Live music and touring have been on lockdown and fans as well as artists are going through withdrawals. We wanted to come up with something fun to help bridge that distance between fans and artists right now. What we came up with is something called The Lockdown Lowdown and it’s a Q&A session with fun questions for artists to answer. They’re not your typical interview questions, so it gives you a peek inside of the artists themselves. We’re big music nerds here at I’m Music Magazine and we love learning things like this about the artists that we love. We’re pretty sure that you’ll get a kick out of these, so we hope you’ll take the time to read them. In this installment, we sat down for a super fun “Top Five” session with Jerri Lassinniemi, drummer for Swedish alternative band Past Five.
Hi! I’m Jerri Lassinniemi from Past Five and these are my top 5 artists that has influenced me as a musician.
5. Dan Whitesides (drummer, The Used)
This dude has such an amazing way of writing his drumbeats. The way he plays is actually pretty simple, yet totally unpredictable and smart with short tasty fills. He also hits hard as shit which shows his passion for the drums and the music.
4. Phil Rudd (drummer, AC/DC)
Phil (together with Malcolm Young) is one of the main reasons to why I got into rock music. He doesn’t really do anything technically difficult but he manages to nail the groove to 1000% with his incredibly tight hi-hat/snare game.
3. JP “Rook” Cappelletty (drummer, Machine Gun Kelly)
I don’t really need to say much about Rook. I have never seen a more energetic drummer. He’s the drummer for a hiphop-artist and plays like he’s headlining Wacken Open Air. Rook (and Machine Gun Kelly) is probably one of my biggest inspirations for live shows.
2. Rick Allen (drummer, Def Leppard)
The man plays with only one arm, how can you not be inspired by that? One of the reasons why I wanted to learn to play the drums.
1. Jimmy “The Rev” Sullivan (drummer, Avenged Sevenfold)
Besides Rick Allen, The Rev is the biggest reason I wanted to start playing drums. I remember hearing the album “Sounding the Seventh Trumpet” for the first time when I was like 6-7 years old and the screams kind of scared me. However, I could not stop listening to it since the drums were totally crazy. The fact that he recorded the album without a click-track and got it all on the first try is even more amazing. Apart from being an insane drummer he was also a musical genius. He could play almost every instrument (he also had the most unique singing voice I’ve ever heard) and wrote many of the band’s best songs. “A Little Piece of Heaven” is an 8 minute long masterpiece.
Past Five during Covid-times
Even though the world is in a crazy phase right now, 2020 has been one of the most successful years for Past Five so far. We signed with Eclipse Records and released our EP Detox. which contains material that we all are super proud of. We worked hard in 2019 to make this happen and now we’re in it. I do however brutally miss playing live as well as going to gigs. This was the year we wanted to tour and promote the EP, but shit happens. This has instead given us all the time in the world to write and record new material. We are really excited to keep working with Eclipse and we can’t wait for the world to hear our new extremely dope material.
Buy/Stream “Detox” EP: https://ffm.to/past5
