Tokio Hotel’s Bill And Tom Kaulitz Talk New Album ‘Kings of Suburbia,’
And The Sexy Music Video ‘Love Who Loves You Back’ EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW

Tokio Hotel is back!

Founded in 2001, the German pop rock band became huge in the 2000s, selling over 7 million albums worldwide. Though they were biggest in Europe and South America, they also made their mark in the US, becoming the first German band to win a VMA (for Best New Artist). In 2011, the band took a much-needed break and founding members Bill and Tom Kaulitz moved to Los Angeles to enjoy a little anonymity. The result – their first album in five years, “Kings of Suburbia.”

We called up Bill and Tom to talk about Tokio Hotel’s new album, the super sexy music video for their lead single “Love Who Loves You Back” and their “Mariah Carey tour rider.”

Moving from Germany to Los Angeles was a huge change for you. What was that experience like?

Bill: It was a massive change. You can’t even compare how we were living then and how we’re living now. We were on the road for such a long time. We’ve been performing since we were 15, we were been putting out one album after another and traveling all the time. So we never really had a private life aside from the career. It was just a lot of work and traveling all the time. We got burned out. We needed a change. We didn’t want to make another album that just sounded like the one before it. So we really needed that change, and Tom and I were finally able to go outside without any security, without having people in front of your house, and just be like normal people.

Do you think you’ll ever move back to Germany?

Tom: I don’t know, I don’t think so.
Bill: We go back for Christmas and for vacation. We like Europe! I think if we could live there, then we probably would have never moved away. But it’s just impossible for us to have privacy and the balance with a career. LA is way more comfortable for us. But then we want to live everywhere. I want to live in New York for a while because I love the city so much. So you never know if we’ll stay in LA. But it’s certainly been a good city.

What were some of your influences for “Kings of Convenience”?

Bill: The biggest influence and the biggest inspiration for the album was the new freedom Tom and me found living in Los Angeles. We moved from Germany to LA before we started recording the album, just to find some privacy and live life. It worked great for us. I think the biggest inspiration was life in general, to do normal things, to be with people and be out. We’ve been out a lot, so I feel like the nightlife was a big inspiration. That might be why the album is so electronic, it’s inspired by the club scene and the electronic scene. In the studio, we started to step out of our comfort zone and try different things and different sounds. That’s why this album sounds different from what we’ve done before.

I wanted to ask about the music video for “Love Who Loves You Back.” It’s very provocative! Did you come up with the idea for the video?

Bill: Yeah, it was. We are super hands on, creative-wise, and I love to come up with all the videos and photoshoots and album art and everything. I always wanted to make a video like that. I’ve always had this idea inspired by the movie “Perfume.” I was always inspired by that because it’s one of my favorite movies. The guy keeps creating the perfume and at the end he pulls it out and everyone starts to make out and it turns into this huge orgy. I always thought that we could do that with our song and our music instead of perfume. I wanted to do it with the last album but we never had the right song or the right director. It was just the perfect song and the perfect time to do it. We came up with the concept and talked about it with the director and he was loving it, he said, “Yeah, let’s do it.” And everything came together. It was definitely an interesting shoot, it was a lot of fun.

What was the filming process like?

Bill: We shot in a super old hotel in downtown Los Angeles. We shot in the basement. It was all grimy and old and it was very cool. We had so many people there. We kind of free-styled the whole thing. We had a rough idea of what we wanted and then we just saw, with all the people, where everything goes. If people were comfortable, we would take it further and further. We started very slow but went further. Then we saw tongue!

I wanted to ask about your fanbase. Even though it’s been five years since you released new music, your fanbase seems to be as strong as ever. Were you surprised?

Tom: We were definitely surprised. The label and everyone who knows things told us that it would be career suicide to stop putting out music, that the industry changes so much and people are always putting out new music. They said, “You guys are insane, you’re going to kill your career.” And we said, “If that’s the case, then that’s the case, but we don’t want to put out a shitty record and this is what we need.” So we kind of just did it even though everyone told us it was not a good idea. We never expected that the fans would wait for the music to come out, so we were definitely surprised by how they reacted and how many people waited all these years for us. Even during the hiatus we were still winning awards so our fans are so incredible. They’re so amazing and so supportive and we’re really lucky to have them, these days it’s hard to have fans who are so supportive.

When I googled “Tokio Hotel,” “fanfiction” was an autocomplete and I also found a lot of trivia quizzes and fan art.

Tom: They are creative. We get a lot of presents, a lot of creative stuff that the fans are doing. It’s insane, some of them spend so much time on things. Last week, we were in Mexico and it was crazy how many people showed up, and how long they waited to give us something. Some of them would give us their personal Bibles or a personal piece of jewelry from their family, it was so much personal stuff. It’s amazing how much love they have.

– original article