TARJA TURUNEN ‘I Wasn’t Fan of Metal Before Nightwish. I Never Thought of Becoming a Metal Singer’

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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.”