"After 20 years, some things are starting to pay off."

Nightwish's bass player Marco Hietala presents his other band, Tarot, where he also takes over the vocal duties...

Vassil Varbanov: Hello Marco, how are you doing?

Marco Hietala: I’m doing fine, thank you. How are you?

V. V.: Great. It’s good to have you with us today, so please note that we are not going to talk about Nightwish that much, but we'll try to concentrate on your other band, Tarot.
Tarot and you have been around for 20 years now, so why, the hell, the world is finding out about the existence of this band only now?

M. H.: The explanation for the band being around for so long is because of the personal chemistry. We, the guys in the band, are best friends and there have been many years in which we haven’t done anything, except for a few concerts, but we never split up.

V. V.: Ok, but now it finally seems you’re getting a bit of a recognition, right?

M. H.: We’ve gone a long way together and, strangely, after 20 years some things are starting to pay off.

V. V.: You are in Tarot with your brother. What are the advantages and disadvantages of being with him in a band?

M. H.: Well, the obvious disadvantage is that when we were starting the band, there was something like a power struggle about the music and about how it should be done, about composing songs and everything else. Young guys have bigger egos and everything, but in the past 15 years or so we’ve been getting along really well with my brother and everybody else in the band. The advantage is that we’re coming from the same musical background and we seem to agree on many things these days.

V. V.: We’re quite familiar with “You” - Tarot's first single. It is on good rotation here on Tangra Mega Rock, but the question is – is this really your favourite song from the new album? I know it’s a stupid question, but at the same time it’s not...

M. H.: No, “You” is not my favourite song, but it fits the requirements for a single – length and a chorus which is repeated annoyingly many times. And, of course, there’s the thing that in the time we were recording this single we didn’t have all the material for the album, so this is probably why we chose “You” as the single from five or six songs.

V. V.: We’re here to talk about Tarot, but it's obvious that we cannot avoid asking you, at what stage is the process of selecting a new singer for Nightwish?

M. H.: We have a few potential candidates and some of them are really good, actually, so if we wanted to enter the studio and start recording now, we could pick one of those people. However, we still have some CDs and demos coming from different parts of the world, Finland included, and we want to wait until the end of January before we decide. We’ve already booked a studio to record the vocals in March.