We were just a bit concerned whether he had the time to do this. We have known him for years and we knew that he would have the skills, the personality and the motivation to do that. Well, considering the circumstances, it couldn’t have been any easier or better. What are your feelings about his replacement Kai Haito? How does he fit into Nightwish? So he’s a super important member of the band, and that’s what he is: he’s still a member of the band. He takes care of all the merchandise and financial issues and all the paper work in the band. He’s the CEO of the band’s company, so to speak. Is he still taking care of all the business aspects of Nightwish as he used to in the past? Will he be able to come back as a fulltime member someday? So he’s doing much better at the moment but Kai will still to do the whole upcoming tour. But I just met him three weeks ago – he came to my place and we had a poker tournament on the internet – and I haven’t seen him that energetic and happy in ages. He did this for the good of the whole group and organization. But we have to mention that it was a really courageous and unselfish thing on Jukka’s side to do because he realized that he wasn’t capable of functioning one hundred percent anymore because of this disease of which he has suffered for more than ten years now. We never get rid of the turbulence in the band, I guess. It was all a bliss and then this happened. Tuomas Holopainen (keyboards): Still terrified and sad because things looked really, really good for Nightwish for quite a long time when she hopped on board at the end of 2012 and did the rest of the tour with us, followed by the live DVD and the songwriting process and the beginning of the rehearsals for the new album. This is the first time in the band’s history that a member has to leave because of health issues.
Radio Metal: Jukka had to pull out of the recording of the album and the upcoming tour. « You have to act accordingly to the songs not do things just because you can. » We talked with Tuomas and Floor about all this, and also about the issue of downloading (following a message that denounced the leak of the first single, “Élan”, a few weeks ago), the “experience of music”, and the role of education in this matter – something they both visibly hold very dear. Every self-respecting fan has been in their starting-blocks for months now, dissecting every piece of music made available, every word that could give them even a hint of the album’s musical direction and of the third singer’s performance. Eighteen months and a soundtrack to Uncle Scrooge’s adventures later, Nightwish make the news once again with their much-expected eighth album. These two additions to the band have made composer Tuomas Holopainen extremely happy, as he confesses in the following interview, alongside the aforementioned Floor.Ī year and a half ago, just a few days after the official announcement, Tuomas explained to us how this new step in Nightwish’s evolution had come about.
The principle fits Nightwish like a custom-made glove – because their ambitious new album, Endless Forms Most Beautiful, is a concept inspired by life and evolution, but also because the band has wonderfully adapted to drummer Jukka Nevalainen’s insomnia problems, and found new strength in the inclusion of versatile singer Floor Jansen and multi-instrumentalist Troy Donockley. In his fundamental book On The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin described natural selection as “the principle by which each slight variation of a trait, if useful, is preserved”, and went on to explain that a change could become a strength in any species.