Tarja Turunen can remember the first time she set foot on Antigua. It was 2007, and a “chaotic” period in the Finnish soprano’s life: two years after her very public, acrimonious split from symphonic giants Nightwish, the band with whom she made her name, and one year after the launch of her solo career. What she needed, more than anything, was anonymity. Immediately, she fell in love with the beautiful scenery, easy-going way of life and the overwhelming sense of seclusion.
“You will find a beach where you will be alone the whole day. It’s so chilled and so positive,” she says over Zoom from her current home in the Andalusia region of southern Spain, the memory of her first visit to the Caribbean still vivid 16 years on. “It was like, ‘Wow. I love this. I can be no one here.’”
By the end of the holiday, she and her husband-manager, Marcelo Cabuli, had bought a holiday house facing out over Antigua’s turquoise sea and forest-covered mountains. Since then, it’s been her second home and her happy place, as well as the source of inspiration for her long-awaited, all-star project, Outlanders. An album of the same name, which was mostly written and mixed on the island over the last 10-plus years, was released in June 2023 and is unlike anything we’ve heard from Tarja before.
Working with her long-term friend and Tubular Beats collaborator, EDM DJ Torsten Stenzel, it sees her pair her soaring, operatic vocals with the sort of pulsating, blissful ambient, proggy electronica you’d hear in a beachside bar. The album’s guitars come courtesy of some of modern prog’s most influential players, with Mike Oldfield, Trevor
Rabin and Marillion’s Steve Rothery among a star-studded guest list featuring on different tracks. The result is miles apart from the orchestral drama we’ve come to expect from Tarja’s solo work – it’s a chilled-out, sundrenched love letter to Antigua.
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1625747790/1703838123/articles/TRtMENKkK1703850019033/7211122823.jpg]
“The energy on the island [has] always made me create,” she says. “The nature. The people. Antiguan history. The ocean. I wanted the listeners to find that kind of inner peace while listening to these songs.”
Turunen and Stenzel met in Ibiza in 2006, where they had worked together during the writing sessions for her solo debut, My Winter Storm. By the time they started Outlanders, Stenzel had relocated to Antigua and Turunen had taken up residence in Argentina.
“We were people living in countries other than our home countries,” the vocalist says, explaining that the theme of belonging runs throughout their self-titled album. “I have always felt like home is where your heart is really. Where you feel your heart is safe.”
The seeds for Outlanders were first sown in 2010 when Tarja wrote a song she knew didn’t fit with the icy material she was creating for her day job.
“I wanted to use it and I couldn’t find a way how,” she remembers.
Back then, she had only had one brush with electronic music – working with German producer Schiller on 2005 club track Tired Of Being Alone, an experience she had enjoyed, and wanted to explore further.
“[Electronic music] has always been something that has appealed to me,” she says. “It felt very natural.”
She took the new song to Stenzel and together they turned it into Outlanders’ dreamy title track.
“I didn’t feel like I needed to write a certain kind of song. It was just a mindflow: free and easy,” she recalls, revealing that she found the challenge extremely liberating.
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1625747790/1703838123/articles/TRtMENKkK1703850019033/1022220113.jpg]
The result truly is mesmerising. It includes sublime guitar work from Rata Blanca’s Walter Giardino, whose soaring solo evokes the sensation of the weight of the world dropping from your shoulders. It’s a soft ambient haze that rises and falls like lapping waves and sets the mood for further electronic material. Although Giardino appears on three of the eventual album’s tracks, Turunen invited a revolving cast of guitarists to the contribute to the rest of the project. She credits Return To Tunguska, a collaboration between Alan Parsons and David Gilmour from the former’s 2004 A Valid Path album, for giving her the idea.
“I had a long, long list of names,” she says with a laugh, explaining that for each song, she had considered the style and sound of each musician before approaching them directly with a demo.
The finished album features 10 guitarists: alongside Oldfield, Rabin and Rothery are Walter Giardino, Joe Satriani, Michael Jackson guitarist Jennifer Batten, jazz fusion artist Al Di Meola, Living Colour’s Vernon Reid, Ron ‘Bumblefoot’ Thal and ex-Megadeth man Marty Friedman. The first person to agree to the project was Trevor Rabin, whose expansive solos merge with Stenzel’s Balearic beats and piano on the gently euphoric Closer To The Sky.
“I’ve been a huge fan of Trevor’s work with Yes and as a film composer,” she says with a smile. “I felt like I’d always known this man. He is such a gentleman; such a sweet person and he came up with incredible things.” While she held back from being too prescriptive about how she wanted each musician to perform (“I wanted to give them freedom to express themselves”) some songs, like the spiritual Echoes featuring Jennifer Batt...
“You will find a beach where you will be alone the whole day. It’s so chilled and so positive,” she says over Zoom from her current home in the Andalusia region of southern Spain, the memory of her first visit to the Caribbean still vivid 16 years on. “It was like, ‘Wow. I love this. I can be no one here.’”
By the end of the holiday, she and her husband-manager, Marcelo Cabuli, had bought a holiday house facing out over Antigua’s turquoise sea and forest-covered mountains. Since then, it’s been her second home and her happy place, as well as the source of inspiration for her long-awaited, all-star project, Outlanders. An album of the same name, which was mostly written and mixed on the island over the last 10-plus years, was released in June 2023 and is unlike anything we’ve heard from Tarja before.
Working with her long-term friend and Tubular Beats collaborator, EDM DJ Torsten Stenzel, it sees her pair her soaring, operatic vocals with the sort of pulsating, blissful ambient, proggy electronica you’d hear in a beachside bar. The album’s guitars come courtesy of some of modern prog’s most influential players, with Mike Oldfield, Trevor
Rabin and Marillion’s Steve Rothery among a star-studded guest list featuring on different tracks. The result is miles apart from the orchestral drama we’ve come to expect from Tarja’s solo work – it’s a chilled-out, sundrenched love letter to Antigua.
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1625747790/1703838123/articles/TRtMENKkK1703850019033/7211122823.jpg]
“The energy on the island [has] always made me create,” she says. “The nature. The people. Antiguan history. The ocean. I wanted the listeners to find that kind of inner peace while listening to these songs.”
Turunen and Stenzel met in Ibiza in 2006, where they had worked together during the writing sessions for her solo debut, My Winter Storm. By the time they started Outlanders, Stenzel had relocated to Antigua and Turunen had taken up residence in Argentina.
“We were people living in countries other than our home countries,” the vocalist says, explaining that the theme of belonging runs throughout their self-titled album. “I have always felt like home is where your heart is really. Where you feel your heart is safe.”
The seeds for Outlanders were first sown in 2010 when Tarja wrote a song she knew didn’t fit with the icy material she was creating for her day job.
“I wanted to use it and I couldn’t find a way how,” she remembers.
Back then, she had only had one brush with electronic music – working with German producer Schiller on 2005 club track Tired Of Being Alone, an experience she had enjoyed, and wanted to explore further.
“[Electronic music] has always been something that has appealed to me,” she says. “It felt very natural.”
She took the new song to Stenzel and together they turned it into Outlanders’ dreamy title track.
“I didn’t feel like I needed to write a certain kind of song. It was just a mindflow: free and easy,” she recalls, revealing that she found the challenge extremely liberating.
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1625747790/1703838123/articles/TRtMENKkK1703850019033/1022220113.jpg]
The result truly is mesmerising. It includes sublime guitar work from Rata Blanca’s Walter Giardino, whose soaring solo evokes the sensation of the weight of the world dropping from your shoulders. It’s a soft ambient haze that rises and falls like lapping waves and sets the mood for further electronic material. Although Giardino appears on three of the eventual album’s tracks, Turunen invited a revolving cast of guitarists to the contribute to the rest of the project. She credits Return To Tunguska, a collaboration between Alan Parsons and David Gilmour from the former’s 2004 A Valid Path album, for giving her the idea.
“I had a long, long list of names,” she says with a laugh, explaining that for each song, she had considered the style and sound of each musician before approaching them directly with a demo.
The finished album features 10 guitarists: alongside Oldfield, Rabin and Rothery are Walter Giardino, Joe Satriani, Michael Jackson guitarist Jennifer Batten, jazz fusion artist Al Di Meola, Living Colour’s Vernon Reid, Ron ‘Bumblefoot’ Thal and ex-Megadeth man Marty Friedman. The first person to agree to the project was Trevor Rabin, whose expansive solos merge with Stenzel’s Balearic beats and piano on the gently euphoric Closer To The Sky.
“I’ve been a huge fan of Trevor’s work with Yes and as a film composer,” she says with a smile. “I felt like I’d always known this man. He is such a gentleman; such a sweet person and he came up with incredible things.” While she held back from being too prescriptive about how she wanted each musician to perform (“I wanted to give them freedom to express themselves”) some songs, like the spiritual Echoes featuring Jennifer Batt...
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Prog (Digital) - 1 Issue, Issue 146