Dommin Lied: Love Is Not Gone

Is Dommin frontman and namesake Kristofer Dommin really as pessimistic about love as it seems? The title of the band's new album is 'Love Is Gone,' for crying out loud. Still Dommin says, "Absolutely not. I'm very hopeful.

"I get that question a lot because of the title, but what I always tell people is that each of these songs are as if someone took a picture of a moment in my life. 'Love Is Gone' as an album title is not an ongoing statement of my belief system. It's merely how I felt at this point, under this circumstance, and that will always be true of that moment in time."

But they are belaboring the sentiment. In the band bio from Roadrunner Records, it begins with a quote from the singer: "Dommin is the sound of the broken hearted." Sigh.

"Maybe on the surface it seems like it, but if someone would actually read the lyrics or listen to the song more than once, they would find that it's not music that makes you depressed. It's not music that plays the victim," Dommin assures. "It's more, 'This is what I went through; this is what I was feeling at the time and I'm a bigger and better and more empowered person because of it.' The music comes across in way that it speaks for people, and it talks about experiences that we all go through, in a way that may be a little bit different than what people are used to hearing."

Dommin, an articulate speaker with a perspective on why and how he writes songs, says he tries not to over-think the process, even though he is writing about the age-old subject of love and has to be careful about clichés and the cheese factor.

"Sometimes I'll put songs away for years because of stuff like that," he says. "Rather than force myself to come up with something, I'll just put it aside. But in some ways I don't even think about it, because I think [songwriting] should be a very natural expression of a person, who they are and where it comes from."

Dommin, who formed the band in 2000 and solidified the lineup in 2007, has other topics to explore that have nothing to do with love and has tons more songs in the can than the ones on 'Love Is Gone.'

"I feel a lot more like a person writing a book figuring out what chapters to put up than someone who is putting out albums in real time," he says. "I'm ready to do album two, three or four already. But I realize I have to pace myself and really take a storyteller's approach and be like, 'This is where it all begins.'"