Dark Passion Play - Background and Production

Background and Production

On 21 October 2005, after the Once Upon a Tour, the band's lead singer Tarja Turunen was dismissed via an open letter. In search of a replacement, the band conducted auditions from 17 March 2006 to 15 January 2007, receiving over 2000 demo tapes in the process. Amidst much speculation the new singer was officially announced on 24 May 2007 to be Anette Olzon, previously the singer for the Swedish AOR band Alyson Avenue. In an interview, Holopainen said they had made the decision in January 2007 based on the impression she made while performing the song "Ever Dream" from the album Century Child.

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Of course it's gonna be a huge task for the singer — she will always be compared to Tarja but I'm pretty confident that she'll do well.

”

The recording process started in the spring 2006 in different studios across Europe; the drums were recorded by Nevalainen in Hollola, Finland, at the Petrax Studios, Emppu Vuorinen recorded the guitars in Kerava, Finland, were also record the keyboards by Holopainen and the bass parts by Marco Hietala. Hietala is also the band's male singer, and in 2006 Hietala sung some of the new songs to record the demo versions as a base for the final recordings, with definitive vocals being recorded by Olzon at the Petrax in March 2007, immediately after being chosen to replace Tarja Turunen, and nearly two months before her name was given to the media and the fans.

When the drummer Jukka Nevalainen was asked about the overall cost of the new album, he was quoted as saying “Roughly half a million... We don’t know the exact sum down to the euros and cents as yet.” Half of this cost was incurred in London, over an expensive eight days at the Abbey Road Studios in London, UK, during which time the London Session Orchestra, the Metro Voices Choir, a gospel choir and two Irish musicians recorded their parts at the studio. In the August 16, 2008, interview with Kerrang! Tuomas Holopainen recalled:

After the split with Tarja, we started writing without a singer, and it was quite a liberating feeling. We knew the right girl was out there somewhere, so we could just concentrate on the music. It took 10 months in the studio to make, but the atmosphere was so good and liberating there was a lot of bittersweet relief in the air. It was an extremely inspirational time.

"When I think back to it, it was such a crucial point to so many people, we didn't even realise back then but it showed uswhat we would be doing for the next year of our lives. We were never nervous about Anette, or the album being good, but we just couldn't tell how people would take it. Would they like Anette? Would they like the music? That was in the back of our minds all the time. And there was such a huge amount of money involved, over 800.000 euros, that we needed to sell at least a few albums to get going," Tuomas Holopainen was recalling in 2008.

The orchestral line-up featured 66 members from the London Philharmonic Orchestra, 32 singers from The Metro Voices and twelve gospel singers. The final mixing process spent more than 75 days at the Finnvox Studios in Kitee, Finland, the same place where Nightwish recorded all their previous albums.