Tarja (Finland) – Together (single/future album track)

In line with our philosophy of occasionally featuring established artists well you can’t get more established than Finland’s Tarja (Turunen-Cabuli) who is now ensconced somewhere on the Costa del Sol but still manages to get to other parts of Europe, mainly in the east, on tour and occasionally ventures northwards and even into the UK.

That’s where I saw her, in January two years ago, a concert in which two highly contrasting sides of her persona were apparent – her trademark operatic singing voice which was as terrific as ever but so pronounced that I could barely understand a word she was singing, and one particular note that she reached that I have never encountered before or since. It was intergalactic in scale and left everyone dumbstruck.

It was just over 20 years ago – 21^st October 2005 – that Tarja was summarily dismissed from Nightwish, of which she had been a founder member a decade previously, immediately after the end of a very long world tour and for reasons that are too complex to raise again, here.

It took her a little time to pick up the pieces after that brutal night but she rose to the challenge of nailing a solo career with nine albums and eight word tours of her own since 2006.

Another album is in the works – ‘Score for a Dark Christmas’, which is out on December 5^th.

The idea of a dark Christmas fascinates me and one of my favourite seasonal songs is Poly Styrene’s ‘Black Christmas’ chronicling the actual assassination of an entire family in Los Angeles by a bloke dressed as Santa Claus and to a reggae beat. Now that is bleak.

But although she can have a dark side in her work that isn’t really evident in the first single from it, ‘Together’.

She has written and released a single with that same title previously and it featured on her Christmas live album, ‘Christmas Together: Live at Olomouc and Hradec Králové 2019’ being one that was considerably more powerfully operatic than this latest song.

That isn’t to say that the 2025 ‘Together’ isn’t powerful. Be careful how you adjust your headset or ear pieces so you don’t get your head blown off. It rises majestically from fleetingly fanciful to a point three minutes and twenty seconds later (“together we will fly into the night”) when they might be making that journey on an Apollo rocket to the Moon.

If you traditionally link Tarja with metal put that aside for the moment. This is the stuff of a global diva. It belongs in a Broadway or West End musical or at the conclusion of the world’s most romantic Hollywood movie of the year.

Lyrically, it appears a little maudlin at first, as if one character is lamenting the physical loss of another but the subject matter on closer examination seems to be of the need to find solace and connection during the Christmas holiday season, contrasting seasonal melancholy and the feeling of togetherness, even for those who are lonely or missing loved ones.

Tarja has said that the album it previews explores “the other side of Christmas. The Christmas of the lonely people and the missing ones. The Christmas for those that do not find joy in the blinking lights and the jingle bells”.

And that in this track, the message is one of a shared human experience of emotions during the holidays, going beyond typical cheerful carols to address deeper, more sombre feelings, and suggesting that in this shared experience, people are not truly alone.

My own personal take is that everyone is ‘alone’ to a degree at Christmas, a season that is tailor made for introspection and regret, irrespective of the number of humans close at hand, and that is why this powerful goose bump stimulator of a song will resonate with so many.

Find her on:

Website: https://tarjaturunen.com/home-tarja/