NIGHTWISH Mainman: 'I Hope To Get A Chance To Score A Movie Someday'

Scott McLennan of the Worcester Telegram & Gazette recently conducted an interview with NIGHTWISH mainman/keyboardist Toumas Holopainen. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow:

On creating the sort of big, emotional and epic music that could easily serve as a movie soundtrack:

"I love film music, and I hope to get a chance to score a movie someday. But right now, I am still a metal head.

On replacing the ousted singer Tarja Turunen with Sweden's Anette Olzon:

"We are all able to breathe again and work together as a band. Having a team player that wants to be part of a band is important."

On Olzon securing the job not just because she has a great voice but also because she is a good storyteller:

"The most important thing was to find someone with a voice that sounds good and can take on the personalities and characters of the songs."

On coming up with a broad assortment of material spanning ethereal Celtic tones to blitzkrieging power metal:

"I always have huge concepts for our albums. There are a lot of different sides to our music, and I'm just blessed as a songwriter to be in a band like this that can handle whatever I come up with. It doesn't matter if it's Celtic-based, or American-Indian-based, or metal. I can let my mind flow, and let all the ideas flow. Trying to calculate in advance, that's like cancer to music."

Watch fan-filmed video footage of NIGHTWISH perfoming the song "Amaranth" in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on October 16, 2007: