For the last 15 years, Tobias Forge has been toiling over his magnum opus, the Ghost project. Ghost has grown to be so much more than just a rock band in the past decade and a half; they’ve built up a multimedia narrative that spans an ongoing web series, a line of comic books with plans for expansion as well as concert film (and another on the way!) After all this time, Forge has decided it is time to take a brief hiatus from the band to spend more time with family, work on other projects and gain fresh inspiration.
In a new interview with Full Metal Jackie, Forge expressed his desire to return home to his wife and twin children, “I’ve had two kids waiting at home with my wife for 15 years and maybe that says something about me that it wasn’t a pushing enough factor during those years. But I’ve definitely come to a point where not only do I feel physically and mentally a need to be home, simply because they’re 17. They’re not gonna be around for much longer.”
Forge also made an apt analogy regarding his role as the bandleader, “Imagine you being a house builder, a visionary and you draw up houses, great ideas, but you’re also doing the permits and you’re also doing the tiles and you’re building everything and you’re sawing up all that and putting it all together. I don’t simply have an idea.”
Despite the lack of inspiration he currently has for Ghost, he still plans to partake in other creative pursuits during the hiatus including two film projects and a separate album he had hinted at in another recent interview which he clarified was not a new covers EP or Ghost record.
The band just finished out the last show of the Skeletour on February 23 at the Intuit Dome in Inglewood, California. They unfortunately had to cancel three shows on the trek following state of emergencies being declared in North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee due to winter storm surges.
During the Full Metal Jackie interview, Forge lamented the fact that other countries were left off the Skeletour itinerary. He specifically named South America, Australia and Japan as planned destinations that were ultimately left out due to the size of the production, “Originally we were intending to do South America, Australia, Japan. The tour is simply too big. We cannot bring it. You cannot travel with all that stuff, at least on our level.”
He left fans with an optimistic promise for any future tours, “I’ll work harder next time to figure out a way to take another show on a more worldwide run. But that will be a problem in the future at some point.”
Photo credit: Raymond Flotat
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