Interviews

Dreams don't end

The founder of NW, Tuomas Holopainen, has moved to his new home in Kitee, next to his grandma’s summer cottage. Every room in this wooden house tells something about its owner who concentrates to see the world through his own eyes. The wanderer doesn’t get tired.

Tuomas knows where to escape to

The founder and the central figure of NW, Tuomas Holopainen, experiences the world even too strongly

The composer is standing on a quay in Kitee. Behind him rises a hill on the top of which he has been able to see a red cottage all his life. His 89-year-old grandma lives there during summers.

- I have seen Airi daily. There she’s doing garden work and seems very happy.

Behind the red house, some 30-40 meters away, stands the new log house of this composer hermit. He has only slept two nights there so far.

The quay is not just any quay. When the composer stands there, he is able to see over the water to his childhood’s paradise, an island with a cottage. After a week, some friends of this 30-year-old musician will come to the island to bathe in a sauna.

- Sonata Arctica, the guys from Children of Bodom, Kotiteollisuus and Timo Rautiainen, the composer lists his friends.

The creator of the songs of the world-famous NW is satisfied with his refuge. In two years, the three-storey house, originally just a drawing by Tuomas on a piece of paper, has become the stately neighbour of his grandma’s summer place.

- I have designed the house for myself only. There is a Disney room, a music room and a movie room there, he tells.

An idyllic childhood and fantasy collections are the treasure chests that Holopainen goes through when composing. In the new home, these worlds are not hidden.

- In the movie room, there are Kevin Costner’s spurs from the movie ‘Dances With Wolves’. I saw them for sale in Disneyland and I had to buy them, he laughs.

- The design of the doorway has been copied from Mordor’s gate, this fan of The Lord of The Rings continues.

In many interviews Holopainen has confessed to being an escapist. He says his Disney hobby is part of this phenomenon. There is no sarcasm in his voice when he frets that he hasn’t had time to read the latest Donald Duck comic magazines for a couple of weeks now.
However, no cartoon character, let alone one log house, can give the shelter that the music can.

- I experience everything very strongly. Music is my defense against the world, he says with certainty.

He grabs the branch of a nearby birch tree even more strongly.

Holopainen doesn’t want any journalists in his new house. That’s why we, too, are having this conversation on the lakeshore.

- There is a certain paradox there. I feel a very strong urge to share everything in my music, but otherwise I don’t want to talk about my private life.

In his lyrics Holopainen doesn’t censor himself at all; instead, he shares even his most painful streams of consciousness with millions of listeners.

- People have a built-in capability to recognise what is real, he says.

With a grin, Holopainen tells that he feels an even “pervert pleasure” writing lyrics about something very intimate knowing that hundreds of thousands of people will identify themselves with it.

The tabloids don’t give Holopainen much pleasure, however. Some days ago, a headline claimed that Tuomas thinks that sex is overrated. The sentence, originally said as a joke, was picked from an interview in a Spanish online magazine.

- Two years ago I couldn’t have slept for some nights. Now, I can relate to things differently and take some things with humor.

During the happenings in 2005 many headlines left their marks in Holopainen and made him feel really bad.

- I think that the sentence “It doesn’t matter what others think” really sucks. I have never understood it. Of course it matters, he almost shouts, for the only time during the whole interview.

NW’s new album DPP will be published in the autumn. The feelings therein reflect the sad feelings during 2005-2006.

- That time was bad in all senses, he says.

According to him, the album is NW’s gloomiest but also best. The opening lines of the new single Amaranth open themselves to those who know Holopainen.

- Baptised with a perfect name, the doubting one by heart.

- I think everything is possible, from God to UFO’s, but I don’t believe anything before I see it, this doubting Tuomas says.

Tuomas doesn’t preach this scepticism in the role of some hater of everything spiritual, far from it. In contrast, he says that he envies people who have a strong belief in something.

Tuomas doesn’t believe in many things, but he believes in his band. NW starts a two-year world tour in the autumn. Tuomas has lived the life of a wanderer for the past eight years.

- It has its own romance which we all like very much.

He is not tired of seeing exotic places and new cultures. Equador, Panama and Australia come to mind first.

There is always the day of homecoming, however, that drops the composer in the middle of empty melancholy every time.

- We have been talking a lot about that feeling among the fellow musicians. On tour, there is always the excitement and all the senses are in the maximum. When it ends, everything is fine basically but it is difficult to get any kicks out of anything.

Holopainen is sure that Kitee and the new home are the best cures for this melancholy. Despite the wanderer’s shoes Tuomas feels he is wholly a Kitee person. If he hadn’t had to go and play with Jouni Hynynen and Kotiteollisuus last Thursday, he would have gone to watch Finnish baseball.

Tuomas lived the first 30 years of his life under his parents’ roof in the village of Potoska in Kitee.
There, in the corner of a small chamber (= bedroom) he has composed all material that NW has published so far.

- It sounds romantic but so it is. Every single song has been composed there.

Last spring he lived in Helsinki for two months because of the recording of the new album.

- I started to feel physical pain as I couldn’t see a lake or a forest.

During the next couple of years, Holopainen will see the Kitee lake and forest for one week after one month of touring, but it is enough for him for the time being.

- The wanderlust is still on.

He pronounces the word in a very North Karelian way, but the wanderer’s biggest dream is far away from Kitee.

- If I still could travel around the world without a plane. I would take half a year off to do that. After that, if there seemed any chance of forming a family, I could even settle down, he contemplates.

The grandeur just comes

Some heavy metal bands have evaluated the grandeur (pomposity) of their sound with the NW scale. If they can reach even the middle part of the scale, it is already a question of rather pompous sound.

The first song of DPP, TPATP, consists of about 200 tracks. A symphony orchestra is also involved.

- The grandeur is not an end in itself, Tuomas defends.
- The key to making a good song is that you don’t think anything beforehand. The biggest mistake is to think that “OK, let’s do a pompous song now.”

Holopainen thinks he is a mixture of Snufkin (of the Moomin books) and a mad scientist. He cannot explain the mammoth-like harmonies of his melodic heavy metal any better. As a sidenote he also says that everything you need to know about life you can find in the Moomin books by Tove Jansson.

The song Eva from the new album is an illustrating example of the way Holopainen makes compositions. The story of an escaping woman came first.

- After that I made different versions and tried out what instruments are needed to tell the story. “Eva” needed a piano, he tells.

The singing parts of Anette Olzon Tuomas tried out first with keyboards and occasionally by humming. He prefers to never sing, not even alone at home.

If Holopainen was called a “lonely wolf” while at junior high, the new singer Olzon is his counterpart.

- Anette is the most extrovert person I have met in a long time. Unreserved might be the best word, Holopainen describes.

The composing work is also the most important thing for Tuomas in the music room of the new home.

TOP 3 MOVIE MUSIC

1. The Gladiator
2. The Village
3. Sleepy Hollow

TOP 3 PLACES

1. The cottage island in Pyhäjärvi Lake, Kitee.
2. Disneyland, Anaheim, or Disney World, Florida
3. Sydney Harbour, Australia

Translated by Anssi from the Nightwish Discussion Board