SOLO CAREER IN A NEW COLLECTIVE

There are those who have been afraid of an end of her career as a rock singer - and then there are those who have been hoping for it. Both sides are wrong. Two years after the end of an era, a new one has started. Tarja Turunen is back with a new self-confidence, new musicians and - maybe most important of all - a new album! SRM has had a lesson in Finnish sisu!

Tarja Turunen is a well known name for most people. Not least in Finland. That's why I was surprised when she rather made this interview sitting by a coffee table in a distant place in the bistro of one of Helsinki's fancy Scandic Hotels, rather than in a locked or supervised conference room.

"When we are in Buenos Aires I can do normal things without people staring at me - like going to the store without doing my make-up first. That's not possible here in Finland. Here, I'm a public person who gets recognized everywhere."

The singer's insight got confirmed a few minutes earlier on her way towards a slightly more distant table, deepest into the triangular plaza who makes the hotel's oasis for all the hungry guests. Long looks, followed by a quiet chit chat followed our way.

"Sure I feel more free in Buenos Aires, but on the other hand Finland is our home - our home base. I love Argentina, but even my husband likes it better in Finland. He loves the Finnish traditions and the food culture. Everything. If it weren't that way, things would have gotten more complicated."

To be a hard-working couple in the music business takes it tribute.

"The past two years, our home in Finland has been more of a sleep-over-apartment. When we come home, we unpack our things and wash clothes during the night. In the morning we pack and leave the country again. It is really hard sometimes. It's really rare for us to spend more than a couple of days in a row at home."

Inspired by film music

The Finnish songbird seems to be happy about her life for the moment, even due to the hard life in the music business. The one who expects to see a broken Finn - cynical and bitter after getting fired from not only Finland's but also Europe's for the moment best selling rock band - has to look somewhere else. Tarja Turunen is electric out of energy.

The reason could be that we are getting closer to the day when her two year long task will be revealed to the public. The album "My Winter Storm" sounds more like Nightwish than the her old partner's do nowadays. And with this insight, a big part of the understanding of how much of the whole picture Tarja's voice actually did for the band.

"I completely love film music. It has been the big force. Each time I left a cinema I thought about how powerful the music was, even if it only was a lonely cello playing. So, at the end I started to look up which composers who made my favourites and then, a couple, three names showed up more than others.

After that I asked the record company to contact those people to see if any of them were available to help me. It turned out that one of the guys on the record company had worked with Hans Zimmer, so he traveled to see him."

Hans Zimmer is one of the world's most famous film composers with "a lot of strings on his guitar". "Gladiator", "Pearl Harbor", "King Arthur" and the two latest "Pirates Of The Caribbean"-movies are a small selection of all big movies he has written the music to. If anyone knows film music, it is him.

"Hans got very interested, but he is a very busy man who often works with music to several movies at the same time. There were just no room for me. But he gave me the oportunity to work in his studio and use his team - especially Jim Dooley who has arranged the orchestral piece and the choir on the album, just as the ghost-like, electronic sounds."

The performance of the symphonic parts were made by "The Prague Film Orchestra & Choir".

"They were just fantastic. Jim supervised everything from Los Angeles through a web cam and kept contact with the leader in Prague. It's crazy what you can do with modern technology.

Unfortunately I couldn't attend myself with the orchestral session since we were recording the video for "I Walk Alone" at the same time. But they sent me files through e-mail which I could listen to in Berlin and I was touched. It was phenomenal, I almost cried."

Lonely Walk

"I Walk Alone" is the first single from what Tarja herself thinks of as her debut album. The song is written by the songwriting duo Mattias Lindblom and Anders Wollbeck from the Swedish synthesisergroup Vacuum and the video has been played frequently on You Tube.

As an outsider it is easy to read the break up from Nightwish in both the song title and the lyrics - where the singer walks away with pride - but according to Tarja there are no connections like that.

"It's a spectacular song title, but both the title and the lyrics is made by the Vacuum-guys. Perhaps they had something like that in their minds when they wrote the song, but for me it is about the opposite.

For me it is a very poetical and powerful song, in which I found the album title. The words just came that strongly when I sang: "My winter storm, moving me awake, it's never gone. We hadn't even finished writing the other songs yet, but the album title was already finished."

It is hard not to see the symbolics even with Tarja's explanation, but then she explains herself a little deeper.

"I see the lyrics as a picture of the reality around me - all the people who has kept me awake. They have never been gone, they have always been there, just like the lyrics says. When I talked about this with Mattias, I understood that he had a completely different idea about the meaning of this song, but to me it is about the people who helped me ride out of the storm. It is thanks to those people I'm still around and continue making music."

According to Tarja there are two versions - one with more guitar than symphony orhestras, and then one with the opposite. If they are going to be on the same single or if it's gonna be two separate releases it sill uncertain at the time this is written.

Over all, the album "My Winter Storm" sounds like a mixed album, without a lot of different directions. The symphonic pieces makes together with Tarja's voice a solid unit divided into fourteen tracks.

"The album is a combination of different elements: like heavy guitars, but on the other hand a very quiet and gentle orchestra. Almost like a first direction towards a magnificant film music. That move was the priority when I started to visualise this album. That's what I wanted to accomplish."

The flirt with the fancy film music is very obvious on the album, just like on many of the past collegue Tuomas Holopainen's work. But on "My Winter Storm", more of this is offered than on Nightwish's "Dark Passion Play".

"In the whole, the songs have quite simple constructions. All the elements are recognizable, but we have worked a lot with various rythms - slower parts which soon will go back to their original speed.

And we haven't been afraid to combine different music styles. This is my first real solo album, and I can't hold me to just one style. That wouldn't make me or my vision justice."


Songwriting paradise

During the last time in Nightwish, Tarja was presented as a spoiled brat who was talked over to show up at the recording sessions och concerts. But on her solo debut, she's had a hand herself in almost everything - even the songwriting.

"To "The Oasis", I wrote both the music and the lyrics all by myself. But that's also the only song in Finnish, ha ha.

To wrote music is something new for me, but I have taken a big step forward with this album. I was tired to not getting any help. I'm a born singer, not a songwriter. And then it's not just to write music, just like that."

"The Oasis" is almost a complete symphonic piece without guitars, where Tarja proves that she's also serious with the songwriting. But on the main part of the album, she has put her trust into a big group of songwriters.

"When it was offical that I was going to make a solo album, songs were streaming to the record company. I made clear from the beginning to Universal that I wanted to listen to every song, but I didn't want to know who made the songs. If I had known who made which song, it would have affected my choice."

Tarja's insight may have cosst her a few friends.

"It was in the beginning of last year, but there are still coming people and talks about me not picking their song, ha ha. But what can you do? Their songs wasn't bad but they didn't fit the kind of music I had in my mind.

On the other hand it was really interesting in hearing what kind of music people expected me to do now. The material included everything between hardrock, classical pieces to pop- and dancemusic."

The songwriting itself turned out to be rather unusual - at least not compared to the files written about in this magazine.

"It ended with me choosing a couple of songs which I really liked, and then we contacted the composers. One of those were Torsten Stenzel, who also play keyboards on the album. He invited me - together with Mattias and Anderts form Vacuum - to his house at Ibiza, where we spent a week.

We started to adjust the songs they had already sent me, but the personal chemistry turned out to be that good that we also got to write six new songs. And those six songs are among the best ones on the album."

Poisonus Cover

Earlier that day, me (and the photographer Michael Johansson) are sitting down, listening to Tarja's album throught a CD-player, supervised by her husband - the very much talked about Marcelo Cabuli. He places himselt strategically on a chair behind us; just like a stereotype of the evil cop, like taken out from a book about interrigation technique. It's not without you start to imagine a task force coming jumping through the window if you should take just a step towards the CD-player and the precious inside it.

But that didn't happen (and Cabuli turns later out to be a really nice chap). On the other hand, we had to witness a shameful of Alice Cooper's "Poison" which gets even Michael's hardened ears to burn. When I later on had to confront Tarja with the ugly truth, I didn't had the heart to be just as mean as a chritical journalist should be. Instead I try to wrap the truth inside the words of the boldness to make a cover of a such famous and - in the original version - appreciated song.

"It was actually an easy choice. I was driving my car through Finland, hundreds of kilometers and while I drove, they played "Poison" five times on the radio. It was in the same breath we were thinking about which cover I should make for the album, and we had already thrown away several suggestions.

So I thought that a song that is quite popular, even though its age, should work as a cover. And besides that I loved the song when I grew up. The record company liked it from the beginning - you just have to do this one, they said."

The arrangements in Tarja's version of "Poison" feels very poor and broken down if you compare it to the original - especially when it come to the verse. Although the intro of the song and the middle is sounding all right.

"My thought was that the intro shouldn't be too far from the original, so that it instead should be a surprise when people realizes that it's not Alice Cooper who sings it, ha ha.

But it was a hard song to finish. We fought with the guitar for a long time and instead of a guitar solo I wanted to have cello solo. I mean, one of the best cello players in the world are on this album. It would have been foolish not to take advantage of it. But the idea was taken with a lot of resistance in the studio and I really had to fight for that thing."

The cello has a very clear presence on the whole album and for that is Martin Tillman's responsible - nowdays based in the film music's Mekka, Los Angeles, with his residence in Zürich, Schweiz.

"I really love the cello parts. They fill up a very important function on this album. It is one of the reasons why I have two cello players with me on the tour - Max Silja who earlier played in Apocalyptica and Markus Hohti who is a classical cello player."

There are more songs on "My Winter Storm" which weren't made in a hurry. "My Little Phoenix" is an example of the complications that can come up when you try to explain your vision for someone else.

"It is based on "The Ring"-movies - you know, the horrormovies that were so popular a few years ago. There are a few albums on the CD with the film music that wasn't on the actual movie - but they are really metal.

When I tried to explain to David (Presley, producer) he didn't understand at all what I meant, but when I had the oportunity to work with the people behind the film music business, it became easier (Hans Zimmer has had his hand in this as well). Then I just had to tell them to find something that reminded about what they already made for the movie. It was easier for them as well. All they had to do was to start up their computers and then they had all the sounds there, ha ha!"

"My Little Phoenix" is the song on the album which has had applied most electronic cosmetics. Here are heavy guitars together with digital processors.

"It's a strange and catatonic song and I know that the record company wanted to remove it from the album for a very long time. It was hard for them to see what I wanted with this song - how I wanted it to sound.

I was always sure that it would sound perfect when the orchestral choir would be added on top of it. But sure - when the song only consisted of the main recording, it was hard to hear how it should sound like in the end."

Healthy tour

After all the fuzz about canceled Nightwish shows - who says was caused by Tarja's mood and her husband's greed - you might start to wonder if Tarja Turunen will be going out on a tour for the new album.

"Yes the real tour starts in the end of March or the beginning of April next year. We will be playing on smaller venues and larger clubs. But first, I want to see that the album is selling so that people want to see me, and that the chemistry between the musicians works out. I have worked with them earlier but everyone hasn't been working together. That's why we're preparing a warm up tour in the end of this year."

The warm up tour consists of nine shows during November and December, but no one is close to Sweden.

"We will be playing in Sweden next year, I promise that! But it will be a healthy tour which will take a long time to finish. We will tour for two weeks and then rest for two weeks, and so on. I don't want to get burnt out, and I also don't want to burn out the people I am working with."

The strict tour schedule was told to be a problem during the time in Nightwish, and it's not without understand Tarja's thoughts about it.

"I am looking forward to spend some time at those places we're visiting, so that you can actually remember being there. With Nightwish we sometimes played on places where I though was for the first time, before it turned out that we had been there before, ha ha!"

A question that had to be asked is whether Tarja plans to perform some old Nightwish songs during her own tour.

"Ha ha! Of course I will sing a few old Nightwish songs - I see no reason why I shouldn't do it. I already have the play list ready, but I'm not gonna tell you about it for the moment."

The Finnish beauty smiles cleverly, but refuses to mention anything further about it. On the other hand she's more than willing to answer the question about her past band members' new album "Dark Passion Play".

"I haven't heard the whole album, just the songs that have been played on the radio so far - a couple of songs. It feels a bit awkward to hear the new songs, but what I've heard this far sounds really good. I really do hope that things works out with their new singer and I wish them all success."