Marko Hietala released his second solo album Roses From the Deep on 7 February 2025. This is his second solo album, which belies the amount of music that has come from this formidable musician over the years.
Marko Hietala has not only shaped, but also been part of defining the sound of modern hard rock. He is a founding member of the heavy metal band Tarot, was an essential member of the supergroup Sinergy, the latter of which is well-known to metalheads worldwide for the presence of Alexi Laiho – the late guitar hero who also founded Children of Bodom, Finlands second-biggest metal band. The biggest? Marko was not just a member, but one of the key figures of Nightwish – probably the biggest symphonic metal band in the world. Needless to say, Marko’s thunderous bass lines and powerful vocals have echoed in some the world’s most famous venues and every huge rock and metal festival worldwide. Those venues are probably still shaking.
Never one for sticking around in a situation just because it is safe and expected, he left Nightwish in December 2020 to do something different and take stock of his life. Sometimes you need to get off the carousel to steady yourself. Marko’s drinking was out of control, his marriage had hit the rocks (which formed a lot of the subject matter on his first album, 2019’s Pyre of the Black Heart), he was not doing well mentally, and he was deeply frustrated by what he called unethical and even untruthful elements in Nightwish’s business organisation. He needed a time-out from everything, and he needed a reboot.
In an August 2022 interview with Finland’s Chaoszine, Hietala revealed that he went through a dark period in his life, which included depression, insomnia, anxiety and an eventual attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) diagnosis.
Another thing that bothered him was what happened to Tarja Turunen. She was the original Nightwish vocalist, and she was handed a letter of dismissal after the band’s final show on the 2006 tour which was also posted publicly online. It was signed by all four band members, and every perceived issue was detailed. Tarja felt that playing the issue out in public was senselessly cruel, and she particularly felt that personal attacks on her husband (whom the band felt had started interfering unduly in band business) were unwarranted. In the end, all parties moved on, likely leaving nobody with a good feeling about anything. It simply wasn’t handled well.
Things have clearly happened since then. The first single from Marko’s second album was Left On Mars, released nearly a year ahead of the album on 15 March 2024. The track is a duet between Marko and Tarja Turunen. She even appears in the music video, and it looks like they are having fun together!
While this wasn’t the first thing they did together, the story of their reconciliation hangs heavily over this track, giving it extra dimensions and making it all the more heartening.
So, how did it happen?
In a 2024 interview with Rock Hard France magazine, Tarja talked about the first time they met after her Nightwish dismissal: “After I left the band in 2006, nearly twelve years passed and I didn’t hear anything from anyone, apart from some business emails with Tuomas. At the end of 2017, I learned that Marko was one of the founding members of the Raskata Joulua project [Finnish Christmas metal project featuring a multitude of musicians]. I was going to participate and even share the microphone with Marko in a Finnish version of Schubert’s Ave Maria. But on the first day, Marko didn’t show up for either soundcheck or rehearsal. It was a great start, haha! No one knew what was going on, if he was going to show up… Finally, he came in just before the concert started. ‘I was stuck in traffic!’ Walked into my dressing room, breathless. He greeted me and gave me a hug, before shouting “See you on stage!” and disappear! Haha!”
Shortly after, they found themselves together on stage for the first time since 2006. Tarja continues: “Ave Maria is a particularly delicate and moving piece when sung as a duo. And taking into account the bond between Marko and I, and what it meant to the Finnish audience to see us together again… The reaction from the audience was crazy! People were screaming, crying living tears… Once the song ended, we stayed on stage for a long time, hugging and staring at the audience, who couldn’t stop applauding… It was extremely moving. We sang that song a few times on tour.”
Eventually, the Christmas tour came to an end. On the last day, once the final show was over, Marko gathered all the members of the production team in Tarja’s dressing room to do something important. Tarja still gets emotional thinking back at it: “Marko apologized to me, in front of everyone, for the way we had parted up twelve years earlier. This brought me to tears! We hugged and talked. He told me so many wonderful things!” In other interviews, she was not admit to share that “I cried like a little girl.” She was not the only one; tears were shed by everybody present.
After this initial meeting, they didn’t immediately meet again. Tarja describes it as “another period of silence, during which I heard nothing from him again. My text messages were not answered. I think he had changed his phone number at that time.”
Finally, in 2023 Tarja found out that Marko was going to perform on the same festival in Switzerland where she was scheduled to appear. She contacted the promoter and asked him to convey a request to Marko: ‘Would you be willing to accompany me on stage to perform The Phantom of the Opera?’ Marko accepted right away.
At this point, Marko had started coming out of his self-imposed exile. No longer in Nightwish, no longer with business demands hanging over him, bit crucially, also no longer in his self-imposed time-out. He was free from most of the things that had weighed him down. He had started playing some shows with his band mates in Tarot again (which includes his brother Zachary). He was also in the middle of making a new solo album, having come up with another batch of soul-searching songs. Making music which resonated deeply on a personal level was still a big part of everything.
“I have some really bad years behind me, and it’s time to go forward,” Marko said in an interview with the Belgian Jasper Youtube-channel. “I just had to clear out quite a few things.”
Just how horrible those bad years had been would only become apparent to people when Marko started talking about them in recent interviews. He was diagnosed as a chronic depressive for over 20 years, but as it turned out, that was a side effect, not the actual problem.
“I got a very vivid imagination, and lots of gears rolling in my head all the time. The bad things kind of took over my head,” he told TVP World in 2024. “The whole thing changed like 2-3 years back. […] I’ve been diagnosed as a chronic depressive for over 20 years. It just got worse and worse; I did not know what to do. Then they found out that it was a side effect, and a symptom – a very common one with ADHD, and the alienation of your social circles and other people because of it. And then when we switched the therapy and meds, the whole thing changed. Within a few weeks I was like, this can’t be real! I’m back alive!”
Roses From the Deep is an intriguing album overall. His previous album, 2019’s Pyre of the Black Heart was described as ‘hard prog’ and that description still applies. It is a musically diverse album, with the biggest changes perhaps being in the album’s themes. If Pyre of the Black Heart was about loss and rebirth, Roses is much more about loneliness, abandonment, and separation anxiety.
ALBUM REVIEW: Marko Hietala – Pyre of the Black Heart (2019)
On the album’s first track, Frankenstein’s Wife, he is willing to do whatever it takes to bring his dead wife back to life. This scenario is flipped on the head on the album-closing title track Roses From the Deep, where he is now dead himself, mourning all the things that he is losing out on as his wife lives on without him, but he takes comfort in waiting for her to join him one day. This may not exactly come across as sunny subject matter, but it is written as a romantic ghost story from the perspective of love and longing rather than anything creepy. These are still intense lyrical expressions, written to feel as dramatic as the musical expression that these songs are given.
Looking closer at Left On Mars, the title alone alludes to the vast loneliness and separation that comes from being stranded on a different planet. This is a metaphor for being isolated from someone (or people in general) mentally, with the song’s main inspiration coming from a personal perspective of love and longing. In the end, the song is less about the isolation and more about the fact that someone is there for you and willing to help. Someone is actually reaching out a hand, and sometimes you just need to accept it back.
“Left On Mars was written in the aftermath of me finding out what was wrong with me,” Marko said in a 2024 YouTube interview with A&P-Reacts, “and getting to solve my depression and anxiety problems. That was of course very fruitful, to start writing again. Left On Mars came out more like a romantic piece to my wife, who had seen me being alienated so far that I might as well be on another planet, but she’s the one who kind of followed me there and made sure that I would come back out.”
Marko tells a similar thing in an interview with Chaoszine: “I had meant it as a romantic piece for someone who gets stranded, whether it’s a different planet or if it’s a state of mind, but then also that there is somebody who will come after you, help you stand up, and maybe even take you back.”
In the press release for the song, Marko once again confirmed that Left On Mars had been written as “a love song to my wife,” but also emphasises the importance of his duet with Tarja: “[it] also ends up uniting two old friends. Even if the song itself sucked, I would be pleased about that result.”
There was a child climbing a hill on a winter’s night
Face up to space above and taken by the sight
Time slowed down under the blessing of the skies
Of dying stars and their billion years of lightI flew across the void of space in a waking dream
Astride a fusion flame I’m finally redeemed
To find the wonders that transcend the bounds of time
To hear the heavens sing and reach the other sideDo you know that my heart still holds the rage, no
And I’ve turned page after page
I never chose to be an alien, no
I’m just looking for a home
I know I’m better left on Mars
Marko’s guitarist and album producer Tuomas Wäinölä recalls hearing the song for the first time at Marko’s place in Kuopio: “It was a strong one immediately. I think Marko had the idea of it being a duet too, straight from the beginning. After that it was just a matter of grinding and demoing it well.”
“Tuomas Wäinölä, my guitar player, said that this could be a duet,” Marko told Chaoszine. “I went back and looked over the lyrics and realized that yes, it will work, and at the same time that Phantom of the Opera thing was happening – performed for the first time in 18 years! – so I kind of knew immediately who to ask for the duet.”
This takes us back to Tarja’s invitation to Marko to sing Phantom of the Opera with her during the special open-air concert in July 2023 at Z7 Summer Nights in Pratteln, Switzerland. Tarja and Marko both played individual sets at the event, with their rendition of the main theme from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical coming during Tarja’s portion of the show. As expected, it brought the figurative house down.
“After 18 years, we were about to sing the song together,” Tarja told Brazil’s Metal Musikast shortly after the event. “And it was super exciting. It was really beautiful. People got very emotional about this. We had met already before – we had been singing on a few occasions in Finland a few years before – so we were on good terms, so to say, but now singing The Phantom of the Opera together after all these years was amazing.”
As it turned out, this almost opened the floodgates. Their respective bands crossed paths again in Finland, sang the song one more time, and decided to book a tour with both their respective bands in 2024, which opened for a nightly collaboration in addition to their separate bands.
Tarja expanded on what made this happen in her Chaoszine interview from late 2023: “We sang Phantom of the Opera in Switzerland for the first time. Then we went over to Finland to perform it again, did a show together there — he with his band and me with my own. Wow. It was pure emotion. I think it was really beautiful, but it made me kind of… I was, like, ‘I’m in peace,’ sort of. The feeling was great. I think it was even more for Marko, because I saw him standing there after my concert, when I finished my set, and he came like almost in tears, saying that this was important. We reconnected, and it’s great. Now I’m really looking forward to have this tour [with Marko] in South America in March [2024], and I’m sure you will see something else happening also. Yeah, you’ll hear.”
Tarja had to be secretive during those final few sentences there, as she had already recorded her parts for Left On Mars. This collaboration had not been announced yet.
Marko was similarly pleased about everything that unfolded, and especially that the initial invitation to do something on stage had come from Tarja. He arrived at the Z7 Festival in Switzerland with an invite of his own, though, hoping that Tarja would be open to add her vocals to Left On Mars.
Marko’s guitar player, Tuomas Wäinölä, still laughs at the subterfuge and secrecy involved. “The fun part,” he said, “was taking the song to Switzerland on an USB drive, like proper agents! We had this secret meeting when we had a Pratteln outdoor gig with Tarja, both playing our own sets. And yeah, it was great to see them together on stage and finally singing the same tune again.”
I can just about imagine Marko going down on one knee, offering the USB stick to Tarja with his most intense plea to sing on the track. It almost certainly wasn’t as melodramatic as that, but I am sure all kinds of pampering was involved as he wasn’t sure if she’d say yes. Fortunately, she did!
Tarja told Rock Hard France: “It was at this festival where he asked, with great gentleness and humility, if we could work together again, and told me about Left On Mars, the piece he was hoping I’d participate in. Frankly, I was impressed by the courage he showed in talking to me like that. Especially because when we were in the same band, we never spoke to each other. We never knew each other at all!”
The fact that they really did not know each other that well when they played together in Nightwish cannot be overstated. They had to more or less start over from scratch. Tarja said: “The members of Nightwish were not friends and never have been. And most of all, let’s not forget that in the early 2000’s Marko was a total alcoholic. Now he’s completely sober and an incredibly different person. It’s a guy I want to meet! Before, it was impossible. […] And we have great conversations! I’ve learned more about Marko in the past year than I have in the four years we’ve been together in the same group, that’s for sure! Marko and I are in constant communication. We have a great tour planned for next year that is being finalized.”
The same issue of Rock Hard France also has an interview with Marko. When confronted with Tarja’s statements about being happy to reconnect far beyond what they were able to do earlier, Marko is quick to say “I feel the same way! At that moment, we established a comradeship, a bond of comradeship. Then we went through the same business experience… And even though things didn’t end well, we had a great time and some great things happened.”
Tarja also elaborated on her friendship with Marko, saying: “It’s a new relationship with him, because he’s not the same person as he was in the band. He has changed a lot, and many years have passed by. I’ve changed myself. Life has changed us. It’s a new relationship, let’s say. And it has made me very happy to get to know him better after all these years.”
The video for Left On Mars appeared on 13 March 2024, with a digital single release and streaming platform release two days later on the 15th. This was some 11 months before the full album appeared, and videos of several other songs would follow over the coming year.
The full album Roses From the Deep was released on 7 February 2025. It was followed by a tour with Marko and Tarja’s bands once again going out together. It could not have played out any better.
In 2024, Marko was asked by El Planeta Del Rock if there is any chance of him and Tarja launching a new and more permanent project together. He responded: “I won’t close that option off. We haven’t talked about it, putting up a group together or anything like that. But at the moment, it seems that we’ve got a different kind of connection than it was in the past. […] What we already realized a few years back when we were all together there doing the Christmas shows in Finland that after all the hassle has died and the noise has died and everything, you still find out that you lost a friend. And that was the main reason why we are basically doing this together again.”
I think you know that my heart still holds the rage, no
But you still believe in me
And I choose the mercy of your heart
I’m just looking for a home
There together we’ll find home
Alone together left on Mars
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