Lacuna Coil: “Members Share the Responsibility… and the Wealth”

Italian metal/goth rock band Lacuna Coil are currently touring in support of their newest album, Shallow Life. The album is their most commercially successful to date, and features the single “Spellbound.” I had the opportunity to interview one of the band’s two lead singers, Andrea Ferro, while he was on on a lunch break in Waterloo, Iowa.

Ferro writes and sings all the Lacuna Coil (which means “empty spiral”) songs in collaboration with his female counterpart, Cristina Scabbia. The two began working together in the mid nineties when Scabbia was asked to sing back up vocals for the band. Impressed with her broad vocal range, she was asked to officially join. Scabbia has a contralto singing voice, which is a term used for the deepest female singing voice. Her range can go between a tenor and a mezzo-soprano.

The group has released five studio albums, including their U.S. breakthrough, 2002’s Comalies, which featured the “Swamped,” which was on the soundtrack for “Resident Evil: Apocalypse.” Their 2006 release, Karmacode, debuted at number 28 on the Billboard charts. The first song, “Our Truth” was on the soundtrack for “Underworld: Evolution.” The album also featured a cover of Depeche Mode’s “Enjoy the Silence.”

So far, Shallow Life has reached number 16 on the Billboard Top 200 album chart. Ferro said that the group stayed very open minded during the creation of the album. “Basically, even before we start the song writing we were considering which way we could make our music still interesting for our fans and for ourselves as a band and which way was the right way to go,” Ferro said in a phone interview, “We thought that the only honest way to go was to go whatever way we wanted to go and try different things, different types of things, different influences and just go with it and see where the music was gonna take us as a band.”

Ferro and Scabbia are the most recognizable members of Lacuna Coil, doing the majority of the writing for the band as well as singing, but Ferro says each member contributes equally and the income is thus split equally as well. “As long as everybody works it’s fine for us. We don’t want people to write music just because they have to have their share of the money. We want to have the best people to write the best music. As long as everybody’s working hard with the same goal it’s perfect for us,” Ferro said.

Scabbia also writes an advice column for “Revolver” magazine. Although the group is from Italy, most of their songs are performed in English. “We grew up listening to American rock songs, and for rock music english is much better,” Ferro said.