"We did three albums in the mid-'90s, the latest one coming out in '98. Witch-Hunts, it was called. And since then, we have had this high school friends get-together almost every summer, since the past 15 years or so, and we always talk about the comeback of Darkwoods and then forget it immediately,” he told Kaaos TV.
“The summer comes, we talk about it, 'Now let's do it,' and then we forget about it. But last July, in 2020, we thought that it's really now or never. Because of this situation that the world is in, we finally might have the time and the means to actually realise this that we have been talking about for so long. And here we are."
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Unlike Nightwish, where Tuomas is the creative main-brain, here he’ll just be manning the keyboards, as ever, and leaving the compositional work up to his bandmates.
"Originally I was just a session musician back in the days," he says. "And now, even though I'm a full-time member of the band, I still don't do any songs; it's the other guys who take care of that. I just play my parts with the keys. That's the dynamics of this particular band, and that's the way it works the best, because Jouni ['Hallgrim' Mikkonen, guitar], Teemu ['Hexenmeister' Kautonen, bass] and Pasi ['Emperor Nattasett' Kankkunen, vocals], the core of the band, they have such a strong vision of the songs and the lyrics and the overall atmosphere of what Darkwoods is about. So they do the songwriting part, and then I just come in and spice up the whole thing with the keyboards, just the way it has worked in the past and on this album as well."