Sleeping Sun

Another plug for Pandora.com here. I first blogged about this internet radio service here, and then again later here and here. In those various posts I have explained what Pandora is, and some of the music that I've been introduced to through my personal radio station programmed around Enya and songs that I find similar. These have included songs from numerous artists, from obvious ones like Clannad and other Celtic artists, to several songs from Sarah Brightman, to groups I had never heard of before such as Dargaard.

Here is the latest song that I really like a lot that I've found through Pandora: "Sleeping Sun", by the Finnish symphony-power-metal group Nightwish. This group formed in 1996, and they've had several albums. You can learn more about them from their Wikipedia entry or their own website. For many years their lead vocalist was Tarja Turenen (see her Wikipedia entry or her own website). But she is no longer with the group, and while Anette Olzon, her replacement, also has a good voice, I think I prefer Tarja's (to my admittedly untrained ears, her voice seems richer, more haunting, more operatic).

To see and hear Tarja/Nightwish doing "Sleeping Sun", you can watch the two videos they produced for it on YouTube. The Sleeping Sun video I prefer has a medieval battle theme, while the other Sleeping Sun video depicts Finnish background scenes. The music is the same in both.

From the little sampling I've done on iTunes, much of their music sounds interesting to me, and worth further exploration, but only their song "Sleeping Sun" has really struck me as something I really like. The song dates back to 1999, but the version I heard on Pandora was from their 2005 compilation album Highest Hopes -- one version of which has a cover of Pink Floyd's "High Hopes" (which I've not yet heard)... a very interesting connection for me as a big Pink Floyd fan.