It sounds like a metal version of Yes mixed with Heart and Fleetwood Mac. “I’ll take that as a compliment,” says Tuomas Holopainen, composer/keyboardist for the Finnish orchestral metal band Nightwish.
Some have called the group’s lush sound operatic, but Holopainen says he never could stand the stuff. “I fiddle with opera, but I don’t really get the music,” he says by phone from Cleveland. The operatic tag was dropped on the band because of former lead singer Tarja Turunen, classically trained in opera.
Even though Turunen belts it out like the fat ladies in the horned helmets, the headbanging backdrop makes sure you don’t mistake it for the screechy high-brow stuff. It’s an odd combination that quickly grows on you. Part of you wants to headbang, and part wants to keep still and listen, making sure those celestial sounds you hear aren’t due to loosened brain juice in your skull.
After nearly a decade of converting metal heads around the world to its sound, the band abruptly fired Turunen in ’05, calling her a “money–oriented diva” who shunned rehearsals. “I don’t want to go into it, but it was just something that had to be done,” Holopainen says. “It was a matter of do or die, and happily for us it was the first one.”
The band searched for a replacement for two years, finally hiring Anette Olzon, who had previously fronted the Swedish rock band Alyson Avenue. Olzon, a sweet-voiced rocker with a pop edge, is credited with turning the band’s sound around. While Holopainen and his bandmates are pleased with the new sound, he wants to lay down one important ground rule for would-be labelers. “If you want to call it pop, I’m totally with that,” he says. “There’s a lot of pop involved in the vocal style, but that doesn’t make us a pop band.”
Nobody who’s listened to its latest, Dark Passion Play, would argue. Olzon emotes like Heart’s Nancy Wilson, but the band bangs the big metal bin behind her as hard as ever.
Her voice may be in front, but the keyboardist is the one who supplies the juice to power this outfit, writing all lyrics and 95 percent of the music. On the record, he has a little help, enlisting the aid of a 52-piece orchestra, a 44-member vocal ensemble and a 12-piece gospel choir. That’s part of the reason the new record cost $800,000 to record. Holopainen says that’s mostly because of the rates at Abbey Road studio where Dark Passion Play was recorded.
Wrangling the orchestra and choirs was quick and easy. “The first time they ever heard the songs was when they put their earphones on and started playing and usually it never took more than three takes per song to nail it,” the keyboardist says. “It was incredible musicianship. I’ve never seen anything like that in my life.”
He recreates that sound on stage with a bevy of synths, utilizing a lot of backing tracks, but says one day he wants to tour with the whole extended family.
The band has come a long way from the original vision Holopainen had in 1996. “What I wanted to do with Nightwish originally was acoustic campfire music where there would only be acoustic instruments like piano and guitar and the female voice,” he says. “But after the first demo, I realized it was kind of boring in the long run just using these kind of instruments, so I started developing something else.”
That’s morphed into the orchestral metal/pop fusion that’s currently taking them on a two year tour around the world.
But fans will have to make do with the band’s back catalogue for awhile. Although the band’s chief composer says songwriting is “a way of life for me: I do songs all the time in my head,” he also acknowledges that he’s a bit distracted right now. “When you’re on tour, you can’t do anything concrete, it’s more like gathering up ideas.”
After the tour ends next September, he’ll take a respite from the headbanging to gather up his ideas and make complete songs out of them. “I need my peace and quiet,” he says.
Nightwish plays at Tremont Music Hall on Sept. 24 at 8 p.m. Tickets are $25 in advance, $30 at the door.
This article appears in Sep 23-30, 2008.
