FLOWER KINGS BACK BY ROYAL DECREE
Their new, 15th album opens a year that will include live shows and a reissue campaign.
Roine Stolt’s enduring prog band The Flower Kings return with a new album, shows and a host of reissues planned for 2022. The band’s 15th studio album, By Royal Decree, comes out on March 4 on InsideOut, and follows their 2020 title, Islands.
“I pretty much let this album be what it wanted to be,” Stolt tells Prog. “Writing for Kaipa, then Flower Kings, then Transatlantic, I’ve written a lot of music over the years.
I had so many [computer] folders with song ideas – some were finished, some had vocals and some didn’t, some had just a few finished lyrics. I even found ideas burned onto CD from about 20 years ago.
“I wrote a little differently back then, so my basic idea was to take these ideas and develop them now, in the way that I write today. I sent the demos to the guys thinking, ‘Okay, if they like it they like it, but if they think the ideas sound old and uninteresting well, so be it. It’s not like I put in days and days of writing.’ But they liked them.”
By Royal Decree was recorded in summer 2021, with the band convening, in the flesh, at Fenix Studio in Sweden. Returning for the album with Stolt were his co-singer and guitarist Hasse Fröberg and recent young recruits Zach Kamins (keyboards) and Mirko DeMaio (drums). There are three bassists on the record – Flower Kings regular Jonas Reingold, rising player and fellow InsideOut signing Jonas Lindberg, and Stolt’s younger brother, Michael.
“Jonas [Reingold] can’t be in the live band anymore,” Roine explains, “because he’s the bass player for Steve Hackett nowadays. We couldn’t wait or adjust Flower Kings live activities for him, but he plays a couple of songs on the record, and so does Jonas [Lindberg]. I played guitar on a track on his new album and in return he played bass on one for us. Michael was on the first four Flower Kings albums.”
After leaving the band in 1999 Michael went on to play bass for some major Swedish pop artists. He’ll join The Flower Kings on their upcoming shows, with three dates in Sweden planned in March/April, Cruise To The Edge in
May and more shows to be announced.
Stolt is also currently remastering those first four albums – Back In The World Of Adventures (1995), Retropolis (1996), Stardust We Are (1997) and
Flower Power (1999) – for CD and vinyl reissue later this year.
“My idea was to take old ideas and develop them in the way I write today.”