My Current Playlist - 'Nightwish'

The place I do most of my work, be it writing or craft, is the dining room, which is also where the computer is.

This means that, so long as I’ve got the internet, I’ve always got music to hand.

If I’m looking up online articles, it doesn’t matter if I’m listening to sung pieces or instrumental. But if I’m writing, and I think I’ve mentioned this before, then it has to be instrumental; anything that’s sung I find too distracting.

While there are certain pieces I tend to listen to frequently, I also go through phases of listening to a chosen selection over a number of days. And that depends on my mood.

As I’m not writing at the moment – it’s proving to be quite a struggle to find my writing mojo with all that’s going on, but that’s a story for another day – instead, doing more online research and craft, I’m listening to a lot of sung pieces.

I’ve mentioned the Finnish symphonic metal band, ‘Nightwish’, before when I blogged about songs that feed my imagination. For reasons unknown even to me, I didn’t explore more of their music back then. Thanks to Liam, who recently started listening to them, I decided it was time to discover more as I liked the snippets I’d overheard.

I didn’t start from the beginning but from their 4th album, ‘Century Child’, released in 2002. The singer, Tarja Turunen, reminds me of Amy Lee of Evanescence, another favourite band.

It doesn’t happen often, but it only took one listen of the whole album to decide I like the entire thing.

Again, just one ‘listen’ of their 2004 album, ‘Once’, was enough for me to add the entire album to the playlist.

By the time the band released their next album, ‘Dark Passion Play’, in 2007, they had a new singer, Anette Olzon.

Her voice isn’t deep like Tarja’s but still fits the mood of the songs.

I didn’t take to the entire album, my 3 favourites being ‘The Poet and the Pendulum’, ‘Eva’ and ‘7 Days to the Wolves’.

The last album that I’ve listened to is 2011’s ‘Imaginaerum’, which has the first song of theirs that I’d heard, ‘Storytime’.

All of ‘Imaginaerum’ also features on my current playlist.

I intend to listen to all their albums, the first 3 and the other 2 after ‘Imaginaerum’, which feature Olzon’s replacement, Floor Jansen.

Some of their songs are well over 10 minutes long although they don’t feel that long. Sometimes, I’m so into the song, it surprises me when it ends.

With their Gothic atmosphere, operatic vocals (especially Tarja’s) and (mostly) fantasy and mythological themes, ‘Nightwish’, for me, is almost the perfect band to feature on a fantasy/fairy tale writer’s playlist.

Now, the difficult part – attempting to choose a couple of songs…

I’ve chosen one by Tarja and another by Anette, which give an idea of the band’s range.

‘I Wish I Had an Angel’ is from ‘Once’ and features Tarja’s vocals; I love the contrast between the voices – female operatic and raucous male.

‘Turn Loose the Mermaids’, sung by Anette and from ‘Imaginaerum’, reminds me of sea shanty-type songs.

If you haven’t listened to ‘Nightwish’ before and you like this kind of music, I hope you enjoy them as much as I do.