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Along with Ca7riel and Paco Amoroso, and Jorge Drexler, the artists each scored seven nominations for ambitious, genre-spanning projects.

Tuomas Holopainen has ruled out a Nightwish reunion with Tarja Turunen, and in doing so revealed what he’s turning down. Speaking to Metal Hammer, the keyboardist said somebody had put it to him that if he brought Tarja and former bassist Marko Hietala back, the band could tour South America alone for a year straight. His answer: that’s not gonna happen. He also did something he’s never really done before — accepted that Nightwish deserved the blame for how the 2005 split was handled.

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What he turned down

Start with the number, because it’s the most concrete thing in the interview and it tells you the scale of what’s being refused.

Holopainen says someone put it to him directly: get Tarja and Marko Hietala back in, and you could tour South America for a year straight.

Not a leg. Not a run of festivals. Twelve months, one continent.

Anyone who’s followed this band knows that isn’t a fantasy. Nightwish in South America is a phenomenon — Tarja herself moved to Buenos Aires after the split and built a second life there, and symphonic metal has an audience in that part of the world that European bands genuinely cannot explain. A reunited classic-era Nightwish playing Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Mexico for a year would be one of the largest touring propositions in metal.

His response to all of it was five words. That’s not gonna happen.

His reasoning: it was a divorce, and an ugly one at that, so he thinks they have their own lives now.

And then he admitted it

Here’s the part that’s genuinely new, and it’s the reason this interview matters beyond the reunion question.

For twenty-one years the Nightwish camp’s position on the 2005 split has been broadly defensive. This time Holopainen said something different.

Nightwish get blamed for what happened, he said — for good reason.

Read that again. The man who wrote the letter is conceding the criticism was earned.

He still holds the underlying position — that there was no future for the band with Tarja in it. His description of where they were: just operating in survival mode, and plagued by dark thoughts.

But he doesn’t defend the method. And the method is the whole story.

What actually happened in 2005

For anyone who came to this band through Floor Jansen, the thing to understand is that Tarja Turunen wasn’t quietly let go at the end of a cycle.

She was handed an open letter at the end of the 2005 tour — and the same letter was published on the Nightwish website at the same moment.

She found out she was fired and the entire world found out simultaneously. There was no window, no statement agreed between lawyers, no chance to get ahead of it.

And the letter wasn’t neutral. The band wrote that to her, unfortunately, business, money and things that have nothing to do with emotions had become much more important.

That’s an accusation about someone’s character, published to their own fanbase, before they’d had an hour to absorb being sacked.

Holopainen’s account of the fallout is that the remaining members got completely butchered in the media — that it was as though they were evil neanderthals who’d hurt their wonderful ex-singer. He added, drily, that he received some really interesting letters.

He’s also previously called the decision to part with Tarja the most difficult thing he’s ever had to do.

Her version, from the same magazine, a month earlier

And this is the part nobody else is going to put together.

Tarja gave her account of the same events to Metal Hammer last month. Holopainen gave his this month. Same publication, consecutive issues, and the second reads as a direct reply to the first — two people conducting a conversation through a magazine twenty-one years after they stopped having it in person.

Her version is considerably harder.

What followed the letter, she says, was really great planning — how they wanted to destroy her publicly. She says it was something she never expected, and that it was nasty.

Then the cost of it. An insane period. In a small country like Finland, her face covering the tabloids for around three weeks. She left her home country. She says she had to. She went to Buenos Aires.

And the part that’s easy to skim past: it affected far more than her. Her family, her friends — everybody was destroyed. It took her a long time to trust people again.

But the sharpest thing she said isn’t about what they did. It’s about what she didn’t do.

She had all her rights. There were contracts. In her words, they would have been in deep shit for a long time if she’d used them — and she didn’t. She decided to move on and leave.

Twenty-one years later, asked what she’d change, her answer was that she probably should have put them through hell.

That’s a woman saying out loud that she regrets the mercy. It’s the most revealing line either of them has given, and it explains why this doesn’t heal.

Has she ever left the door open?

Barely, and less over time.

In 2019 she told Kerrang! she didn’t see anything happening with her and them, to be perfectly honest — while noting that Marko Hietala came into the band later and was always someone she was close to. On Holopainen specifically: they hadn’t seen each other in a long time, but they had been in touch, and it wasn’t bad. The past is what it is and can’t be changed; only the future can.

Asked a few years ago whether she’d tour with them if all her former bandmates apologised and invited her back, she was careful rather than warm. She said she couldn’t really close any doors any more, that she isn’t that kind of person now, and that it would be very hypothetically possible.

Then: it would be unlikely to happen.

And her position before that had been blunter. Maybe one day she’ll forgive, she said, but she will never forget.

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The book, and the lawsuit that failed

One more piece of this that gets left out, and it matters because it’s the only part that ever went before a judge.

Nightwish’s authorised biography, Once Upon a Nightwish: The Official Biography 1996-2006, came out in Finnish in 2006 and in English three years later. It blamed Tarja’s husband, Marcelo Cabuli, for the events leading to her expulsion.

Cabuli and his Brazilian business partners sued the publisher, Like Kustannus Oy, and the author, Marko “Mape” Ollila, for defamation — arguing the book contained false accusations and insinuations that had caused suffering and financial damage.

In 2011 the Helsinki District Court dismissed the case. The court found that the book criticised Cabuli on only a few of its 380 pages, that it hadn’t detrimentally affected his work or reputation in South America, and that Ollila had not maliciously portrayed him in a negative light.

Worth stating the outcome plainly, because the existence of a lawsuit gets cited far more often than its result.

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Where everyone is now

Nightwish have had Floor Jansen since 2012 — she made her live debut on October 1 that year at Showbox Sodo in Seattle after the abrupt departure of Anette Olzon, joined officially in 2013, and recorded her first album with them on 2015’s Endless Forms Most Beautiful. Fourteen years in, she isn’t a replacement any more; she’s simply the singer.

Marko Hietala left in 2020.

Tarja released Frisson Noir in June via earMUSIC, described by her label as the heaviest record of her career and a statement of identity, strength and belonging. Twenty-one years after being handed that letter, she’s still making metal records and still selling out rooms in the city she fled to.

Three separate careers, all of them working. Which is roughly what Holopainen meant by saying they have their own lives now — and it’s the only genuinely uncomplicated thing about this story.

It’s also the second time this month that one of the bands that built a genre has publicly closed the door on a reunion everybody wanted — Tony Iommi revealed a fortnight ago that he’d turned down a final Black Sabbath album with the original lineup. The difference is that Sabbath’s door shut because somebody died. This one is shut because of a letter.

TL;DR

• Tuomas Holopainen has ruled out a Nightwish reunion with Tarja Turunen, telling Metal Hammer: “That’s not gonna happen.”
• What he turned down: he says someone put it to him that with Tarja and former bassist Marko Hietala back in the band, they could tour South America alone for a year straight.
• His reasoning: “It was a divorce, and an ugly one at that, so I think we have our own lives now.”
• The admission: Holopainen said Nightwish “get blamed for what happened, for good reason,” while maintaining there was no future for the band with Turunen. He described the period as operating in survival mode.
• How the 2005 split happened: Turunen was handed an open letter at the end of the tour, published on the band’s website at the same moment, which accused her of prioritising business and money over emotion.
• Her account, given to the same magazine a month earlier: that the band planned to destroy her publicly, that her face covered the Finnish tabloids for three weeks, and that she left the country for Buenos Aires.
• What she says she’d change: she had contracts and rights and could have taken them to court, and chose not to. She now says she probably should have put them through hell.
• The lawsuit: her husband Marcelo Cabuli sued over the band’s authorised biography. The Helsinki District Court dismissed the case in 2011.
• Floor Jansen has fronted Nightwish since 2012. Tarja released Frisson Noir in June.

FAQ

Twenty-one years, one open letter, and a year of sold-out South American shows left on the table. Should they find a way, or is some damage permanent? Tell me below. And keep it locked on the Loaded Radio stream — follow Loaded Radio for daily rock and metal news.

The post Nightwish Just Killed The Tarja Turunen Reunion For Good appeared first on Loaded Radio.

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The 1960s were the decade when the blues got louder. American blues artists including Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, B.B. King, Albert King, Freddie King and John Lee Hooker had already established the language, but as a new generation of musicians discovered those records, they began pushing that language into increasingly aggressive territory. Amplifiers got bigger, guitar tones became dirtier, solos stretched longer and the blues collided with rock and roll, psychedelia and the emerging album-oriented culture.

By the second half of the decade, blues rock had become one of the dominant forces in popular music. Cream brought improvisation into arenas. Jimi Hendrix completely altered expectations of what an electric guitar could do. Fleetwood Mac was still a blues band led by one of Britain’s most gifted guitarists. Johnny Winter emerged from Texas playing the blues with ferocious intensity, while the Allman Brothers Band began developing a distinctly Southern variation on the form that would flourish in the 1970s.

At the same time, blues giants including Albert King and B.B. King were making recordings that crossed easily into the growing blues rock audience and had an enormous influence on the guitarists carrying the music forward. The lines between blues and blues rock weren’t always clean, and that’s part of what made the era so exciting.

These ten unforgettable songs capture a decade when the blues was simultaneously honoring its past and pointing toward the future.

Canned Heat – “On the Road Again”

Few bands of the 1960s were as deeply immersed in blues history as Canned Heat. Its members were serious students and collectors of the music, and that knowledge helped distinguish Canned Heat from many of its contemporaries.

“On the Road Again” became the band’s signature recording and one of the most recognizable blues rock songs of the decade. Built around a hypnotic boogie pattern, the song draws from earlier blues traditions while sounding unmistakably connected to the psychedelic era. Alan Wilson’s unusual high vocal floats above the groove, while the persistent rhythm gives the recording an almost trance-like quality. Rather than overwhelming the listener with sheer volume, Canned Heat finds its power through repetition. The groove barely needs to change because it becomes more compelling the longer it continues.

That relentless rhythmic approach would become an important ingredient in blues rock over the following decade. “On the Road Again” sounds simultaneously old and new, which is exactly what made so much of the best 1960s blues rock exciting. Canned Heat understood where the music came from without being afraid to take it somewhere different.

Albert King – “Born Under a Bad Sign”

Few recordings had a greater impact on the vocabulary of blues rock guitar than Albert King’s “Born Under a Bad Sign.” Written by Booker T. Jones and William Bell, the song was recorded by King for Stax Records in 1967 and became the title track of his landmark album released that same year.

Everything about the recording feels economical. King’s guitar doesn’t need a barrage of notes to establish authority. His bends are enormous, his vibrato is instantly recognizable and every phrase seems to arrive exactly where it needs to. Behind him, the Stax musicians provide a groove that brings blues, soul and R&B together without allowing any one element to overwhelm the others. The famous bass line alone is enough to make the song instantly identifiable.

The importance of “Born Under a Bad Sign” to blues rock became obvious almost immediately. Cream recorded the song for Wheels of Fire in 1968, exposing it to an even larger rock audience, while King’s guitar style became a major influence on generations of players. His approach can be heard throughout blues rock long after the 1960s ended.

Albert King didn’t need to become a rock guitarist to influence rock guitar. “Born Under a Bad Sign” helped provide the vocabulary that countless blues rock musicians would spend the next several decades speaking.

B.B. King – “The Thrill Is Gone”

B.B. King had already spent decades building his reputation before “The Thrill Is Gone” gave him one of the defining recordings of his career. Recorded in 1969 and released as a single late that year, King’s interpretation of the Roy Hawkins and Rick Darnell composition brought a sophisticated, contemporary sound to the blues without sacrificing the emotional directness at the center of his music.

The arrangement immediately separates “The Thrill Is Gone” from a conventional blues performance. Strings create a dark atmosphere around King’s voice and guitar, while the rhythm moves with a restrained confidence. King never sounds as though he is trying to overpower the song. His guitar, Lucille, functions almost like another vocalist, responding to the lyrics with carefully placed bends and phrases. Where younger blues rock guitarists were often discovering how much sound they could produce, King demonstrated how devastating a few perfectly chosen notes could be.

“The Thrill Is Gone” also arrived at precisely the right moment. Rock audiences were increasingly interested in the blues because of Hendrix, Cream, the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin and the wave of British and American bands drawing heavily from the genre. King didn’t need those musicians to validate his work, but the changing musical climate introduced his playing to listeners who might otherwise never have explored contemporary blues.

The result was a song capable of existing comfortably alongside the blues rock explosion without surrendering its identity. “The Thrill Is Gone” became one of King’s signature performances and a masterclass in the idea that intensity isn’t measured by how many notes a guitarist can play.

The Rolling Stones – “Midnight Rambler”

The Rolling Stones’ connection to the blues existed from the beginning. Their name came from a Muddy Waters song, their early repertoire was filled with American blues and R&B material, and their success helped direct many young rock listeners toward the artists who had influenced them. By 1969, however, the Stones had developed a musical identity entirely their own.

“Midnight Rambler,” from Let It Bleed, demonstrates how the band could take the blues and turn it into something theatrical and menacing. The studio version moves through several different levels of intensity rather than rushing toward a conventional chorus. Mick Jagger’s harmonica reinforces the blues foundation, while Keith Richards’ guitar and the rhythm section gradually increase the tension. The changes in tempo and dynamics make the performance feel unpredictable, as though the band could suddenly head in another direction at any moment.

The song became even more formidable onstage, where the Stones could stretch those quiet-loud dynamics into an extended performance. “Midnight Rambler” showed that blues rock didn’t have to mean simply placing a long guitar solo over a familiar progression. The entire band could use blues vocabulary to create atmosphere, suspense and drama.

Johnny Winter – “Be Careful with a Fool”

Johnny Winter seemed to approach the guitar as though the distinction between blues and rock had never existed. His version of “Be Careful with a Fool,” included on his 1969 self-titled Columbia debut, is a showcase for everything that made the Texas guitarist such an electrifying presence.

The song had previously been recorded by B.B. King, but Winter’s interpretation reflects a dramatically different personality. His playing is fiery, sharp and intensely physical. Notes arrive in furious bursts, yet the performance never loses its blues foundation. That’s what separated Winter from guitarists who simply played fast. He understood the vocabulary well enough to push it to extremes without disconnecting it from its source.

Raised in Texas, Winter had been immersed in blues, R&B and rock and roll long before the late-’60s blues boom made that combination commercially fashionable. When he received national attention near the end of the decade, he arrived sounding fully formed. “Be Careful with a Fool” gives Winter room to stretch out, and his guitar constantly raises the emotional temperature of the performance.

Winter would record plenty of outstanding music during the 1970s and later play an important role in Muddy Waters’ late-career resurgence, but “Be Careful with a Fool” already made a convincing case for him as one of his generation’s essential blues guitarists.

Fleetwood Mac – “Oh Well”

Long before Rumours turned Fleetwood Mac into one of the biggest bands in the world, the group was a British blues powerhouse led by Peter Green. “Oh Well,” released in 1969, remains one of Green’s masterpieces and one of the most unusual blues rock songs to emerge from the decade.

Its famous opening section is driven by a muscular guitar riff and Green’s sparse vocal. There is no wasted motion. The riff hits, the band locks into place and Green delivers one of the coolest performances of his career. Then everything changes. The second portion moves into a quiet, spacious and almost cinematic musical landscape that seems to belong to another composition entirely.

That contrast demonstrates Green’s ambition and helps explain why “Oh Well” has endured beyond its original British blues context. Green didn’t need constant displays of technical fireworks. His playing was built around touch, tone and phrasing, and he could make a handful of notes feel enormous. At the same time, the opening riff anticipates the heavier guitar-driven rock that would dominate much of the following decade.

Fleetwood Mac’s Peter Green era lasted only a relatively short time, but its influence was substantial. “Oh Well” captures a band rooted in the blues while already refusing to be restricted by it.

The Allman Brothers Band – “Dreams”

The Allman Brothers Band’s self-titled debut arrived in November 1969, just before the decade ended, and offered a glimpse of where blues rock was heading next. “Dreams” is one of the album’s defining performances, combining blues feeling with the improvisational freedom that would eventually make the Allman Brothers Band one of America’s greatest live groups.

Rather than attacking the listener with a massive riff, the song unfolds patiently. Gregg Allman’s organ establishes an atmospheric foundation while his voice carries the weary emotional weight of the composition. Duane Allman’s guitar then moves through the arrangement with remarkable fluidity. His playing is expressive rather than frantic, drawing from blues while leaving enough space for the music to breathe.

The band was creating something distinct from the British blues explosion. Blues remained at the core, but jazz, soul, country and Southern musical traditions were becoming part of the mixture. “Dreams” points directly toward the extended improvisations that would soon define the Allman Brothers Band onstage, particularly as the group moved into the 1970s.

It is also a reminder that blues rock didn’t always have to be heavy. It could be spacious, sophisticated and emotionally complex. The Allman Brothers Band would soon take that idea much further, but “Dreams” showed that the foundation was already there in 1969.

Cream – “Crossroads”

Robert Johnson recorded “Cross Road Blues” in 1936. More than three decades later, Cream plugged the idea into enormous amplifiers and created one of the defining live recordings of the blues rock era.

Recorded at San Francisco’s Winterland Ballroom and released on Wheels of Fire in 1968, Cream’s “Crossroads” is a remarkable example of three musicians creating tremendous sound without clutter. Eric Clapton’s guitar understandably receives much of the attention. His solos are relatively concise by Cream’s standards, but they are filled with the fluid phrases and aggressive tone that helped establish the vocabulary of blues rock lead guitar.

The performance works because of what is happening underneath him as well. Jack Bruce’s bass constantly moves while Ginger Baker attacks the drums with the force and independence of a jazz musician. Cream rarely sounded like a guitarist being supported by a conventional rhythm section. All three musicians pushed against one another, creating a sense of tension that could make the trio sound considerably larger than it actually was.

Cream took Johnson’s blues and transformed it into something built for the late-’60s rock stage. Countless guitarists would study Clapton’s playing on “Crossroads,” and countless bands would attempt to reproduce its combination of improvisation, volume and virtuosity. Few would make it sound as natural.

Led Zeppelin – “Dazed and Confused”

By the time Led Zeppelin’s debut album arrived in January 1969, blues rock was already beginning to mutate into something considerably heavier. “Dazed and Confused” sits directly at that crossroads.

The song originated with Jake Holmes, who recorded his version in 1967, before Jimmy Page developed a substantially different arrangement, initially with the Yardbirds and then with Led Zeppelin. Zeppelin’s recording transformed the piece into a dark, heavy and improvisational centerpiece. John Paul Jones’ descending bass line immediately establishes an ominous mood, John Bonham’s drums give the music enormous physical weight and Robert Plant moves from restraint to full-throated intensity.

Page’s guitar takes the recording somewhere stranger. His bowed-guitar passages give “Dazed and Confused” an eerie psychedelic quality before the entire band erupts. The contrast between quiet tension and overwhelming volume became one of Led Zeppelin’s greatest strengths, and much of that formula is already present on the band’s first album.

Led Zeppelin’s relationship with earlier blues material has generated extensive discussion over the decades, but musically their arrival represented a major escalation in the development of blues-based rock. The guitars were heavier, the drums were bigger and the arrangements were increasingly dramatic. “Dazed and Confused” captures the point where the blues rock explosion of the 1960s was beginning to evolve into the hard rock of the 1970s.

The Jimi Hendrix Experience – “Red House”

For all of Jimi Hendrix’s experimentation with feedback, distortion, psychedelia and studio technology, he remained deeply connected to the blues. “Red House” makes that connection impossible to miss.

Originally appearing on the British edition of the Jimi Hendrix Experience’s 1967 debut Are You Experienced, “Red House” strips away much of the psychedelic spectacle commonly associated with Hendrix and places his blues playing front and center. His bends, vibrato and phrasing reveal the influence of the blues guitarists who came before him, but nothing about the performance feels imitative. Hendrix could unleash flurries of notes when he wanted, yet some of the most powerful moments occur when he slows down and allows a single note or phrase to hang in the air.

That’s the magic of “Red House.” It is unmistakably a blues song, yet nobody could mistake Hendrix for anyone else. Live versions became opportunities for him to reinvent the composition repeatedly. Tempos shifted, solos expanded and phrases appeared and disappeared as Hendrix treated the song as a framework rather than something that had to be reproduced exactly as it appeared on the record.

His influence on blues rock is almost impossible to measure. Generations of guitarists have studied his tone, technique and improvisational approach, but imitation rarely captures what made Hendrix extraordinary. He didn’t simply play the blues louder. He used the blues as the foundation for an entirely new vocabulary of electric guitar, and “Red House” remains one of the clearest examples of that connection.

The post 10 Unforgettable Blues Rock Songs of the 1960s appeared first on Blues Rock Review.

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