Seura 6.10.2006

czarnycharakter · Wysłany: Czw 15:32, 07 Cze 2007 Temat postu: Seura 6.10.2006

TARJA TURUNEN: Only now I have time to grieve my mother's death

A song to a mother's memory
Tarja Turunen sings on her forthcoming album to her late mother, whose lost she didn't even have time to cry during the most hectic Nightwish years.

It's a rarely beautiful and warm autumn day outside. When we step inside the dim studio, it feels like jumping a few months ahead in time. Red elves on the walls, silver braids and red balls shine from the Christmas tree. It's Christmas.
"This is Marcelo's suprise for me" Tarja Turunen says with smile. "When we started to record the Christmas album, I wondered aloud how I'll get into the mood."
The studio is familiar: there Tarja has recorded almost all the material she's sung in Finland. From August she has been recording her Christmas album that will be released in November.
"We have a good team and enough time. It's good to work with Esa Nieminen. I did a single with him a few years ago, so I'm not nervous around him. I'm always nervous when making new stuff, when you try to do your best, you'd rather outdo yourself."
The Christmas album starts a new stage in Tarja's life. She will come out as herself - not as the singer of Nightwish anymore.
"The upcoming Christmas album will be versatile and diverse in style. The music will be calm and warm. It will include the kind of music I'd like to listen on Christmas. It has a few classical songs, Finnish carols, a few new songs and carols that are known all over the world."

The most important song to Tarja is 'You Would Have Loved This' that she found from USA. It tells about the death of someone close to you. And how this person who passed away loved this time of year. Not just Christmas, but 'this' time of year.
"The lyrics are so touching that I cried when I heard it for the first time", Tarja says. "It brought my mother that I lost close to me. I'm singing it to her."
Tarja hasn't talked about her mother's death before. It's been three years. Before she passed away, she'd been sick for a long time. She died of cancer.
"Only now I have time to grieve. I still have moments, when I miss her so much. She was so strong, but sensitive", Tarja tells. "Now I've had the time to stop and think of what happened, think back. Only now I can talk about her death. It's still hasn't been that long."
"On the other hand through the longing there are also flashes of tender memories of good moments. At times I have a good feeling mixed with yearning and bittersweetness."
Tarja ponders, how people are forced to push sorrow and other unpleasant thoughts to the deepest corners of their minds. There they wait for a suitable time to come out - and a person should allow their core the possibility. "I've had to manage too."
"I think about how many people are in their work lives running a rat race, where it's impossible to get away from. The pressure coming from the outside is enormous and in a competition situation a person has to do more than they're able to do. They have to consciously push their worries and sorrows aside."

Tarja admits that it's sometimes easy for a person to escape themselves for example to work. You have to dismantle the sorrow someway or another, taking on too much everyday life for example.
"It's easy to escape to work. In the instent time of need friends are really important. They can be there for you and help. The actual grief work you have to do on your own. We have a huge amount of strength in us when we need it."
Tarja is now for the first time alone in the public eye.
"I'm again in a beginging and alone, but I don't feel lonely or an outsider. I have a lot of people around me who give me strenght. I'm gushing with new energy and I look into the future with a hapy mind. I feel that I can give my listeners even more. Only my solo album next year will show what is Tarja like."
The core of a North-Karelian girl comes out in a sweet dialect word.
"I'm happy, when I get to do things on my own. I'm after all the strongest when I stand on my own two feet."
(note: it was originally mie which is a form of minä (= I) that is used in some dialects.)

Tarja says classical music is her strongest base, but admits having a rock spirit.
"Classical music is my vent-hole, but I might be at my strongest in rock. I got to know it quite profoundly in nine years in Nightwish. My music will probably have elements from metal music. I find strenght in colours, tones and emotions from it."
Tarja is known as an exceptionally unconditional artist, who doesn't accept anything half-finished from others or from herself.
"If I feel that I fail in the studio I punish myself strictly. I'm a person, who has to beat myself to the final limit of my talent. I think you can always do better. I don't want to think I'm ready, because then the development stops there."
"Now I have the courage to listen to my old recordings. I can be joyful of my own development. It's relativly easy for a singer to hear one's own progress immediately."

Tarja isn't shy of her roots in Kitee. She's proud of the area she grow up in.
"Unfortunately seldom I have time to go to Kitee. Both my brothers still live there. My dad lives in Joensuu. It's no use to travel to North-Karelia for a day, you have to have time to stay there. Luckily my brothers and other important people come to visit us in Kuusankoski more often."
"I never stop to admire the beauty of the nature in North-Karelia. I can only sigh to how beautiful and clean our land is. All the hillocky landscapes, lakes, ponds and forests. I love them."
"I like the directness in East-Finland. You can go to a friend's house without ceremonies. Just pop in and ask to put the coffee on."
Tarja and her husband Marcelo have a home in Finland in Kuusankoski. The most important thing there are friends, who were in a way inherited from a cantor they know, who helped to find the house. A dear place is also the home in Buenos Aires in Argentina.
"The culture is totally different there, but I really feel like I'm home. Openness, showing emotions and talking about stuff immediately do me good. I'm basically a pretty shy and reserved person. I'm nervous around people and that's why I don't easily make friends. The latino culture gives me a lot."
There has been a lot of specilation in the media of Marcelo's part in Nightwish's conflicts. Tarja stands by her spouse.
"Marcelo is my best supporter. Without his aid, encouragement and the srenght he's given me, I wouldn't be here right now, so strong", Tarja says. "Being with your partner 24/7 is foreign to the Finnish culture. But from my heart I can say that we're extremely happy together. People don't probably understand how well we are together. No one can know how strong the connection between us is."
In the beginning Tarja and Marcelo tried to spend more time apart, but it didn't suit them.
"It's good like this. And it doesn't mean that we live one life. We both have the freedom to think and act, but also the possibility to share everything immediately. We give each other enough space."
Family is a mutual dream for Tarja and Marcelo, but now is not the right time.
"We've been together six years. We've sometimes joked that 'the man is starting to get some years behind him'. But the clock isn't ticking yet. Everything happens on it's own time, that's how it goes. You don't just order babies, but I hope and believe that when the time is right we will have children."

Tarja is a warm and sensitive person. Her dark, gothic appearance and serious face creates some distance, that can be interpreted as arrogance or pride.
There hasn't beem a picture of Tarja where she's giggling like a child or blowing soap-bubbles. In the sofa drones her soft laughter, she talks freely and happily, but in pictures she's a distant artist Tarja Turunen. She wants to remain a workrole to save herself.
The photographer admires Tarja's face, which has an almost perfect skeletal structure, and her being so photogenic. She could be a model.
"But I'm ten centimeters too short for that", she laughs.
Do you feel like a star Tarja Turunen?
"I'll probably never get used to people following me with their eyes and whispering. I know they don't mean anything bad with it, it's just natural and spontaneous curiosity. Then I remind myself that people know me as a performer. It's a necessary part of a public occupation and you have to adapt with that. It doesn't torment me."
"I don't feel like a star. I'm happy about the world wide success, but it doesn't change me as a person", Tarja points out. "I'm still the same Tarja, a lot developed but still incomplete. I feel privileged, because I get to do something I really enjoy. I also know that I haven't gotten anything for free. Success demands tremendously hard work and you still need some luck."

Tarja wonders about herself as a person.
"I'm a typical leo and I have more fire in me than Marcelo has. He's more balanced. In every day life I don't want to be the center, but I clear my own space", Tarja says."I feel emotions really strongly. I feel as fiercely thankfulness and pain, love and distress. Marcelo is also a very emotional person, but he feels things more calmly."
Tarja also says that Marcelo has taught her a lot about openness. "If at home I learned not to talk about things, with Marcelo I have learned to open up. He wants to get the cat on table right away - we talk things through immediately."
"During the last few years I might have become more careful than before. When I make friends, I give my all."