it shows that we haven’t yet become these jaded rockstar types, who’ve lost all their youthful curiosity and playfulness.

On a personal note, has your musical preference changed in the recent years?

We are pretty much omnivores when it comes to music. But sure, over the years our tastes have evolved. With a friend of mine, we sometimes listen to and muse the songs we used to listen way back, and those same songs still feel important. But when you work with music constantly, your listening habits tend to change.

Personally I prefer to rest my ears and not really listen to so much music anymore. I’ve also taken more of a liking to music without vocals. Being a vocalist myself, it just takes too much of my bandwidth to have someone singing in the background. I just have to analyse it to bits in my head. It’s hard to just feel it, which is what I think music is for. But when you want music, it’s like with food, you want something to fit your mood. So in that sense, any style may fit the bill.

The last time you were in Calcutta’s Nazul Mancha in 2012, there was a mad rush for your gig. Anything about the city that captured your mind?

Absolutely. Lots. The show was just super-great. The crowd was so great and so welcoming. So thank you to all who were there. I remember the torrential rain that drummed the venue outside, and the few thousand people, who didn’t fit inside, still listening to the concert out in the rain. That must’ve been an amazing bonding experience. The rain dissipated after a while though. And it was so hot, the paint on my face that day came off in rivulets, and actually looked pretty wicked, when I saw some of the photos taken there. So yes lots of detailed memories. Could probably write a whole chapter in a book about them.