TOBIAS FORGE (OF GHOST)

PAST WINS best metal performance (“Cirice,” 2016)

NOMINATED THIS YEAR best metal performance (“Phantom of the Opera”)

When you’re working with art, you normally do not have a whole lot of the sort of moments that you have within sports. In sports, the win is very momentary: Either you win or you lose. Whereas an artistic career is usually over the course of time. Even if you’re somewhat successful as an artist, it’s very, very rarely happening overnight. When you’re nominated for awards, that’s the closest you can get [as an artist] to that “One second ago, I didn’t have it, and now I have it.” [Winning a Grammy] is one of the few moments I’ve had throughout my professional career where I really felt [how things] could have felt very different had I not achieved what happened 10 seconds ago. The rings on the water meant a lot of things professionally in terms of quote-unquote “being taken seriously.”

Radio, promoters — if you for some reason might be looking for a new label — all of a sudden, when you’re nominated, it’s a stamp of approval that will automatically make potential collaborators, partners, what have you, give you more chances. That is not to say that you can come in and be a dick. You just automatically get a bit more of a gravitas in maneuvering within the different aspects of your career in a way that you might not have, had you not had the stamp of approval of getting a Grammy nomination — or, even better, winning it. But as with most things, what you’re getting is a bag of tools. And you can choose not to use them. Over the course of many, many decades of artists getting awards, there are many that have gotten an accolade and then just faded into nothingness. Because it’s all about momentum. You should see it as a steppingstone. It’s part of your journey, not the end of it.