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When I was 13 or 14 years old, I bought a CD called "Once" by a band named Nightwish that hailed from Finland. The cover had an artist rendition of the Angel of Grief statue showing a female angel weeping upon a stone altar. On the back of the CD was a picture of four men along with a beautiful, dark-haired woman.
I went home that night, listened to the CD, and my entire life changed. I was hit with a wave of fantastic music. Angry, edgy guitars mixed with gothic synthesizers and a full orchestra, all led by the vocals of a female soprano. I had never heard anything like it before, and I haven’t heard anything like it since.
As I listened to more of the band and delved more into its background, I learned that a man named Tuomas Holopainen was the mastermind behind its success. I could pick him out in photos of the band, because he looked like Johnny Depp with shoulder-length black hair and a dapper goatee. He played piano and keyboard for the symphonic metal group, but I also discovered that he wrote 95% of the band’s music as well as all of the songs’ lyrics. As I listened to more of Nightwish, it did not take me long to realize that Tuomas Holopainen was a genius.
When you experience Nightwish’s music, absorbing every note that was crafted by Tuomas’s hand, you experience wonder and beauty at a level that has never been fathomed. Even if heavy metal is not to your taste, the intricacies of Tuomas’s songwriting cannot be denied. Throughout the Nightwish albums, he has written not only head-banging shredders, but also soundtrack scores, orchestral fantasies that rival Beethoven, Celtic jigs, and soft love ballads. His music has the enchantment of a magical broomstick, whisking you away to far off shores and shadowy forests, high mountains and misty vales.
And if his composing skills were not enough, his lyrics are also awe-inspiring. Tuomas’s lyrics, usually written in English, are heavily inspired by authors such as Tolkien, Gaiman, Rothfuss, and Poe. He takes in the beauty of nature and imagination and weaves it into his words, creating stories that captivate the mind. He touches on religion, love, romance, fantasy, escapism, and so much more. To give you an example, here is a bit of verse from the song “Ghost Love Score” from the album Once:
We used to swim the same moonlight waters
Oceans away from the wakeful day
My fall will be for you-My fall will be for you
My love will be in you
If you be the one to cut me I will bleed forever
Scent of the sea before the waking of the world
Brings me to thee
Into the blue memory
Tuomas’s songs have enchanted me for nearly 15 years, and he is one of the most artistic people I know. He made me wear my hair long in college, he drove me to want to become better at piano (though I failed miserably). He inspired me to create dark, beautiful stories and to see the wonder of the world around me. That being said, some of his songs do showcase beliefs he has about religion and evolution that I find erroneous, and I would not say that every Nightwish song is appropriate to listen to, so one must tread with caution. But given how much he has impacted my creative life, I can’t help but admire Tuomas and treasure the wonders he has created through his songwriting. And as I finish this article about him, let me leave you with another piece of verse of his that inspires me to write. It is “Song of Myself” on the album Imaginaerum:
Paper is dead without words
Ink idle without a poem
All the world dead without stories
Without love and disarming beauty
