The ‘we’ll never forget you’ Nightwish’s vocalist Tarja Turunen said in an interview to Loudwire that before joining Nightwish she wasn’t a Metal fan. Read the muse’s words:
“I was not a metal fan. That was the thing, I never thought in my whole life of becoming a heavy metal singer. No!
“But it just happened. Because I took the challenge. I felt the music was super beautiful, I felt I was capable of doing that.
“Since I’ve been a little child, I’ve been always eager to jump into challenges. And Nightwish were like that for me. It was like, ‘Hey, let’s see what’s gonna happen.’ And, ‘Woah!’ [Laughs] Things just happened. My life changed completely.”
About her thoughts about Metal that time:
“Metallica was my metal. I was listening to hard rock, those kinds of things – Whitesnake, Alice Cooper, Scorpions, all those kinds of melodic bands. But metal was Metallica for me.
“I was not aware of the genre until I became a heavy metal singer in a heavy metal band. [Laughs] And the whole scene opened up for me and it was incredible. I found so much beauty in it.”
About Nightwish would be an acoustic project:
“Me living in that little tiny village, everybody knew already that I was having the voice to sing. So I was always participating in the events. I was the girl who sang.
“Then when the time took me out the musical studies and all that high school of music conservatory, University of music, I was 18 when Tuomas [Holopainen, keyboards, bandleader] came with the demo on my door and asked me to sing on the first Nightwish demo, that was acoustic.
“He did not know that I have already been studying lyrical singing and my voice became bigger and, well, powerful. So it was a surprise in the studio… It was born like the idea of combining these operatic vocals with a heavy metal background.”
I’m just a lucky guy who has chosen metal to live with for a long time. Metal changed my life for good. It made me more confident and stronger. Metalheads are naturally far away from the mass mediocrity and don’t accept impostures from anybody else. Metal is more than music, it’s a life changing oportunity!