Ted Lundström has described the thirty five years of Amon Amarth as a sequence of small decisions rather than a plan. Asked by KillerTube what the band does now that would have been impossible at the start, in an interview transcribed by Blabbermouth, the bassist said the honest answer was all of it.
"Thirty years ago, I was a teenager and everything was new and crazy and we just did everything just day by day," he said. "We had no really kind of visions more than just the next step, what do you wanna do with the band. So, what we're doing now was hardly even a dream back then because it's so crazy, our trip. Even though it's been slow but steady, just growing bigger, and for each step we reached, we just set new goals."
The decision he singles out came in the middle of that. "Somewhere in the middle where we kind of realized this is something that's for real, we quit our daytime jobs to focus 100% on the music." There was no money in it yet. "We didn't really make any money or anything, but we said, 'We have to give it a try at least.' We felt there was potential here, so we said, like, 'Let's give it a shot because we're gonna live until we're old.'"
He used Upphaf, the acoustic piece on The Allfather Awakens, as the measure of how far the scene has moved. "That was something that would be completely a no-go back when we started, when you were young and metal was very true and the black metal scene was going on, and you had to be very heavy, very cool and very specific about this genre." The album was written on the road.