In early 2007, a small, select group of journalists were sent to Petrax Studios in Hollola, 100 km North of Helsinki. Their mission was top secret: to report on recording sessions for Nightwish’s then-unannounced sixth album, Dark Passion Play, and interview their new singer, Anette Olzon.
“It was in the wintertime, and there was a lot of snow. We went out on sleds, Tuomas was driving, and I was in the back,” remembers Anette. She fondly calls the remote sessions, where she and band leader and songwriter, Tuomas Holopainen, holed up with just the studio techs and cabin staff, like “living in a camp for three weeks”.
“I took long walks in the snowy forest, which gave a lot of inspiration, and you could take breaks,” she adds. “So we had no pressure.” Keeping her identity a secret was a covert and time-consuming operation.
“That was a hell of [a lot of] work!” Tuomas said in a 2007 interview on the Nightwish forum. “We always avoided being seen together at the airport. Inside the plane, we were sitting totally apart and distant from each other. When [Anette] needed to come to Finland, we booked different hotels, with different names.”
Then again, it’s no surprise that Tuomas wanted to record Nightwish’s next musical chapter off-grid. To say the cycle for their previous album, 2004’s Once, had been a whirlwind would be putting it mildly. The record had turned the symphonic metallers into superstars, but behind the scenes, inter-band relationships had reached an all-time low. On 21 October 2005, after a huge, triumphant show in Helsinki, the band fired their then-singer, Tarja Turunen, via an open letter which they immediately posted to the Internet.
We booked different hotels, with different names
Tuomas Holopainen
The drama caused a furore, with even the then-Finnish prime minister, Matti Vanhanen, giving his opinion (“I’m not for either side,” he said. “They are young people and hopefully will manage to go forward in this difficult situation”). Looking back, Anette admits she wasn’t aware of just how much things had kicked off when she took the job.
“I didn’t know what I was getting myself into. I was quite naive, I guess,” she says. “I didn’t know how big the band was. And I think that’s my personality; if I want to do something, I jump on board.” She sighs. “Then, of course, I saw immediately that they had done this letter, and it was not so nice.”
Immediately, she found herself embroiled in melodrama. “If anything about [Tarja] came up on the tour bus, I didn’t want to be involved,” she says firmly. “It felt awkward for me to be in the situation.”
Anette on stage with Nightwish in 2008 (Image credit: Gary Wolstenholme/Redfern via Getty)
Released on 26 September 2007, stacked with cinematic bombast and dynamic musical statements, Dark Passion Play remains one of the best albums in Nightwish’s discography. Immediately, one song in particular, Bye Bye Beautiful, caught the attention of fans. Glossy and frantic and containing the lyric: “Still fresh from the red-hot blade of your words”, it didn’t take long for fans to figure out they were listening to symphonic metal’s first diss track, a personal, gloves-off, flip-off to Tarja.
“I talked to Tuomas about that,” Anette admits. From the start, she says was uncomfortable singing a song so personal and emotionally charged. While the lyrics in her verses are pretty obscure, Marko’s chorus is far more direct: “Did you ever hear what I told you? Did you ever read what I wrote you? … You chose the long road, but we’ll be waiting.”
It was important to Anette that Bye Bye Beautiful didn’t define her identity as the band’s newest member. “In the live shows, if you watch the YouTube [videos], you will see that I turn around when he sings his part,” she continues. It was a way to distance herself from the situation, and a move designed to show respect towards Tarja, with whom she has a positive relationship.
I turn around when Marko sings his part
Anette Olzen
“Me and Tarja have talked on Instagram. I really love Tarja,” she adds firmly. “I’ve always stood up for her. I think she knows that. It was hard. It wasn’t the nicest situation for me either.”
For Tuomas, the song was a purge. “This is the reason I became a songwriter,” he told Faceculture in 2007. “I need to drill a hole into my head to let all the demons out. This song had to be done because I was feeling so bad about everything. It still is a huge part of my life, everything that happened, so of course I needed to do a song about what happened.”
Despite Bye Bye Beautiful’s direct message, he insisted his intentions had been pure with the song; it had been a form of therapy. “I hope no one gets offended by this song because it’s not a song about hatred at all,” he continued. “It sounds more aggressive than the meaning behind the song actually is.”
It was more, he says, about getting closure than pointing fingers. “For me, it’s just a farewell, a song about frustration and bittersweet feelings. It’s a song about a really sad happening where no one was really innocent.”
Despite her misgivings, Anette understands why Bye Bye Beautiful needed to exist. “Sometimes, Tuomas didn’t tell me what the songs were about, and sometimes I had to ask him, because he writes a lot in metaphors,” she says. “I need to know, when I sing, what I am singing about. Of course, with Bye Bye Beauitful, I knew what it was about. He was fully clear.”
She now sees herself as a narrator for Tuomas’ pain: “I think, for him, it was important to have that song there and a statement for him.”
By their own admission, Nightwish had been looking for something different when they started looking for their new singer. “The only thing we knew for sure was we did not want another classically trained operatic singer in the band,” Tuomas said in a 2007 interview with About Heavy Metal. “I personally think we hit the jackpot with Anette. She has a storyteller’s voice and doesn’t sound like Tarja at all.”
We hit the jackpot with Anette
Tuomas Holopainen
Even so, Dark Passion Play was something of a baptism of fire for the singer. Her first tour with Nightwish was their biggest and most intensive to date, spanning almost 200 shows over two years. Meanwhile, on her arrival at Petrax Studios, Tuomas had already written the full album, laying down the orchestral and choir parts during an extravagant eight-day session at London’s Abbey Road studios, at a cost of over 500,000 Euros. It meant that Anette had very little say in the songs.
“As a singer, you’d normally want to be able to change the key of the songs so that it fits your voice,” she says. “Many of the songs were really high. I had to work hard on [album opener] The Poet and the Pendulum, and For The Heart I Once Had is really high too. I’m not like a high soprano, I’m like a Meso soprano. I have my limits.”
For some fans who had followed the band since their inception, that switch-up between Tarja’s icy, operatic vocals and Anette’s warm, sweet belt was too stark a contrast, and some of them took it too far.
“I got hate letters sent to my home,” says Anette. She acknowledges now that reading YouTube comments, where many fans were often voicing cruel opinions and debating the differences between the two singers, had been detrimental to her mental health, leading to struggles with anxiety and panic attacks.
“That made me lose a lot of self-esteem,” she continues. “There were a lot of bad comments about my voice, that I couldn’t sing.”
Nightwish soak in some applause in 2008 (Image credit: Getty Images)
These days she protects herself, taking medication for her anxiety and avoiding comments on social media: “I think it would have helped me a lot [back then] if I hadn’t read all the stuff [people] wrote.”
Nightwish stopped playing Bye Bye Beautiful in their live shows in 2008, with Tuomas calling the drama and song “dead and buried” in a 2009 interview. It’s the right move. While writing the track might have provided Tuomas with closure, the song itself felt catty even then, while many fans have argued the song was unnecessary given the band set out their reasons for Tarja’s sacking in their 2005 public letter.
Anette’s tenure would come to a similarly dramatic end. On October 1, 2012, during their Imaginaerum world tour, she was fired and replaced by current singer Floor Jansen, later claiming her sacking was because she was pregnant, a statement her former bandmates denied. Even so, she looks back on her time with the symphonic metallers with great fondness.
This summer, she set off on a European tour, playing her favourite Nightwish tracks from the two albums she sang on: Dark Passion Play and 2011’s Imaginaerum. And Bye Bye Beautiful, she says, will be part of the setlist.
“[For me] that song has nothing to do with Tarja,” she says. “It could be a Bye Bye Beautiful to anyone.” And while she says she hasn’t spoken to Tuomas since her acrimonious departure, she’d love to one day reunite with the band, with members both past and present.
“I cherish Nightwish with all the ups and downs, and I wish we could all be friends again,” she smiles. “I hope one day we will meet backstage and we can have a big hug again. I hope they feel the same. And maybe we could do a big show with all the singers.”
