2018: Interviews about the Decades release and tour

[Fugazi]

Starting off with this nice interview with Troy, covering among many things the first Auri release, the Decades tour and the toxicity of Internet. The usual stuff!

Desert Flowers: An Interview with Troy Donockley

By J Salmeron - 01/04/2018

https://www.metalblast.net/interviews/desert-flowers-an-interview-with-troy-donockley/

Some excerpts:

• Going to the root of it, both Tuomas and I were huge admirers of Johanna‘s  voice, and we kind of saw it as a quest to have that voice in our world, in our music; to be able to write music for that voice. Auri was a good way to get Johanna‘s voice out of Finland, because she’s an established artist in Finland, but nowhere else. She really fired this project. I played in her album back in 2010, where I did a guest appearance and Tuomas wrote a song for her. We were all in this “mutual admiration society” so, of course, we decided that, as soon as we could, we would do this. It wasn’t even called Auri at the time, it was only an idea, and we were driven to do it with the time that we found available.
• [...] We do intend to perform this [Auri] music live, but we need another album under our belt to do so. Luckily for us Nuclear Blast has a 2-album deal with us,  We will do another album and tour it with Auri, but we’re looking at 2022 for it… which is crazy, of course. The thing is, Nightwish is a heavy beast, and it demands a lot of attention and commitment, so we’ve to wait for the next 4 years.
• The Auri tap has been closed for a while now, and will remain closed, but we will open it up again for 2022. We’ve even have a plan! We want to do a tour of castles and cathedrals in 2022!
• We haven’t had a backlash about it, but we’ve definitely had a number of people asking why we didn’t want to do this or that, create a Facebook page for Auri, do more updates, etc. It’s saturated, and we wanted to go back, even if a little bit, to create some sort of enigma. Make it so that the music speaks volumes rather than us.
• [During Nightwish shows] there’s no much space for left-of-field improvisation or anything like that; plus, we’re all locked into time on stage, as in we’ve got a clicktrack going, so we’re all tied to the orchestral backing tracks. We have to all be synchronized and know what everyone is doing. I personally really like to improvise, it’s really in my roots, and I do get a chance to improvise a bit but, on the whole, everything there is carefully planned.
• If I was a different kind of man, I’d be really annoyed and angry at some of the things that I’ve read about Floor, but they give it to us all as well. There are people out there who hate Tuomas and think he is shit, and other who hate me because I’ve influenced Tuomas. That he’d still be a Christian if it wasn’t for me or some shit like that.
• [Decades is] a snapshot from the past. We all felt that it was important that every part of the band was represented, not necessarily from a chronological standpoint,  but in regards to the ideas behind them. Look at a song like Elvenpath, for example. It’s a really naive song; the Carpenter, sure enough, is obviously a Christian song, but it reflected the way he was back then. The splendid thing about old Tuomas is that he really is at peace with himself. He doesn’t have any problems with that kind of stuff. I think that we all think that it’s a bit quaint, it’s part of the history of the band.
• Of course, you know me… singing “The Carpenter” feels quaint to me, and it feels quaint because I have no problem singing like” All things bright and beautiful, All creatures great and small, All things wise and wonderful, The Lord God made them all.” I have no problem singing hymns. I was a Christening yesterday! A friend of mine was getting his baby Christened… a preposterous thing for me, but there I was. I was there for my friend.
• Now, you’ll find that on this Decades tour there are a lot more backing vocals. We’ve gone seriously into harmony vocals, which is really a delight. It really transformed songs like “Come Cover Me,” which we sing in a 3-part harmony. Also, I’m playing harmony guitars to Emppu, which is a nice development, since I can now fill out the underground while he soloes on the top with rhythm and things like that. And, in any case, I was doomed, there was no way out of singing “The Carpenter.” It was like “you’ve got to sing this song”, I was like “….but I can’t!,” and they kept asking until I did. And, honestly, it really works.