I didn’t think too hard about dedicating the second-ever edition of this column to Ragne Wahlquist. The late Heavy Load frontman left an indelible mark on heavy metal, in his native Sweden and beyond, so writing about him after learning he’d died unexpectedly at the age of 69 just made sense. I stand behind that column. It contains the only major interview that Ragne’s brother and bandmate, Styrbjörn Wahlquist, has done since Ragne’s death. I got a few luminaries of today’s Swedish metal underground to talk about what Heavy Load meant to them. A few readers even told me that my column had convinced them to check out Death And Glory and Stronger Than Evil, which was all I could have asked for. By late summer, when I had weighed and decided against a half-dozen other memorial columns, it became clear that the Ragne Wahlquist tribute would be a one-off. Metal legends were dying with such frequency that, if anything, Breaking The Oath needed an obituaries desk.
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