FLOOR JANSEN Reflects On Her Six Years With NIGHTWISH: 'It's Been Quite The Ride'

Prior to NIGHTWISH's performance in Copenhagen, Denmark on November 3, vocalist Floor Jansen spoke with HeavyMetal.dk. The full conversation can be seen below. A few excerpts follow (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET).

On the hardest NIGHTWISH songs to sing live:

Floor: "Songs we don't do very often are often more demanding, because there's less muscle memory. The more often you do a song, the more it starts to sit, so to speak, so it becomes easier to do."

On her background as a classically trained soprano:

Floor: "I've studied classical singing, but not to a great extent. For me, I'm way more at home in heavy metal than I am in classical music. I don't even really like it, the style of singing implemented. Opera, I've tried. I started hearing it, of course with NIGHTWISH, having Tarja [Turunen] in the band. That for many singers was like, 'What's this?' It was interesting for me, and I realized I had the voice for it, but to really go with the classical stuff was not my thing."

On joining NIGHTWISH midway through an American tour in 2012:

Floor: "I started the tour out of the blue. They called me. Things were not going well with the previous singer [Anette Olzon]. You go into full survival mode. For my part, I'd never heard their latest album until a few hours before... Compared to now, where I have been singing in the band for six years [and] became the official singer more than five years [ago], of course, that's a completely different feeling. I can't even imagine a life now without NIGHTWISH anymore, and I feel indeed very much a part of it. It's fantastic to do a tour like this... it's all about the history, so we are playing songs of the time when Tarja was in the band and songs of the time when Anette was in the band, and I need to make all of them sound like NIGHTWISH but still my own. It's wonderful to feel that the NIGHTWISH of 2018 is with me, and my whole life has evolved around the band as well. Lots of things changed in my life as well. It's been quite the ride, but I feel totally at home."

On being the group's lone female member:

Floor: "I don't know what it would be like if it was any different. It's usual. I joined a metal band with only guys when I was 17. That's 20 years ago, and it's never been any different for me. It works, and you have to find your way. Emphasizing the difference in sexes doesn't really help in that sense. There are differences, and they're obvious. For the rest, I'm their sister and they're my brothers."

On the #MeToo movement:

Floor: "I'm happy that there are more voices coming out for women that have been in those situations and never even dared to speak about it. That's horrible — everything about that is horrible. I agree that it's a macho world, metal, but it's also a very, very social world, where people are loving music in respect for one another, female or male. Twenty years ago, that was a tiny bit different. It was a bit weird that there all of a sudden were girls on stage and the only thing that the men could really do was scream, 'Boobs!,' because what else are you supposed to [do]? But I think we've all come to a bit of a better balance and a bit more of a respect for each other, so despite the macho thing, most women in this scene are the tougher kind of girls, but there are also a lot of very lovely ladies that are not going to be macho'ed over, and there are a lot of men that aren't the standard kind of 'monkey man.'"

On the difficulty of having a family while being a touring musician:

Floor: "Everybody has to work... It's just that our working times are more irregular. That actually made me at more home with my child, I think, than most moms, and the same goes for [husband] Hannes [Van Dahl], especially this year, [when] he has not been doing much with SABATON. The heavy touring of before kind of slowed down a little bit, and now they're going to work on a new album, so Hannes has been home more than most dads of the children that we meet at the day care where our daughter is going now. There is definitely a way that of course you think of before you even start with having children. We, like many other parents, are also very much grateful to the grandparents that step in at times. Even on this run, she will be joining me, because it's a six-week tour, and to be without each other so long, that's too long. My band are super-, super-cool with it — they want to make sure that we can be a family, that it is possible for me to be a mom. That's fantastic."

This past July, NIGHTWISH keyboardist Tuomas Holopainen revealed that he had "about 80 or 90 percent of the material" already written for the band's next album. "It's gonna be 10, 11 songs, most likely," he said. "And we're gonna start recording next summer, in July, so if everything goes as planned, we're looking at a spring 2020 release."

NIGHTWISH's next album will mark the band's second full-length release with Jansen.

NIGHTWISH has spent the last few months touring in support of its recently released "Decades" compilation.