In an interview on the radio program The Rock Hard Radio Show With Kim Rennie , Tobias Forge revealed that "Mary on a Cross," a single from Ghost , wasn't very warmly received by some people at his record label.
The song, which makes up the B-side of the EP Seven Inches of Satanic Panic (2019), went viral on the social network TikTok in 2022 and became Ghost on Spotify, with over 740,000,000 plays.
The vocalist recounts that, when he showed the composition to his record label and asked for opinions, he received comments like “What? It’s good. My son likes it.” and “Okay, it’s a good song, but it sounds like a B-side. It wasn’t made for…”. “It was like a question mark,” Tobias adds.
“So I said, ‘It doesn’t matter, it’s a good song. I’m going to play it live.’ We started playing it immediately, as soon as it was released. Then I thought, ‘Wow, this is amazing. One of the best songs I’ve ever written is just a B-side. That’s okay.’ A few years later, it would become the biggest song of my career. That got a lot of attention within the record label world, who reacted like, ‘Oh, we didn’t know that,’” Forge details.
“What this told me was that we don’t have a plan – I don’t have a plan – so I’m not going to chase after it. I’m going to write songs – the best I’ve ever written – and we’ll see what happens, because there’s no clear way to predict exactly how this will materialize into a song that’s worth anything from a success standpoint.”
“And I felt that this isn’t even a bad thing, because I’m in a great position anyway. I can make an album full of songs that might be very difficult, or maybe too much of this or too little of that, or that just fit thematically. If it’s a success, it will show itself, it will materialize. If it’s not, no problem. We can play the other hits too. We are blessed, for lack of a better and more appropriate word, to be able to go on tour. We have many fans and a lot of support, anyway, and that, for me, really relieved some of the stress, because I was thinking: ‘I’m not going to chase another big hit,’” he concludes.
Ghost's new album, Skeletá , will be released on April 25th by Loma Vista Recordings . "Lachryma," the album's second single, was released today, April 11th.
