For me, I'm way more at home in heavy metal than I am in classical music.Collection: Home
People think that when they come up to me, screaming things into my ear, that I will respond according to what they want. I'll turn around and smile and take the photo. But I'm not somebody's marionette.Collection: Smile
Both the guys in Nightwish and I have experiences with previous band breakups and all emotions that come with it. It's almost like dating.Collection: Dating
It's good to reflect on life and take a step back and sit and relax and do something else.
I had a general burnout: I got extremely tired; I couldn't do anything anymore. I canceled tours; I cancelled everything in my life. For a year and a half, I was completely sick; I couldn't do anything. So yeah, I wanted to write about it in my lyrics. 'Anatomy Of A Nervous Breakdown' is really about that, the inspiration behind it.
No... I don't like Slayer.
If I'm happy, you can tell, and there's no way of faking it.
If you are waiting for this thing that might happen tomorrow, it probably will never happen. You need to activate it now! No one else is going to do it for you, and ten years are going to go by before you even know it.
You always speak the language you hear most.
Unfortunately, life unfolds as it does, and you can't do everything at the same time, and you can't do some things if you can't spend the time.
Arch Enemy is a female-fronted metal band, but so is Delain. They don't sound alike at all. The only thing they both are are metal bands, but the style within metal is so massively different that it doesn't really say much whether there's a girl singing or not. So it's really not so important.
I don't have a poker face at all - I have a very, very expressional face, and I have no control over that.
I had the idea to spend the year off in 2008 and start writing a rock album. I wanted to do something else other than melodic metal after more than ten years of After Forever. I thought it would be nice to sidestep into rock.
I didn't like progressive jazz or anything. Rock was something I like to listen to.
I always feel I need to do well regardless of the level of the band.
Who on earth would expect a band such as Nightwish, to give you, of all people, the phone call, 'Hey, can you come and join us now?' Yeah, that turned everything upside down.
Nightwish is my band, and so is Revamp. They both get my 100 percent, which is why I also cannot do them both at the same time. They're both my babies.
Actually, I consider both Nightwish and Revamp equal.
I don't always have to be the best. Things don't always have to be perfect.
I really like to meet people, but only when I have the energy for it.
There seems to sometimes be an entire genre called 'female-fronted metal.'
It's not so surprising that there are more women in metal bands. And they're not just fronting them. There are drummers and guitar players, bass players.
Since the moment I joined with Nightwish, I have been working non-stop.
Even though Nightwish is my life and I love what I do - I could do this every day - to not do it really makes you desire even more for it again.
Everybody needs to take a little distance from things.
Make music when I want to in whatever style I would like to. That is something that I know that I'm not the only Nightwish member who has that. That's a luxury we can take, and we will.
I'm not the kind of singer that's always super, super careful.
A good glass of red wine or maybe a little bit too much every now and then is just fine. Heavy boozing, not so much, because you don't recover enough from it.
Musically, I have little ambition. The only real ambition I have is to make music and do music whenever I feel like it, without any real ambition or planning.
Revamp is a band that would deserve the hundred-percent devotion a band needs, and at this moment, I don't see any future for another band next to a band such as Nightwish, and with the ambition to become a mother, I will have to let Revamp go, which is a very sad decision.
There is a project that I did back in 2008 with a Norwegian guitar player, Jorn Viggo Lofstad, who plays in Pagan's Mind. We wrote a rock album, and we never released it.
The most metal? Some would say Slayer, but I think they're a dreadful band. Unbelievably boring. Terrible. Apparently it's not metal to say that, but it's a personal opinion.
I cannot work on a Revamp album when I tour with Nightwish. And I cannot do any Nightwish stuff when I'm touring with Revamp.
The success of Revamp is clear. We've sold a lot of albums, we've done very good tours, and wherever we play, we get a very positive response, and that's something that would be very nice to keep.
I'm very happy with what I can bring into Nightwish, but I will probably want to keep on writing things. And that can take many forms as well.
When After Forever stopped, I didn't want to first find a band, then see if I could write with them, figure that whole thing out, then record an album. Instead, I worked with people I knew would be good songwriters out of an idea how I thought it would sound like.
I think every physiotherapist will tell you that it's not a very good idea, and there are many musicians in the metal scene who have suffered severe damage - like, the guitar player from Iced Earth, Jon Schaffer, had severe neck problems due to headbanging.
I'm studying Finnish, and it's one of the five most difficult languages in the world. And the more I learn, the more I realize that's definitely true.
I might move to Finland, at least for a while, to learn the language a bit better, 'cause you don't learn any language better than in the country itself.
My Finnish is... I'm sounding like a three-year-old, at my best. It's super hard to really have a conversation, unfortunately. I know a lot of words, and so reading signs and stuff is becoming better, or going to a supermarket. But some specific words, of course, you don't get in your first year.
When you used to be able to express yourself as an adult in your own language, or as I can do in English, for instance, it's sometimes hard to switch back to very simple talking, like I am forced to do in Finnish. So a real conversation, when I really wanna tell something, I can't do it in Finnish.
I have creative energy in me that needs to come out one way or another, but that's where Revamp comes in.
Sometimes, I would love to record a super-quiet album, but for some reason, I never really got to that because my heart lies with the heavy stuff.
I never really thought of myself as somebody to move abroad. It just came on my path.
I tried to learn the Finnish language, which is really, really, really hard, and I realized that if I want to really learn it, I need to move to Finland.
My Finnish, it never really happened, but I'm good in Swedish.
I agree that it's a macho world, metal, but it's also a very, very social world, where people are loving music in respect for one another, female or male.
I've studied classical singing, but not to a great extent.
I joined a metal band with only guys when I was 17.
I am a humble person.