







World-renowned vocalist Tarja Turunen (ex-Nightwish) performed a solo concert from her home accompanied only by a piano, as a part of the #TogetherAtHome series, fueled by Global Citizen and in support of the World Health Organization. Watch it now below. Tarja’s latest album In The Raw was released last August via earMUSIC.

Tarja wrote in an accompanying message: “Together at Home – Live Thank you very much for being there last night with me. I hope you enjoyed this little performance and that it let you forget for a minute this locked down situation where we all are. I pass the mic now for my friend Elize Ryd from AMARANTHE. Good luck girl!! Stay at home!! This is the only way we all can help not to spread the virus. Love you all!”

Last summer, Tarja spoke to France’s Pozzo Live about what inspired the title of her latest studio album, “In The Raw”, and why it was such a difficult process for her to create it.

“I kind of found it out when I already laid out the first songs as demos,” she said. “As demos, they are not sounding good. They are sounding ‘raw.’ They are sounding kind of fragile. They are sounding unpolished, unproduced. So, I realized that I really like how they sound, the guitar, bass, keyboards, drums only — the core of the band, the power core of the band. That’s the power that I need for my big voice to support me. So, I kind of liked that rawness in that sound in those demos and I said, ‘Yeah, I would like to keep this kind of feeling on the album because it gives me that beautiful energy, that beautiful, unpolished feeling.’ That came there, the kind of rawness in sound, but then I found myself being very raw in a way, very alone in the process of songwriting. I wanted to see if I was capable doing so much as I did on the album.

“I found myself vulnerable,” she continued. “I was so exhausted. To tell you a story, at the end of last year, I felt exhausted. I felt really tired of the touring and all that. I said, ‘I cannot write these lyrics for the album.’ I was not ready for that. I had a huge doubt in me. I doubted myself: ‘I cannot do it.’ That was Christmas time. Then I knew I was having a deadline hitting hard to deliver the album in time, all this. So the stress, the pressure was there. Then I found myself after Christmas sitting with my notebook in my living room, thinking, ‘What now? I’m here, I’m alone, I need to do this.’ And I just started. I really put everything in, everything about myself. I went very deep within myself. It was very painful. It really is very raw. So, I found myself being in that raw situation that was kind of familiar for me, but still unfamiliar because I went so further deep.”

Check out our EXCLUSIVE career-spanning interview with Tarja!