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Trivia / Sabaton

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  • Approval of God:
  • Colbert Bump: A really weird case of this. On their album Heroes, one of the songs was about Air Marshal Karel Janoušek. He was given an English Wikipedia page around the same time the song about him, Far From the Fame was added to the album's list on Wikipedia. "The Attack of the Dead Men" had a similar result: there was already an article for the Osowiec Fortress campaign, but the gas attack got its own article about two weeks after the album came out.
  • Creator Backlash:
    • The band stopped playing "The Final Solution" for several years at concerts because they got a little freaked out by their fans singing along to and applauding a song about The Holocaust. They changed their minds in time for the Heroes tour, though it's still not often in setlists.
    • Played for Laughs with "Swedish Pagans". Jocke's on-stage reluctance to play it is mostly a Running Gag: he doesn't hate the song, although it isn't his favorite. The band stopped also playing "Panzer Battalion" because he got tired of it.
    • Joakim and Pär have said in interviews that they probably wouldn't have written "Panzer Battalion" nowadays because, since then, they've decided not to try to write songs about present or recent conflicts in order to allow for passions to cool and professional historians to study the events ("Panzer Battalion" was on Primo Victoria, which came out only two years after its subject, the 2003 US invasion of Iraq). Since Primo Victoria, the most recently-set song they've published is "Hill 3234", about a 1988 battle from the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan.
  • Dawson Casting: Indy Neidell was 52 when playing T. E. Lawrence in the music video for "Seven Pillars of Wisdom" (Lawrence was in his late twenties to early thirties during World War One) and 55 when playing Adrian Carton de Wiart in the music video for "The Unkillable Soldier" (Carton de Wiart was in his mid to late thirties during World War One).
  • Fan Community Nickname: The Panzer Battalion. Named after their song of the same name. Sometimes separated by country with "[nationality] Panzer Battalion" ex: American Panzer Battalion, Swedish Panzer Battalion, Polish Panzer Battalion, etc.
  • He Also Did:
    • Hannes and Chris did the cover art for Northward, Floor Jansen's Hard Rock side project with Jørn Viggo Lofstad of Pagan's Mind.
    • Tommy did an impressive Marco Hietala impression on Minniva's cover of Nightwish's "Bye Bye Beautiful". Tommy is also the rhythm guitarist and lead vocalist for the band Majestica.
  • Milestone Celebration:
    • After Carolus Rex was certified quadruple platinum in 2018 for staying on the Swedish charts for 326 weeks, the band announced a series of Platinum Edition reissues and merch, to come out 30 November 2018, the 300th anniversary of Carolus Rex's death at the Battle of Fredriksten.
    • The band celebrated their 20th anniversary with a two-hour headlining gig at Wacken 2019, with former members Daniel Mÿhr, Daniel Mullback, Rikard Sundén, and Thobbe Englund joining the current band on a second stage a third of the way into the concert.
  • Promoted Fanboy:
    • Tommy Johansson was a longtime fan of the band before he became their guitarist in 2017 (replacing Thobbe Englund).
    • Sabaton's members are big World of Tanks fans and started a cross-promotion deal with studio Wargaming in 2017: the band has promotional tanks in WoT, and the studio has done CGI for some of the band's music videos (to date, "Primo Victoria", "Bismarck" for World of Warships, and "Steel Commanders").
    • Most of Sabaton's members are longtime Judas Priest fans. They've gotten to open for them on tours in Europe and on the 50 Heavy Metal Years Tour in the United States (pushed back a year due to the COVID-19 Pandemic and then cut short by JP guitarist Richie Faulkner having an aortic aneurysm onstage in Kentucky).
  • Real-Life Relative:
    • Polish filmmaker Jacek Raginis, who directed the music videos for "40:1" and "Uprising", is a descendant of Captain Władysław Raginis, the actual Polish commander at the Battle of Wizna upon which "40:1" is based. He got in touch with the band after a fan-made music video for the song went viral in Poland.
    • Any time Sabaton and Nightwish appear together: Sabaton drummer Hannes Van Dahl is married to Nightwish vocalist Floor Jansen. Floor also did some of the choir recording on The Last Stand and provided vocals on the Soundtrack Edition of The Great War.
  • Recursive Adaptation: "Defence of Moscow" is a Cover Version of an original track by cover artist Radio Tapok, who made his name covering Western metal songs in Russian and wrote the song in homage to Sabaton's music.
  • Recycled Script:
    • "Purple Heart" on Primo Victoria reuses the music from the band's early Heavy Mithril song "Nightchild", which is a bonus track on the reissue of Attero Dominatus. The liner notes say the band prefers "Nightchild".
    • "Saboteurs" on Coat of Arms reuses the melody from an unproduced song from their Heavy Mithril period (you can hear a very low-quality snippet of the original demo on the Sabaton History video for the song).
  • Referenced by...: A story set in The Four Horsemen Universe is based on "The Last Stand" and features lyrics from the chorus used as a Trust Password.
  • Romance on the Set: Sabaton did a co-headlining tour with labelmate Re Vamp in 2014, and drummer Hannes Van Dahl fell in love with vocalist Floor Jansen (also frontwoman of Nightwish). They're now married with two children. According to him, it was quite a Meet Cute:
    Hannes: Here is this opera singer who likes Pantera, smokes cigars and likes whiskey ... I must marry this woman.
  • Saved from Development Hell: "Bismarck". The story of the WWII German battleship Bismarck is the most-requested topic for a Sabaton song in the history of the band, but they couldn't figure out which album to include it with: they first got the idea after Coat of Arms but it obviously didn't fit Carolus Rex, didn't really fit Heroes, and they could have fit it into The Last Stand but decided not to. They finally released it as a standalone single in April 2019, ahead of The Great War.
  • Screwed by the Lawyers:
  • Similarly Named Works: "Hearts of Iron" from Heroes shares its name with the Hearts of Iron 4X game series by Paradox Interactive. The song was actually written as part of a promotion deal: some Sabaton fans in PDX approached them after a concert in Stockholm about doing a tie-in for HoI IV, then in development. Sabaton ultimately licensed several songs as soundtrack DLC for both HoI IV and Europa Universalis IV.
  • Sleeper Hit: Several songs on The Art of War proved unexpectedly popular.
  • Throw It In!:
    • Joakim completely forgot to write the lyrics for one of the songs on Primo Victoria before they went to record the album, and improvised "Metal Machine" from a stack of rock magazines in the recording studio's bathroom in about thirty minutes.
    • According to a YouTube community post by the band, when shooting their first music video for "Attero Dominatus", the director told the band members to "dress cooler" for the video. So Joakim decided to wear a very distinctive armor-plate vest, while everyone else wore camouflage pants. The band liked the look, and it became the Sabaton "uniform" for all of their videos and on-stage performances afterwards.
  • Trolling Creator:
    • Their song "A Secret" from The Art Of War begins with another excerpt from The Art of War, but a short time later plays a computerized voice speaking in English that an illegal download has been detected and that spyware is to be activated. This happens on all versions of the album, which makes it particularly funny when it happens on a CD or vinyl.
      "Hostile armies may face each other for years, striving to the victory which is decided in a single day." Several silent seconds later: "Illegal download detected, executing spyware protocol 666" (pronounced as "six hundred Sixty-Six")
    • Joakim said on Sabaton History that the line "Jenny at the gates" in "The Last Battle" is a way of messing with the audience: "Who's this 'Jenny'", etc.
      Indy Neidell: Who is Jenny and what does she mean to you, Joakim?note 
    • This is also at least part of the reason why their 2017 tour is named The Last Tour (though mostly it's a joke on the name of the Last Stand album).
  • What Could Have Been:
    • When they started out as a garage band, they called themselves Aeon. They changed their name later because they found out it was already taken.
    • Joakim started out playing keyboards and a Hammond B3 organ for the band and was originally asked to just be a stand-in singer until they could find a permanent vocalist. He picked up keyboards again after Daniel Myhr left (though he pre-records it for live shows for obvious reasons).
    • Joakim's first draft of the lyrics for "Wolfpack" was a song about how humans are the ultimate predator, but he started over from scratch when they decided to make a Concept Album about World War II instead.
    • Tommy Johansson was originally offered one of the musician spots in the band during the 2012 lineup change, but turned them down because his own band ReinXeed seemed to be taking off; Thobbe Englund accepted the job instead. Tommy ended up replacing Thobbe in 2017.
    • The song "Smoking Snakes" was originally going to be called "Heroes" (which is the name of the album) and be more about general heroism, before Joakim tweaked things and added the subject of the Brazilian Expeditionary Force to it. Traces of this can be seen in how the chorus talks about heroism more openly than in the other songs.
    • Before the band settled on famous last stands being the Central Theme of the album following Heroes, they had several ideas floating around for a Heroes Part II album. The three main ideas were an album about more heroic individuals (Joakim says they tried, but couldn't replicate the feel of the first Heroes album, so it was dropped), one about Villains across history (Nuclear Blast vetoed this to avoid controversy), and one named "Commanders" about WWII leaders like Roosevelt, Churchill, Hitler and Stalin (once again, vetoed by the label for its controversial themes). Eventually they just settled on "last stands" and that gave them a heading.
    • The band has said they've tried to write a song about Pearl Harbor many times but can't manage to put together one that sounds right. Similarly, some topics such as the Harlem Hellfighters ended up being dropped from The Great War due to songwriting difficulties; they ended up getting their song "Hellfighters" on The War to End All Wars instead.
  • Writing by the Seat of Your Pants:
    • Joakim says that he sometimes comes up with a melody but doesn't have any idea what to use for lyrics until inspiration strikes way later. This was the case with "Primo Victoria" (he was inspired to make the lyrics about D-Day after seeing Saving Private Ryan) and "To Hell and Back" (he had an idea for a Western soundtrack-inspired tune—which everybody else in the band thought was nuts—but didn't know what to use it for until he discovered Audie Murphy's poetry). "The Red Baron" is in the same category: Jocke played a snippet of Bach on his Hammond B3 and used it as the lead-in to a song with a shuffle beat, which only became about von Richthofen later.
    • Joakim said in the Sabaton History episode for "Metal Machine" that he realized when they were setting up to record Primo Victoria that he'd completely forgotten to write lyrics for one of the songs, and ended up locking himself in the studio bathroom for half an hour while he frantically composed a Song of Song Titles from a heavy metal music magazine that had been left there, on a roll of toilet paper no less.

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