In a recent interview with Benni of Thomann Music, Nightwish keyboardist and main songwriter Tuomas Holopainen explained why he prefers to write longer songs that don’t follow the typical pop song structure. He questioned the need to always stick to the formula of short songs with choruses about love or heartbreak.
“We’ve been doing things this way for almost 28 years now, so why the hell would we change anything at the moment? But, yeah, it’s really tedious to me that you have to do a song like under four minutes all the time — it has to have a chorus, it has to talk about somebody’s love life or broken relationships. It’s just tedious and boring to me. There is a time and place for those songs as well, but if you have a story you want to tell, and it needs some time to be told in a proper way, you just take your time and the song lasts however [long] it needs to last. As simple as that.”
