Trivia / Nightwish (Band)

• Creative Differences: The band's official reason for dismissing Anette Olzon in the middle of the Imaginaerum tour. Olzon has since accused them of firing her because she learned she was pregnant mid-tour (discovered while she was in the hospital with the flu), which the band denies.
• Creator Backlash:
  • "Bye Bye Beautiful" is essentially an extended Take That! to Tarja Turunen after she was kicked out of the band. After using it as the opening song for the Dark Passion Play World Tour, in 2009 the band announced they would never perform it live again. Tuomas also reportedly sometimes has their sound engineer mute the vocal track in his earpiece when the band performs "The Poet and the Pendulum" because he wrote it as self-therapy for a severe bout of depression. On the Vehicle of Spirit live DVD, you can see Emppu and Marco checking on him while they play the song.
  • Tuomas doesn't think too highly of Angel Fall First, and has more or less admitted that it's just a full-length demo.
• Creator Breakdown: Century Child, Once, and Dark Passion Play contain a lot of songs pertaining to death, depression, unrequited love/obsession etc. Tuomas wrote the 14-minute epic "The Poet and the Pendulum" in the midst of a nasty bout of depression, and has called Dark Passion Play "the album that saved [his] life".
  Today, in the year of our Lord 2005
  Tuomas was called from the cares of the world
  He stopped crying at the end of the most beautiful day
  His music had too long been without silence
• Genre Popularizer: They were one of the earliest, and are still arguably the biggest, names in Symphonic Power Metal and are known to have inspired a number of other bands and performers to have taken up the subgenre. Epica's lead vocalist Simone Simons in particular decided to study classical singing after listening to Tarja on Oceanborn.
• He Also Did: In addition to playing and writing Symphonic Metal for Nightwish and the supergroup For My Pain, Tuomas Holopainen also did a Concept Album based on The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck.
• Milestone Celebration: The Decades compilation album, released in 2018 to (belatedly) celebrate the band's 20th anniversary.
• Permanent Placeholder:
  • After Anette Olzon was dismissed from Nightwish in the middle of a live tour, Floor Jansen of the band ReVamp was called in to replace Olzon for the remainder of the tour. However, Floor got such a positive reception that the rest of the band decided to permanently install her as the new lead vocalist.
  • Something similar happened with Jukka Koskinen. They originally brought him on as a touring bassist after Marko Hietala quit, but decided to make him a permanent member following their first year touring again after the COVID-19 Pandemic.
• The Pete Best: Sami Vänskä played bass through Wishmaster but is all but forgotten in favor of now-former Lead Bassist Marko Hietala.
• Schedule Slip: Human. :II: Nature came out right at the start of the COVID-19 Pandemic, forcing the album tour to be delayed for two years—during which Tuomas wrote a whole new album out of sheer boredom.
• Trolling Creator: Troy in one of the countdown videos for Human. :II: Nature, which came out early in the COVID-19 Pandemic. He starts to explain how the song "Harvest" contains the secret to the whole album, then is told to put a facemask on and is made The Unintelligible when he "reveals" the secret.
• What Could Have Been: Elize Ryd, now the lead singer of Amaranthe, auditioned to replace Tarja before starting her current band, using the song "Nemo". On September 28, 2012, she brought it full circle when she performed that song, among others, with Nightwish as an emergency replacement for the flu-stricken Anette Olzon.

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