By Carl Begai
Nightwish bassist / vocalist Marko Hietala was in the business of making music long before keyboardist Tuomas Holopainen launched the band in 1996. Back in 1984 – almost 20 years before he would join Nightwish, in 2001 – Hietala and his brother Zachary founded Tarot, a metal band that would find underground popularity in their native Finland but remain relatively obscure internationally until the Crows Fly Black album in 2007. Nightwish’s rise to mega-fame is in the history books, with Hietala as one of the players that made their 2004 album, Once, an international breakthrough. And now, after three Nightwish studio albums under his belt with a fourth on the horizon, he has released Pyre Of The Black Heart, a low-key solo record. It originally surfaced as a Finnish version – Mustan Sydämen Rovio – issued in the spring of 2019; news of an English version hit later in the year with an early 2020 release planned as Hietala, record label Nuclear Blast, and the rest of the world gear up for the new Nightwish record, Human. :II: Nature., due in April of this year.
“I’ve been working on this album for the last couple of years, but we didn’t get into any hype for it until we were ready to put it out,” Hietala explains. “That made it easier because we didn’t have to deal with any extra pressure. There is always some pressure that you put on yourself when you’re releasing something new, of course, but we didn’t have any of that from the outside, which was good. It’s been a long time dream as a musician to do something like this, and now was the time. Nightwish was taking a sabbatical and I had enough material. Some of the pieces go back as much as 15 years, but most of the songs became concrete over the last four years or so. Then, two-and-a-half years ago we started putting this together. There were a few things that got in the way as we were making this, but it all came together.”
Continue reading BraveWords Interview: MARKO HIETALA – Feeling The Burn