Interview with Tuomas Holopainen from Nightwish

RV: So how’s it goin?

TH: It’s going really well – I think this leg of the tour is the most relaxed one so far. Everything is going so smoothly, nobody’s ill…. Well not seriously ill… and everyone’s having a good time.

RV: You have three videos to accompany the singles you’ve put out – has the band done videos in the past?

TH: Yah, we have done, but I think this is the first time we’ve come up with 3 videos on the same album. I think we did two from the previous album, “Once,” for Nemo
and Wish I Had An Angel and we also have done Over the Hills and Far Away, Sacrament of Wilderness, Sleeping Sun, two times, so there’s quite a few.

RV: So the videos from this album they were shot in Los Angeles?

TH: Two of them were, but the third one, “The Islander” was shot in Finland.

RV: So when you were in LA, how did the shooting go?

TH: Actually, we filmed both of the videos in the same day, so it was a long, strenuous day. Then we did all of the acting parts the next day – so it was really two long days. We wanted to use this guy Anthony Okean who already did the Nemo video and he was here in LA so we had to come here.

RV: Was shooting in LA different from shooting in Finland atmosphere wise?

TH: It was much more hot!! But I didn’t see any real difference. It feels sort of cool to come to LA to shoot a video, so far from home, but there’s no real difference.

RV: So the new album, Dark Passion Play, you have a disk that accompanies it with all orchestral versions of the song. How did that come about?

TH: Well, two reasons. For one thing, these days, The Record Labels always demand something extra, bonus tracks or whatever, and this is something that I don’t think any band has done before – releasing an instrumental or all orchestral version of the album – we just thought to give it a shot. It’s a good thing for home karaoke if you just want to listen to the instrumental version. The other reason is we did a short print of the previous album as all-instrumental as well and we had a really good response
and people were asking where they could find it. There were only 500 copies of that printed, ever, so when it came time to make this record we decided to offer the instrumental version.

RV: When you decided to do this, did you have a particular orchestra in mind? How did you choose them?

TH: The Orchestra was already there to record the whole album – for this one we just took off the vocals.

RV: Do you play classical music at all? Does that play into the music?

TH: I used to play the classical piano and clarinet when I was a kid. Actually I played for 12 years, so I have a little bit of a classical background, but we don’t have any like, high-level classical education and we don’t do it seriously. The most of our influence comes from film music and soundtracks which I consider Contemporary Classical music.

RV: So do you have any favorite composers?

TH: Not from Classical music, I think I got an overdose of that as a kid. Only from film music – Hans Zimmer is that for me.

RV: So give me a couple of favorite film soundtracks that have influenced you and your music?

TH: Gladiator, Crimson Tide, The Rock, anything Danny Elfman did for Tim Burton like Edward Scissor Hands and Sleepy Hollow. James Horner and Titanic is fantastic. I could go on and on….

RV: So influences growing up, what influenced you to do this?

TH: This is not a dream come true in anyway… I always wanted to be a mad scientist. I wanted to be this academic freak, a biologist or whatever, a scientist. Music was just a hobby for me. But then when I joined my first band at the age of 16 I found this world really interesting. As soon as I started to do songs of my own, then we got a record deal, suddenly things got out of hand. Then I dropped out of my studies in University and I’ve been on that road ever since.

RV: So tell me about how your style of music, between your home over in Finland and here with more Epic metal. Is there a cultural difference that you find?

TH: I wish I knew! The way I see it – we come from Scandinavia – the way people are there, people aren’t as social as here in the US. In a way this kind of music is in our veins, it’s in our blood. Just like Americans do the best hip-hop and Jamaicans do the best Reggae – it’s in their blood. Scandinavian people, doing this melancholic, dark music, it’s in our blood it’s a natural thing.

RV: Now I read that you’re the main songwriter – do most of the songs sound on the piano? What’s the process?

TH: I always need to have the idea for the story for the song before I even write the first note. I need to know: I want to do a song about native American Indians, I want to do a song about Tarja’s departure from the band, I want to make a song about this feeling of being in love, after that I always paint the story in music and usually it starts with keyboards or piano. Sometimes I use the guitar but usually it’s keyboards. I never-ever understood how some artists just jam, do riffs and then afterwards just say “OK what should this be about”


RV: On the Myspace page, you can read about some of what the album means and it says that it “touches on darker things but still reminds us of hope.” Can you expand on that statement?

TH: I consider myself as being quite a melancholic human being, but I also love life and I think that this world is a beautiful place, but I also think this world sucks… big-time. There’s like angels and demons fighting inside of me all the time. I haven’t found that balance in life yet. I think that’s why the music I do sounds like it does. It comes from a dark place, but there’s always the light at the end of the tunnel. I just hope that light doesn’t come from a train.

RV: You’ve been quoted on saying “Dark Passion Play is the album that saved your life” can you elaborate on that?

TH: That’s a little bit of an exaggeration but not much, because what happened in 2005 with the previous singer was comparable to the ugliest divorce imaginable. What followed after with the media, hassle and guilt, the bitter-sweetness and everything, it was a living hell. That’s no exaggeration; it was a living hell for a year. The only way I could escape those feelings and that place in my life was through songs. And those songs can be heard on Dark Passion Play. So, diving into that world of music on Dark Passion Play really saved me from going mentally insane.

RV: So what did happen to Tarja? Did you leave on bad terms?

TH: It was a really bad separation and we haven’t talked in 3 years so lets leave it at that.

RV: I remember the rumors that you guys were breaking up about 3 years ago…

TH: It was in 2005.

RV: Do you think you lost fans? Or was it a net gain?

TH: Both really, we lost a lot of fans and we have gained a lot of new fans. There are a surprising amount of people who say ‘this is the first time I can listen to this band – I loved the music but the vocal style was always too much for me…’ And now, Annette being in the band, her voice being a bit softer, not so high and loud and not so distinctive either, we have gained a lot of new fans as well.

RV: Tell me about your tour plans.

TH: This is the longest tour we ever did. It’s going to be two years in total. It started out about a year ago in Israel and it will probably end with the last show in mid-September of 2009. We went to North America, Canada, Europe, and now we’re going to South America after this tour and one show in Russia in-between. It’s pretty much all over the world.

RV: Do you still play a lot of older songs with Annette? Or did you drop them off the set list?

TH: Well, we didn’t drop them off because she couldn’t sing them, but we are on a Dark Passion Play tour, so we want to play songs from Dark Passion Play – but still it’s about 50/50 when we play the set between older and new songs.

RV: It was great talking to you.

TH: Thanks you too…

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