SABATON are three days into a North American headline tour and Joakim Brodén is being asked, once again, why it all took so long. Speaking to Cassius Morris, the vocalist made the case that the slowness was the whole point.
"I'm very happy, and I feel fortunate about it because we've never had a huge dip or a huge rise," Brodén said, as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET. "I mean, yeah, maybe something happened and we got a bit of a hype in Poland when we did '40:1', and there was a rise there, but it was never global. So, we never went from 100 people per show to 4,000 people per show. We always had this gradual rise — in general. Might be a slight dip, but then coming back up."
"40:1" is the outlier he keeps having to account for. The song turned the Battle of Wizna — a lesser-known Polish stand in the opening days of the Second World War — into a genuine cultural phenomenon in Poland, and nothing else in the catalogue has replicated it anywhere else.
What grew instead, Brodén argued, was the apparatus around the band. "We've been able to grow organically, as an organization with the people around us. It's not only us — it's actually more people who are not in the band on tour than in the band. So you need a production manager, sound designers, all of this, that we have with us. So that has grown organically as well as us as persons. Nobody got taken as a 17-year-old and put in front of 10,000 people and, like, 'Oh, shit.'"
He is not entirely sentimental about it. "Sometimes, back in the day especially, we wished it would've been a bit faster, because it was a long and hard journey the first 10 years. However … I don't think I would change very much, actually. Also I know a lot of things now that I didn't know back then. I mean, we didn't have a management. We were doing things our own way, for good and bad. It's brought us a lot of advantages and a lot of disadvantages, 'cause we never did it the regular business way. We did it our way. Sometimes that was the best way. Sometimes that was actually the worst way of doing it."
Then the punchline, delivered flat: "And, yeah, these days I know maybe why it didn't go faster when we tried that and that 10 years ago — because it was fucking bad management."
The "Legends On Tour" North American run opened on September 23 in Halifax, Nova Scotia, with POP EVIL and WINGS OF STEEL supporting, and wraps December 12 in Fort Lauderdale. "The Legendary Tour Part 2" brings SABATON back to Europe in April 2027, following a first leg that sold out London's O2 Arena and Manchester's Co-op Live. The band's most recent album, "Legends", arrived at the end of 2025.