30 Days, 30 Songs: A song that reminds of you of somewhere
Songs the Night Sings - The Dark Element
I wanna live the stories I write
See the whole world with my own eyes
Take the unknown trail
And hear the songs the night sings
I wanna feel the flame when it burns
Wanna feel the pain when it hurts
Take the unknown trail
And hear the songs the night sings
In no particular order: No More Hollywood Endings by Battle Beast | Gods of Debauchery by Seven Spires | Chapter II - Legacy by Ad Infinitum | King of Everything by Jinjer | Omega by Epica | Micro by Jinjer | The Source by Ayreon | The Spell by Cellar Darling | The Dark Element by The Dark Element
Between school and life I didn’t have too much time to listen to music in 2021, so this was harder than last year. That said there are a couple albums I’m already looking forward to in 2022.
Thanks @sapphireswimming for tagging! Anyone else who wants to do this, feel welcome, especially @tillthestarsevaporate or @paper-ink-and-sorrow
Very long post ahead! I couldn't get this out of my head for a while because there's so much similarity between how these two big influences in my life evolved with their changing leads and the way their fandoms reacted to those changes, which I want to ramble about in this post. Read at your own risk.
IMAGE: I lined up live photos of the three frontwomen of the metal band Nightwish on the top three panels against the hosts of Blue's Clues on the bottom three, with the lighting on the singers to match the hosts' shirts: green on Tarja Turunen and Steve Burns, orange on Anette Olzon and Donovan Patton, and blue on Floor Jansen and Josh dela Cruz.
Steve and Tarja
Both of them were pioneers in their art: Tarja Turunen [pronunciation note for her first name, for those who don't know: tar-ya] was among the first to make opera singing sound awesome against a metal band, while Steve Burns was among the first to work as a kiddie show presenter in a wild mix of animation and green screen live action when older shows worked with puppets and on-location shoots.
Thanks to having been there for a long enough time, Steve and Tarja are most known for these works long after they had both left because they felt that it was time to explore other paths: Steve pursuing music and going through college while Tarja coming back to her classical roots and focusing on her married life, before deciding to jump back into the scene, much to the delight of their respective fandoms. Steve appeared in some of Joe's Blue's Clues episodes and now writes and directs some of Josh's as well in the reboot. Tarja got back to the metal world as a solo artist and has since been swinging back and forth between classical and rock/metal in her work, plus taking on even more genre fusions in recent projects like Outlanders.
These two also did raise me: the first Nightwish song I have heard in my life was „Nemo“ and my life had never been the same since.
Joe and Anette
Anette Olzon enjoys Tarja's work, just as Joe's actor Donovan Patton enjoys Steve's. This is the first of so many things I wanted to put in this part as both the Blue's Clues and Nightwish fandoms regularly go to war to pit one talent against another when in the end they're actually their own kind of great, and they're not even antagonistic towards each other despite the contrasts.
Anette's singing style is a huge contrast to Tarja: though classically trained herself, her style is more pop-oriented, influenced especially by ABBA. The only time she's ever really sung in a classical style for Nightwish was in „The Poet and the Pendulum“ (IMO she sounded like a choir singer) and then afterwards she no longer pretended. Which I love, but much of the Nightwish fandom hated sorely.
That being said, Anette's style pushed the band and especially its primary songwriter Tuomas Holopainen to take on more styles and more genres and as a result her only two studio albums in the discography, Dark Passion Play and Imaginaerum, were such adventures to listen to. Particularly the latter where they had the energy to create a film that moved me to tears the very first time I watched it.
Re Blue's Clues and Joe, he contrasts with his loving older brother first and foremost from the way they sound: Steve is calming while Joe is uplifting. Joe sounds like the breakfast that you skip in a rush to get out and make it on time to wherever you have to be today. I can say so much more about it that you can find in my other posts in this blog, but good luck finding them.
Joe and Anette, both emergency replacements for outgoing founders who established the style they were taking on, became the ones around which their media sought new directions. Anette got to try Celtic folk and slow jazz alongside Nightwish's usual symphonic metal output. Joe got to wear many colors of shirts, watch the clues in his notebook and especially Blue be given voices of their own, and cross over from just imagining things against a green screen to interacting with more tangible puppets in Blue's Room.
Both their fandoms were unstable as well: some managed to adjust and others just stuck to the past at the expense of the present that they bullied just when social media was only beginning to take over the Internet.
Donovan faded out with the show and Anette was wished out of the band; now out of the spotlight and in spite of fandom hate, or maybe because of it, both of them wanted to do something different to juggle with their parenting lives. Donovan took on serious roles in film, TV, and theatre while he honed his voice acting skills in shows like Clarence and Team Umizoomi, as well as took on games like Minecraft and Horizon Zero Dawn. Anette stuck to softer folk and rock for her solo album Shine.
Like Steve and Tarja, though, Donovan and Anette never forget how their big break really made them. Donovan came back as Joe in 2010 for Nickelodeon's annual Music Fest and then again for 2019's Blue's Clues and You!, this time as Joe the hot purple-shirted clerk from the local present store. Anette collaborated with a number of power metal and rock bands before forming alliances with Sonata Arctica axeman Jani Liimatainen as The Dark Element and with Symphony X vocalist Russell Allen for Allen/Olzon, as well as coming back to her old AOR band Alyson Avenue.
Fandom has since lightened up on both Donovan and Anette, but still they're not as popular as the ones who replaced them in turn.
Floor and Josh
Incidentally, both of them are very intimidating to look at. Josh dela Cruz works out as a hobby and is burly compared to his lean onscreen cousins, despite having one of them taller than him by a few inches. Floor Jansen towers over all of Nightwish at the same height as Donovan Patton and looks like she's the one of the three women most likely to literally floor you if you slander her or the people she respects. And both of them have been vocal about how women (Floor) and people of color (Josh) have been denied the chance to be respected as professionals.
Floor and Josh are already seasoned performers by the time they come in to Nightwish and Blue's Clues respectively. Floor was vocalist for the band After Forever and then the much heavier ReVamp, and has worked with fellow Dutch rockers like Epica and Arjen Anthony Lucassen multiple times. Josh was an ensemble performer in Broadway and starred in the likes of The King and I before becoming an Aladdin understudy. Floor was an emergency replacement for Anette who had to miss out for health reasons and sadly, amidst conflicts between the Swede and the Finnish band, while the bookends of Joe and Josh's eras are more than a decade apart.
Both were the complete package: Josh was chosen for the energy and talent that he'd shown during auditions that caught the eye of series creators Traci Paige Johnson and Angela Santomero. Floor shifted from classical style towards pop/rock during her time with After Forever and now swings back and forth between both. This was her advantage coming into Nightwish who had themselves learned to accommodate both. Floor was better received by fans than Anette coming in, just as Josh was better received by fans than Joe, though the reasons are where they vary: Floor because of the way she can do Tarja's work, Josh because of what he stands for.
Both came in just as their media were retracting into a comfort zone. Nightwish debuted Floor on a much softer track, and album, compared to Anette. Many of the first episodes of Blue's Clues & You! were updates of old Blue's Clues episodes, thanks to its target market being preschoolers to which even the recycled old is new. The years pass and especially cross into this pandemic and we actually see how both Blue's Clues and Nightwish are creeping out of that comfort zone once more: Josh gets to show more of his Filipino side on Blue's Clues & You! as well as deep dive into cultural holidays a bit more like what they did with Chanukah. Nightwish continue their conceptual songwriting around Floor but bring it further down to earth to appreciate its life and evolution after a long time of dark fantasy.
Personal notes
I'm usually not one to delve so deep into something until I resonate big time with it, and I do with this metal band and this kiddie show and of course crashing into the fandom at this point in the timeline feels different compared to having been a fan earlier or maybe later.
I discovered Nightwish during the time Anette was their frontwoman, while I first got to watch Blue's Clues with Steve far earlier. That plus considering that the way I go absolutely berserk over a topic is at times incongruous with the way other people in the same fandom would makes me feel like I don't belong in the collective, like I'm just an outsider looking in. This is the distance that I wrote this rant post with, and the distance that made it pretty easy for me to like all three Nightwish vocalists and all three Blue's Clues guys regardless of my biases. Your bias will inevitably be a bit different from mine, and what I would probably want you to do in the end is take it apart, consider where/when/how/why your inclination towards one made you poorly receive the others. And then maybe work on that, too.
I just want Layla to pick Zayne please 😭😭 I'm n years too late but crossing my fingers that Layla and Zayne are end game. Friends to lovers would always trump enemies to lovers for me.
