Latest / HEAVY Music Interviews / Making Christmas Dark With TARJA

Transcript

Making Christmas Dark With TARJA · HEAVY Music Interviews

• 0:32
  I am very and we will be talking about this album of my new Dark
• 0:39
  Christmas album. Ah. Yes, it's fantastic, beautiful. Thanks for joining
• 0:46
  us to night Taja. Thank you for having me my pleasure. So you
• 0:51
  were releasing a new album, Dark Christmas on November the tenth, which is
• 0:54
  basically a reworking of Christmas songs done with your unique flavor. So it's been
• 0:59
  a nice way to spice up the festive season. It is. It is
• 1:04
  something, but it's like a It's like you can call me a Christmas woman
• 1:07
  already because I've been doing this is my third Chrismas album. Actually, to
• 1:15
  do an album like this very different, very much darker than usually. You
• 1:21
  know, even though the songs that you hear there are other songs that everybody
• 1:23
  know, but when you get to listen to them, they have absolutely different
• 1:27
  arrangements, a very cinematographic dark arrangements. And so but I love this Christmas
• 1:36
  tradition that I have as an artist already, it's a very very important part
• 1:38
  of my career. I'm doing tours every year at the end of the year
• 1:44
  since two thousand and five. I've been doing the tours a long time.
• 1:49
  It never ends. Does it. So can we talk into dark Christmas a
• 1:57
  bit deeper from a musical point of view and what you're done forward it?
• 2:00
  Yes, it's this time. I chose songs that are very, very known,
• 2:07
  no even the jingle bells, and all I want for Christmas is you
• 2:09
  last Christmas, white Christmas songs that you really definitely know, because you know,
• 2:17
  I don't necessarily enjoy myself this type of music. You know, the
• 2:23
  music that it sound sounds in the supermarket when you get over there. It's
• 2:27
  too commercial. It's all that. So I wanted to escape from all that
• 2:30
  and make these songs more appealing to me, first of all as an artist.
• 2:35
  And I worked the arrangement with man called Jim Dooley in Los Angeles.
• 2:40
  He's working only and basically only for films with movies soundtracks, and so so
• 2:49
  he really understood my concept that I wanted to really get was to get these
• 2:54
  songs completely different. Of course, the melody you know, but even you
• 3:00
  know, it's a completely different world when you emerge when you listen to these
• 3:06
  songs, a it's a different thing. And so there is a in some
• 3:10
  songs. This time I took some creepy kids you know, there is a
• 3:15
  kid Squire involved guitar player from Argentina, My daughter plays drums and the symphonic
• 3:25
  orcustra and my voice. That's a lot. That's about it. Yeah,
• 3:30
  So the album's actually called Dark Christmas a course, So before we get get
• 3:32
  any further, like what makes it Dark Christmas? In your opinion? The
• 3:38
  songs, their arrangements very much. It's an album that I thought of the
• 3:44
  lonely souls in Christmas. You know how many of us we really don't enjoy
• 3:49
  or we cannot enjoy, or we don't find the joy of Christmas because we
• 3:53
  get to think about the people that have passed away, that are no longer
• 3:58
  any among us. So I thought of those people when I worked on this
• 4:03
  album, you know, the ones that do not enjoy the commercial side of
• 4:08
  Christmas music. They might, they might, I really hope they might find
• 4:13
  this album appealing to them, because music is therapy. It's therapy for so
• 4:17
  many ways. You know, music is there when you feel down, music
• 4:21
  is there when you really you are sad, or when you least expect music
• 4:27
  can give you joy. And so this is the album that I thought of,
• 4:31
  you know, doing for those lonely Souls and Christmas very beautiful and it
• 4:36
  sort of touched on this before, but this time you brought in a children's
• 4:40
  choir. So tell us about that idea and how they contribute to the to
• 4:44
  the sound on the album. You know, we have neighbors here and I
• 4:49
  have a daughter eleven years old, and we drive their kids and hours to
• 4:55
  school. We do like a pool carpool thing with the parents and and we
• 5:00
  have been playing some Christmas songs for these kiddos and trying out which ones they
• 5:04
  really know, all of the all of the songs that are on the albums.
• 5:08
  These the children, they were singing them in a car and you know,
• 5:11
  they were like Jillian and singing and knowing the melodies, and so this
• 5:15
  is the song I need to do, This is the song I need to
• 5:16
  do. So I was checking out the songs I need to do because of
• 5:20
  the children, and then I thought of involving them. So actually I went
• 5:25
  to the school my daughter. You nine, My daughter know me it's eleven,
• 5:38
  so you are almost the same. Wow. Sorry, that's great.
• 5:47
  So, yes, I I went to the school for my daughter and I
• 5:51
  talked with the director that if they would be interested because I have seen them
• 5:56
  performing and making plays and uh, you know, or productions. So I
• 6:00
  would like to involve them on my album because I wanted to have a kids
• 6:03
  schoir that is not professional. You know, when you watch a movie and
• 6:11
  you see children in spooky, scary movies, the children are the creepiest ones.
• 6:16
  So true, so true. Yeah, so their voices they are also
• 6:23
  creepy, and so on my album, I actually wanted to enhance that creepiness
• 6:30
  in these dark arrangements. And it was fantastic. We spent the day in
• 6:34
  a professional studio with the children. For them, it was amazing experience,
• 6:40
  a new one and they worked very hard, very hard. It was really
• 6:45
  nice. And you said your daughter drums from one track. Is that your
• 6:47
  eleven year old daughter you've got drumming on the track. Yeah, Wow,
• 6:54
  she's a drummer. She's a drummer. Actually, we are waiting for the
• 6:56
  new drum set to arrive in a matter of one week or something. Back
• 7:00
  home. She is a drummer and she also plays piano things, but drums
• 7:04
  that's her instrument. There's nothing better than seeing you you'd do something with passion
• 7:10
  like that is a Yeah, it is wonderful to see now I am.
• 7:15
  Of course, my daughter has was born with the parents that both work with
• 7:18
  music. Okay, it's in her blood, in her kind of cells already
• 7:24
  in a cell level music. But I wanted to see, of course,
• 7:28
  it was interesting to see in your case also to see where your daughter what
• 7:31
  are what is what is she really willing to do in her life? What
• 7:36
  is her passion? And yeah, I see that my daughter is getting into
• 7:41
  that without me really pushing it to that direction. It's in the exactly beautiful.
• 7:51
  You've also chosen to rework Mariah Carey's All I Want for Christmas Is You.
• 7:55
  There's Paul McCartney's Wonderful Christmas Time and Last Christmas by Way, Like what
• 8:00
  should those covers to cover? I guess, and how have you made them
• 8:03
  your own? Very big challenge, very big check to take a song like
• 8:09
  all I Want for Christmas is You from Marria, like, wow, she
• 8:13
  that's the song that she made. It's the most popular song from her.
• 8:18
  I mean, hey, but you know, I had my my trust in
• 8:24
  Jim Dually, that is the man behind these arrangements, that we had had
• 8:28
  an album already together with him, and he's super talented and he really really
• 8:33
  worked hard with this. We of course we were going through some experiments with
• 8:39
  the songs and which one which one of the arrangements didn't work in the beginning,
• 8:43
  and then it started working out, and you know, you needed to
• 8:46
  try and try and error, try an error, and it was really wonderful
• 8:50
  to see that it is possible to take a song like jingle Bells and completely
• 8:58
  completely going somewhere else. It's the it's the beauty that we have when you
• 9:03
  get to be open minded. You know, you need to really get away
• 9:09
  from the from your box of I've known and learned how to do things.
• 9:15
  You know, a classically educated musician, I have been studying so many years,
• 9:20
  and it was for me very difficult in the beginning to start writing songs
• 9:26
  after night which I started writing my own songs, and so it was very
• 9:30
  difficult for me to get away from all what I've learned, you know,
• 9:33
  open up and go with the flow and you know, do things in a
• 9:39
  way that you've never done before. But that is about the progression that I
• 9:45
  myself personally, I want to do as an artist. I want to be
• 9:48
  open minded and I want to try if I feel I would be able to
• 9:54
  do something. I go for it. It's a beautiful challenge. It is
• 10:00
  Christmas. Carol's are normally reserved for children and stuff. So would you say
• 10:03
  that your album Dark Christmas is still suitable for children? Oh? Absolutely,
• 10:09
  I think the children will. Kind of yesterday, you know, I went
• 10:11
  to the school of them of my daughter, and I played these songs where
• 10:16
  the kids were singing, and they were all like, of course they were
• 10:22
  involved on the album. They are involved on the album, so they know
• 10:26
  these songs already. But I think that, you know, there are some
• 10:30
  creepy kids, you know, but they might get very very interested in this,
• 10:35
  you know. But of course it's about us as parents as well.
• 10:39
  You know, my daughter knows the songs from Beatles, she knows the songs
• 10:45
  from Super Trump Why because we have been playing these songs and she knows them.
• 10:50
  It's about education that we parents can give for our children, obviously,
• 10:54
  show them new things. And that's about music. Is that, Hey,
• 11:03
  we have a lot of responsibility in our hand. Yeah. Yeah. You've
• 11:13
  also got one original song on the album too, called Dark Christmas. Can
• 11:16
  you tell us about that? Yes, I wrote it. It was the
• 11:24
  a violin thing that came to me first. And I thought. I thought
• 11:28
  that it would be it would be something that I would do vocally, but
• 11:31
  it didn't work out. I said, no, no, no, it
• 11:35
  needs to have an instrument that can breathe and do it. And so I
• 11:37
  called for my friend Mery from Finland. She recorded this this violin thing for
• 11:45
  the song. But the song was again. I wrote the song in a
• 11:50
  few minutes. It's not like because of this thing that there is not such
• 11:56
  pressure on my shoulders when I work in a project like this, I have
• 12:00
  a lot more pressure on my shoulders when I start writing rock songs for my
• 12:03
  rock I don't know, why is it that I am doing that to myself,
• 12:13
  Like I'm really punishing myself. And really I'm struggling during the songwriting process
• 12:20
  for the new album. I am on it. Actually, I'm now nowadays,
• 12:22
  I'm currently writing the songs for the new rock album. But it's like
• 12:28
  for for this music, for this Christmas music, it's like it's just there,
• 12:31
  it's easy to lay down something like that Christmas. It's of course it
• 12:37
  has the connection with Finland, with my home country, with the darkness there,
• 12:43
  with the environment that is there during this time of the year. It's
• 12:48
  really dark. Also, I know that there are a lot of lonely people
• 12:52
  in that during Christmas and it's hard time of the year there, so I
• 13:00
  with that inspired, you know, I wrote a song Dark Christmas that's beautiful
• 13:05
  and it also comes with a music video for each song on the album,
• 13:09
  and there's a full length music feature film as well. Tell us that do
• 13:13
  you like create and work for yourself? Yeah, well, instead of focusing
• 13:18
  in one song and making a music video from one song, we decided to
• 13:22
  film all songs like kind of in a row in a very cinematic way.
• 13:28
  We did it in Poland with the company that is working with films in TV
• 13:33
  in general. We found a really great partner there. Of course we didn't
• 13:37
  do another lot of the rings, you can't expect that, but it was
• 13:43
  something that the music gets you there. You know, when you have an
• 13:52
  image around, it's somehow more appealing, and when you're talking about this kind
• 13:56
  of cinematographic music, it's really like it needs the image. And at the
• 14:03
  moment, we are currently discussing with many cinemas actually all around the world globally
• 14:07
  to do the pre listening party for the fans that they can go to the
• 14:13
  cinemas and really listen to this album with Adobe atmosph mixed that we prepare album
• 14:18
  so it's already happening. It's happening and it's going to happen in many many
• 14:22
  countries. That the fans get to hear the album with the Dolby Atmosphex in
• 14:28
  the cinema, that we beat screens with the images film. It's a wonderful
• 14:35
  thing because it's some bit. It's something completely different than I've never done before,
• 14:39
  but it really suits on this project very nice. Well before we started
• 14:46
  doing three different Spotify playlists for heavy listeners to get to know the artist better,
• 14:50
  so using songs from anywhere in your career, so it could be with
• 14:54
  night Wish, it could be a solo stuff anything from your career, but
• 14:56
  one for a playlist to get the party started, one for a playlist to
• 15:01
  save your marriage, and one for a playlist it could potentially end your marriage.
• 15:05
  Oh my god, save an end, Holy cod That is really really
• 15:13
  tough. Marriage playlist song one song, one song of yours to add to
• 15:20
  the playlist. Okay, the end the marriage. Love to hate would be
• 15:30
  the end of the marriage. Great, save the marriage. It will be
• 15:35
  you and I you and beautiful he about one to get the party started?
• 15:41
  Yeah, have you got start? Ah? That is dead promises, dead
• 15:48
  promises sounds like a party song. Beautiful. Okay, Well, thanks very
• 15:56
  much of your time that it's been an absolute pleasure speaking with you. The
• 15:58
  album Dark Christmas is that November tenth, and from what I've heard of it,
• 16:00
  she is another another magnificent effort from you. So keep it up and
• 16:06
  keep small and hopefully we'll see you at this side of the world. One
• 16:07
  day said thank you so much. Working very hard to get down to Australia.
• 16:14
  I mean really, I've seen many bands they've gotten their first ever opportunities
• 16:18
  to go there recently, so I'm really having my high hopes that this will
• 16:22
  happen in the near future. Me too. I'll speak to some people the
• 16:25
  right now and I'll see if you can push your process along for you.
• 16:29
  P Perfect, Thank you so much, Happy dok Christmas to you, Thank
• 16:33
  you too. Bye for the snow. Listen Jolly had So with the corn
• 17:47
  car pipe Bota Botons into Eys made it out of fasty the smooth Man is
• 18:15
  Suparito that he said he was made of snow. The Children show he came
• 18:26
  to live one. How he came to life one for the most sunmt CP,
• 18:40
  the all of that Y had wholly pasted on his heart. He began
• 18:51
  to tanser step the snow man solid fee and the children's say. He had
• 19:15
  loved that way, just to say, as say, we keep