Nightwish vocalist Floor Jansen spoke with Metal Wani’s Carl O’Rourke about her upcoming debut album with her side project, Northward, her thoughts on music culture and its future as well as gathering songs for new Nightwish material.
Despite its 2018 release, Floor’s Northward debut was written and left in the vault since 2008, almost a decade ago. Floor explained how the project came to be.
“Indeed it was written back in 2008. I had a year off back then, from my band I had at the time called After Forever, and after more than ten years of Symphonic Metal with that band, I wanted to use that year off to explore a different genre. I wanted to make a rock album. I had that in mind, but it wasn’t really set in stone that I was gonna do that, also because I didn’t know with who [Laughs].”
[metalwani_content_ad]
On joining forces with Joorn Vigo,
It seemed I met the right person. We played all these covers and he played a lot of different styles of music and it showed his versatility. By it [their meeting] being at a Prog festival, it was clear to me he was a great rock guitar player.” She concluded that ” When we checked if we had a good chemistry, not just on stage but with writing, we continued writing and actually finished that album with, of course, the intention to release it. However, the break with After Forever, it was not just a break. It became a permanent stop, and all of a sudden I had no band left. Because of this, the contract we almost signed for Northward was cancelled, and I did not want a side project in rock to become my next new thing. So we had to put it on hold for the time being until I could get a new band going and, well I did, but before I knew it I joined Nightwish and time was not there. [Laughs].
Speaking about how the album finally came back around, Floor recalls,
“Time just went by with that just laying around until Nightwish announced a year off in 2017. I contacted Joorn Vigo again in ’16 like, ‘Hey, I’m gonna have a year off from my band again, would you like to finish this album with me?’. I would never have the time to write something new, but if the material would be up to date, we could fix it and record it and yeah, that’s what we did and that’s why it took so long! [Laughs].”
Asked what she can share about future plans and new music for Nightwish, Floor graciously shared,
“Well we are in the middle of a world tour, that’s where we are at [Laughs]. So that is our first and foremost concern to do that well. We leave for South America next week and we still have our European arena tour coming up in November, December. But Tuomas, our songwriter and keyboard player and main man has been very creative already and has been collecting a lot of material over the course of the last two years. So, next year we’ll start working on that material and record it. And in 2020 we’ll start with a brand new world tour.”