Tuomas Holopainen reveals new information about “Yesterwynde”

Tuomas Holopainen, songwriter and keyboardist of the band Nightwish, revealed some new information about Nightwish’s upcoming album “Yesterwynde” in an interview with the German Radio Station Rock Antenne.

Tuomas Holopainen said that Nightwish wants to tell “a story which celebrates time, memories, humanity and mortality” (Tuomas Holopainen) with this new album. The new music will feature the topic evolution, which is a common topic in the music of this band in the last years. The songwriter finds it comforting to think that “we are part of an unbroken chain of human beings” (Tuomas Holopainen).

“It must be an unbroken chain of generations for millions of years for you to exist and all our ancestors. They have had their own stories, their dreams, their sorrows and they don’t exist anymore except as atoms scattered all over the universe and there there’s something profoundly comforting in that fact and so that’s where the connection between the past and present comes to be and that’s what we want to celebrate on this album.”

Tuomas Holopainen

The name of the new Nightwish album “Yesterwynde” describes the feeling of the theme of the album, what Tuomas described in the words above. The name came to be as Tuomas watched a YouTube clip, which portrayed footage from the late 19th century, which had been coloured.

“It made such a huge impact on me because suddenly it wasn’t like this distant past, another universe, another world. It was actually like it was being filmed yesterday, even though it was so long ago and it gave me this really funny tickle in the back of my head… like what’s going on? I’m feeling something that I cannot explain and since I cannot explain it, I don’t have a word for it, so we have to invent a word to describe this feeling – Yesterwynde”. Tuomas Holopainen

Nightwish’s typical sounds and familiar elements will still be in the new album – the instruments, the two vocalists, the three different choirs and the orchestra. The album however will feature also new elements, for example some 80ties vibes in some of the songs (track nr. 4 and nr. 7).

Tuomas Holopainen talked a lot about this new track, nr. 7, “The Children of ‘Ata”. The song is about six children that got stranded in the 1960ties on the uninhabited island Ata in the Southern Pacific and survived there alone for 15 months.

“I just thought that this is such an inspiring beautiful true story that the world needs to hear […], because it’s a very common conception that if you take a bunch of human beings and put them together in an isolated place, they become savages in the most horrible Darwinian way. The children of Ata are are a perfect example that this is not the case and there’s also a lesson to be learned there somewhere that if they got along, I think we could all get along on this planet.” Tuomas Holopainen

The new Nightwish album “Yesterwynde” will feature 12 songs.

1. Yesterwynde
2. An Ocean of Strange Islands
3. The Antikythera Mechanism
4. The Day Of…
5. Perfume of the Timeless
6. Sway
7. The Children of ‘Ata
8. Something Whispered Follow Me
9. Spider Silk
10. Hiraeth
11. The Weave
12. Lanternlight

“There is so much that is hidden beneath the surface that you will find after dozens of listening, so this album, I think, is something that really needs time to get really into. But it will be rewarding in the end, I promise you.”

Tuomas Holopainen