Nightwish Vocalist: Don’t Feel Sorry for Yourself Because You Can’t Attend Concerts Right Now
Nightwish vocalist Floor Jansen was our guest on this week’s episode of The MetalSucks Podcast, and as you might expect, the subject matter eventually turned to the ongoing pandemic, very much on the forefront of everyone’s minds.
With a new album that just came out, Human. :II: Nature., you’d think Jansen would be bummed about the lack of touring opportunities for the forseeable future. But she’s taking a particularly zen-like approach to the issue, expressing gratitude that she’s healthy and reminding herself that the current hardships brought on by the pandemic shall eventually pass:
“As much as it seems like it takes forever at this moment, we’re looking at only a couple of weeks of quarantine and at worse it’s going to be months, at worse it’s going to be a year, maybe a year and a half [that we’re affected]. But in a lifetime, really, it’s not that long.
“We’re so used to everything happening fast, if anything I think that COVID-19 teaches us to slow down. And this album is not going anywhere, we’re not going anywhere, so the album is going to sound exactly the same a year from now as it does today.
“So, sure, we’re generating all the attention now, but if people really want to see us and they really got into this album and they know it’s going to happen, we’ll make sure everyone knows it’s going to happen. Then it’s just one year later, that’s really how I see it.
“I still can only think health first; if we’re healthy that’s all that matters. The rest are luxury problems. I’m super happy we got to release the album so people can enjoy it maybe even more in these troubled days. Time is just a matter of perception… next year.”
Floor leans into that sentiment by extending it to fans who are complaining about not being able to attend live shows:
“If you feel like ‘I’m missing so much’ — I see a lot of focus sometimes on ‘Things are different than they were’ and ‘I wish that things would go back to normal’ — there’s so much energy going into wishful thinking.
“What if we change it around? We know we can’t change [the world] right now. So we can focus on the things that we do have, and there is a musical library that is so endless we’d need 20 or 30 years more of pure quarantine to even go through it and you’d still probably not hear everything. So there’s enough to do and there’s enough music to experience. Sure the social outlets of it all and the energy of a concert, hell, that’s something else, but we don’t have it.
“And once again I want to stress the importance of our health. That might sound like I’m your mom but it’s for real. Imagine you really get sick, imagine you really really go into intensive care and fight for your life for weeks, you could die, it’s not a joke. It’s not an inconvenience, it’s a life threat. And from that, everything else is a luxury problem that can then be seen from the positive end. Like, first of all, ‘I’m healthy. Wow, lucky me!’ Because there are a lot of people who are not, and a lot of people that are dying, thousands on a daily basis globally.
“So we should not even be discussing how sad it is that we can’t do something. I think that’s a very, very, very important thing to always remember, that with every day that passes you can [start to] feel a little sorry for yourself, but if you’re healthy, you can totally forget about feeling sorry for yourself.” *laughs*
You can listen to the whole podcast interview with Jansen below.
