Wish You Were Here

A decade in the making, the debut album from Tarja Turunen’s Outlanders project is the perfect antidote to these chaotic times. Featuring guest appearances from a host of celebrated musicians, including Mike Oldfield, Trevor Rabin and Steve Rothery, it showcases a very different side to the Finnish soprano who’s better known for her dramatic progressive metal and classical recordings. She shares the story behind Outlanders and the Alan Parsons album that inspired it.

Tarja Turunen can remember the first time she set foot on Antigua. It was 2007, and a “chaotic” period in the Finnish soprano’s life: two years after her very public, acrimonious split from symphonic giants Nightwish, the band with whom she made her name, and one year after the launch of her solo career. What she needed, more than anything, was anonymity. Immediately, she fell in love with the beautiful scenery, easy-going way of life and the overwhelming sense of seclusion.

“You will find a beach where you will be alone the whole day. It’s so chilled and so positive,” she says over Zoom from her current home in the Andalusia region of southern Spain, the memory of her first visit to the Caribbean still vivid 16 years on. “It was like, ‘Wow. I love this. I can be no one here.’”

By the end of the holiday, she and her husband-manager, Marcelo Cabuli, had bought a holiday house facing out over Antigua’s turquoise sea and forest-covered mountains. Since then, it’s been her second home and her happy place, as well as the source of inspiration for her long-awaited, all-star project, Outlanders. An album of the same name, which was mostly written and mixed on the island over the last 10-plus years, was released in June 2023 and is unlike anything we’ve heard from Tarja before.

Working with her long-term friend and Tubular Beats collaborator, EDM DJ Torsten Stenzel, it sees her pair her soaring, operatic vocals with the sort of pulsating, blissful ambient, proggy electronica you’d hear in a beachside bar. The album’s guitars come courtesy of some of modern prog’s most influential players, with Mike Oldfield, Trevor