More than two decades after one of the most bitter band splits, Tarja Turunen has pinpointed her single regret about the way it all unraveled and it isn’t the one most people would guess. Looking back on her 2005 exit from Nightwish, the singer says she wishes she’d been far less forgiving. Handed the same situation again, she’d have used every legal weapon at her disposal to make life miserable for her former bandmates.
In a new interview with Metal Hammer, Turunen explained that she had the leverage to drag the band through a prolonged legal ordeal but chose to walk away instead:
“It’s very sad how everything ended up [with Nightwish], but the thing that I would have done differently is, I probably should have put them through hell. I had all my rights, there were contracts, and they would have been in deep s**t for a long time if I had done that, according to my rights, but I didn’t. I just decided to move on and leave.”
The circumstances of her departure remain notorious. Turunen was dismissed at the close of Nightwish‘s 2005 tour, informed via an open letter that the band published on its website at the very same moment. In that letter, her bandmates wrote: “To you, unfortunately, business, money, and things that have nothing to do with emotions have become much more important.”
According to Turunen, the fallout that followed was calculated and cruel. She told Metal Hammer: “What followed was their really great planning, how they wanted to destroy me publicly. That was something I never expected. It was nasty.”
The scrutiny, she said, became unbearable in her home country, driving her to leave Finland altogether: “It was an insane period [after the split], and in a small country like Finland, my face was covering the tabloids for three weeks or so. I left my home country. I had to. I went down to Buenos Aires.”
The damage, by her account, rippled out well beyond herself: “It was tough, because it affected so many more people than just me. It affected my family, my friends. Everybody was destroyed. It took me a long time to gain trust in people again. But luckily, I have amazing relationships and a long-lasting marriage with my husband. My family, my friends were there for me in that very hard period.”
The band has offered its own perspective on the breakup over the years. Nightwish keyboardist and leader Tuomas Holopainen once described the choice to part ways with Turunen as “the most difficult thing I ever had to do.” Turunen, for her part, has said in the past that the manner of her removal proved her former bandmates were never truly her friends, adding: “Maybe one day I’ll forgive, but I will never forget.” She has consistently played down the prospect of any reunion, most notably after a brief 2017 onstage reunion with then-Nightwish bassist and vocalist Marko Hietala at a Raskasta Joulua concert in Hämeenlinna, Finland, while noting that she and Holopainen have at least remained in occasional contact.
The bad blood also spilled into the courts. Nightwish‘s authorized biography, Once Upon a Nightwish: The Official Biography 1996-2006, was published in Finnish in 2006 and in English three years later. Turunen‘s husband, Marcelo Cabuli, along with his business partners, later sued the publisher, Like Kustannus Oy, and the book’s author, Marko “Mape” Ollila, for defamation, arguing that it contained false accusations that had caused them personal and financial harm. The book had laid blame on Cabuli for the events that led to Turunen‘s expulsion. In 2011, however, the Helsinki District Court threw out the case, ruling that the book, which addressed Cabuli across only a handful of its 380 pages, hadn’t damaged his work or reputation in South America, and that Ollila had not set out to portray him maliciously.
Speaking recently with Albert Perera of Metal Hammer Spain, Turunen reflected on how much happier she is today compared to her Nightwish years.
When Perera noted that she seems far more content touring on her own than she did two decades ago, the singer agreed without hesitation: “Yeah, I am,” Tarja said at the time. “I have some colleagues. I remember, for example, Sharon Den Adel from Within Temptation. When I was touring with them — it was also a little bit more than one year ago, maybe almost two years ago — she was asking me, ‘How on earth you are doing so many shows all the time, Tarja? You’re touring all the time.’ And so she was asking, ‘How the hell you work so much? You are on tour all the time.’ And I’m, like, ‘Yes, I am.’ But I also really do enjoy that. I really enjoy, and I’m like a glowing light bulb on my shows. I’m really happy. Very happy. And so I’m happy to hear that you saw that in me, because it’s really real.”
She went on to describe the close-knit team that surrounds her now, even drawing a contrast with her past:
“Of course it’s hard to be on the road. As a mother, leave the home door and close it behind me, leave my family behind, be weeks away from home. It’s hard. I miss my family. It’s hard physically to tour and be on the road. But I have the best team of people. I have really good guys with me. I have a beautiful crew, musicians. We all are like a happy bunch family. I don’t have a band, but I feel like I have a band with me. So they are there for me, and it feels great. And they are there to support me, and if I have a sh**ty day, like everybody does one day, they are there to give me a shoulder to cry on. And as well it was with Marko. We had good days and bad days, and we were there for each other. So it’s very important for me to be able to feel this happiness, because I would never, ever, ever, ever be willing to go back where I was with the days in Nightwish. It was so miserable. It was not happy times. Why? You do music — it should be happy. I want the people to come to my shows, and they also go back home happy. Yeah, having that energy is absolutely important.”
These days, Turunen is focused firmly forward. Her latest album, Frisson Noir, arrived on June 12 via earMUSIC. The label has billed it as the heaviest release of her career and “a powerful statement of identity, strength and belonging.”
