86117086 Loneliness of a 1000 Years

7/29/2019 86117086 Loneliness of a 1000 Years

1/130

TIMO TOLKKI

LONELINESS OF A THOUSAND YEARS


2/130

To Mika


3/130

LONELINESS OF A THOUSAND YEARS

Only in the crushing loneliness You finallyyou finally understand

I dont remember when it happened. Was it when I was told by my mother that I haveto eat all the food from my plate when I was seven years old or else? No. That wasnt so bad. Was it the day when my father


4/130

finally left after many years of fear and violence? When we finally escaped hisrage? No. I felt happy. Was it when I understood, at 14, that there had been a thing called World War 2 and that 70 million people were killed in it? And that even small children were killed in it just because they happened to be of a certainrace. No, not that either. It made me think. Was it when my father, on one winter morning, decided to cut both of his arms with a fillet knife in a bath tub that had no water in it, and then jumped down to death from the fourth floor of his apartment? No. Thats when I started to run for my life. And I continued runningfor 32 years. It was none of these things. It was me. When I lost faith in myself. That is when it happened. I lost faith. In me. And that is the worst thing that can happen.


5/130

THE YEAR I DIED I am browsing the internet in a March winter morning of 2004. Ifeel a growing feeling of panic and my head feels like its bring pressed with giant hands. I am desperate. I call to few places and I get no help. The panic is getting bigger. This is not an ordinary panic attack, or whatever they call those. This is a result of years of living in a lie finally taking its toll. It wantsto crush me. And it is succeeding. At that point I had been going to psychotherapy for seven years, on and off more or less. What I did not understand was thatit was the therapy itself that had brought me to the origins of my pain. The floodgates were open and the floods could not be stopped after that. And that I had to die so I could live. Finally I was taken to a private hospital, but beforethat I had to wait half an hour in the waiting room with some other people. It was


6/130

one of the most horrible moments of my life. I could barely hold the terror inside while I was waiting to hear my name. Finally the doctor called me in and asked what he could do for me. I said that I didnt know. That I just felt so utterlydesperate and in panic that I thought I was going insane. I had this indescribable emotional pain flooding all over me from head to toe. A feeling of terror. From the corner of my eye I could see him writing on his notepad:musician in a famous rock band. There was no empathy in his attitude when he said: I guess I shouldsend you to the State Mental Hospital. I had heard about that place. I knew whatit was like because a friend of mine had been committed there. Later he committed suicide. It was the ultimate place for people that have no hope. The place where nobody is really treated where you dont come back. I asked the doctor if I could stay in their hospital. His eyes brightened. But of course you can., he answered. Why didnt you ask before? Let me take you there


7/130

right away. What he did not tell me was that it cost 1000 euros a day to stay inthat hospital. But perhaps it saved me. I was given my own room, and for the first time in my life, I had a tranquilizer. I started feeling extremely heavy andnumb. Like I did not exist at all. I was lying in my bed in that white room andI could see a tree outside. I did not feel the terror anymore. I did not feel anything at all because of the medication. I did not understand what was happeningto me. I was truly scared. A doctor came to see me. A kind woman who looked very happy. I remember wondering how somebody could be so happy. She asked me somequestions and then I had to take a depression test, which is basically just a series of questions. Like most doctors, she tried to define what is wrong with mein a mechanical way. But I was used to that already anyway. I remember telling her that in some


8/130

way I understand that I have all these emotions in me and that suddenly I felt them all. She said she was no psychiatrist and told me I would have a consultation on the following day. I told her that I had been in psychotherapy already forseven years in and out with breaks in between. She did not comment on that at all. So I spent the rest of the day like a zombie. Not feeling anything, not seeing anything, not hearing anything. Just staring at that tree. And hoping that oneday I could be as alive as it was. The following day I met the psychiatrist. Hewas an older man, in his sixties, and he made me do series of questionnaires and asked me many questions. I told him about my life and I noticed a few tears running down his cheek. His diagnosis, as the doctors call it, was that I had bipolar disorder. I had no idea what that was until he explained it to me. It did make sense. I remembered that I had had


9/130

the symptoms for almost 10 years and he said that it is not uncommon that this illness goes untreated for 10 years, that it is actually quite common. I was wondering about all that time I had spent in therapy. Was it in vain? Now I know itwas not. So what was the result? Medication. In the following weeks I was put onnumerous different medicines. Most had horrible side effects and some had no effect at all. Finally I was given one of the modern and very expensive antidepressants and tranquilizers. Little did I know that to give antidepressants to someone who has a bipolar disorder is like a time bomb. It can launch a very viciousmanic episode or alternatively and almost ironically, it can also make you depressed. For the next six months I mostly stayed in bed with curtains drawn. On some days the curtain was open for 10cm, but most days it was completely closed. Icried every single day for half a year. I did not


10/130

understand where it came from but something in me understood that this had beeninside of me for a long time. It was desperate, deep crying. It came from somewhere deep inside of me. I understood that what I was going through had nothing todo with bipolar disorder. That it was something I had been hiding. Something terrible from the past and from my whole life. I had never mourned my father and my lost childhood. But then I was starting to. When I managed to go out, I oftenwent to visit the places of my childhood. I remembered everything, even the little details. Pranks my friends and I did to people. Places we played football. All these places brought more emotions into the surface. It is not possible to describe how I was feeling if you havent experienced emotional pain yourself. It hurts. It is physical pain. Very much so, although people dont usually understand that it really is extreme


11/130

physical pain. I dont think it is possible to understand this if you havent had ityourself in your life. I often went to sit by the sea to a place where I went fishing when I was 11 years old. I sat on a rock and looked at the scenery. The snow had melted and the ice covered most of the sea, as well as covering the Gulfof Finland. Suddenly it started to snow. Yet I could see that the snow was onlyfalling around me, in a 100 meter or so radius. I sat there looking at the beautiful scenery while the snow fell on me. I felt that all my life had been in vain, that my pain was so big that I just could not take it anymore. I did not realize that the place where my father had committed suicide was just 3km away fromthe place I was now. I had a bottle of pills with me, enough to end the pain. Iwas sitting there for a long time in the falling snow and staring into the distance. I was asking myself if this life mattered to me anymore and if this


12/130

pain and hopelessness was worth it. It would be easy, like fading away. And yetsomething in me could not do that. And still in that year, I died. That is how the whole thing felt. A slow death. It was impossible to make music. It was impossible most of the time even to get out of bed. Mornings were horrible. The firstthing I felt when I woke up was hopelessness. I lived in that hopelessness forhalf a year. I really died in that year. So I could live. I have often heard some people say that suicide is the easy way out. I can tell from experience, both myown and after learning more about my father, that that it is nothing but a clich. Suicide is far from being the easy way out. It takes courage to kill yourselfbecause it is the ultimate end of your life as you know it. Thats why it is mostoften an escape from an intolerable situation or intolerable pain or from both. But it is not easy. You can try to imagine, if you have some empathy left in you,how it might


13/130

have felt for somebody who really ended his life. Just before that and while itwas happening. Trying to imagine what the person has felt while going through it. And yet I know, that only if you have been close enough to death yourself, only then, you are somehow able to understand the decision of that person who tookhis life. Like my father. Like one Finnish author, who one morning went for a walk from a mental hospital where he had committed himself voluntarily. He walkedto the nearest subway station and waited for the train to arrive. Just before itdid, he jumped in front of the train and stood facing the train without any movement. Without any fear. The train tried to slow down, but it had only 40 metersto do so. And the author had 40 meters to stand and face the train. He did notmove an inch. Or like my best friend Mika, who jumped from 4th floor of his parents house to death five years ago, after a long struggle with depression and feelings of worthlessness.


14/130

Please dont think that I am writing here as some kind of spokesman for suicide. Just that I truly understand people who have decided to end their lives. And thatyou most likely believe one of the many taboos suicide has in society. For me,I dont believe in either one. Taboos or society. But so many people close to me have ended their lives by their own hand that I have thought about the subject alot. And of course through my own pain and suffering it is far easier for me tounderstand their decision. Decisions which seem mostly absurd to people who areleading a happy life and have never been truly depressed. And so I continued tolive with my pain and terror. Day by day. Year by year. It did not stop me fromdriving four hours to a concert my daughter wanted so much to see. And while shewas at the concert, I stayed in a hotel and cried because it hurt so much. I felt everything at the same time: fear, anger, terror, sadness, abandonment. At that time I could not identify any emotions, I was just


15/130

suffering through them and tried to continue nevertheless. It just hurt so much.It did not stop me from driving my daughter to school in the morning and picking her up in the afternoon. It did not stop me from making breakfast for her. Itdid not stop me from doing two world tours in a metal band under very heavy conditions. It did not stop me from visiting my fathers grave and having imaginary conversations with him, or just sitting there for hours watching his grave and thecemetery. I realized that I never had said goodbye to my father. That I did noteven understand that he was dead. It is possible for us humans to be like this.Intellectually I understood that he was dead, but emotionally on a deep level,he was very much alive. In me. I never truly had realized that he was dead. It took a lot of visits to his grave. It took a lot of pain, more than I ever thought was possible to take. Complete research of his suicide and the days before that. Returning to that


16/130

state of being a 12 year old boy, who had to go through something like that. Only then I started to understand what had happened. But it took years. And still today I am somehow struggling with it. Maybe it is not possible to heal all the painful moments of our lives. It is possible that I have to live with this for the rest of my life. I am now 11 years older than my father was when he died. Thatfeels strange. But we all have our story to tell. It did stop me from fully living and experiencing life, and yet at the same time I felt it was in a way my destiny. Many painful things that I had locked inside were now coming into my consciousness. I felt them in my body. Some people say you cannot change who you really are. I did not even know who I was until my past finally broke free in me. From there I started a journey that would ultimately lead back to myself and whoI really am. Not who I pretend to be. And that journey is the most painful journey in life. And yet, when this journey called upon


17/130

me, I had no choice but to jump into its stream and let it guide me. Life alwaysfinds a way. And of course I cannot deny the effect my painful childhood has had on me as an artist and why I became a musician. For sure many of my songs havethat longing and missing element towards my father although I havent been awareof that while writing those songs. So in that light, my childhood could maybe have an entirely different meaning after all. Maybe. Now as I am writing this in the summer of 2010, I have lived with this pain for six years every single day. It has not gone away. I am still taking lithium and tranquilizers. The doctors say that you cannot cure bipolar disorder that you have it for life. Maybe it is so, I dont know. What I do know is that it is like a ghost on my shoulder, a companion that reminds me every morning when I wake up about the fragility of life andhow easy it is to lose everything you have in the flash of a second.


18/130

THERE WAS NO SORROW, THERE WAS NO PAIN

I spent most of my childhood being happy and feeling safe. When I write childhood,in my case it means up until when I was about nine years old. There seemed to be nothing wrong in our family. In fact, it seemed to be a true dream family. Wehad a nice home and financial security. My mother really took care of me with alove and devotion that gave me the tools to survive much later in my life. I remember that I loved Christmases especially. I can still somehow remember the magical feeling of Christmas when I was eight years old. I remember the smell. I remember the atmosphere. It felt safe. Everybody was together. Everybody was happy.Always when the family gathered together, my grandfather wanted me to sing one


19/130

song he liked. I was shy but he always gave me money if I sang so I did. I was singing in a classical boys choir called Cantores Minores at that time and often I sang at school parties. I remember having a huge self confidence about my voice.I really felt it was something I could do that came very easy for me. It felt completely natural to me to sing. When I was seven, I got my first guitar as a Christmas present. I had seen my cousin play an acoustic guitar when I was five years old and he instantly became my hero. I remember sneaking into his room just to look at his guitar. I still remember what it looked like. Very carefully I touched the strings and played them a little bit. It was love at first sight. I could not understand the magic of the guitar. My cousin taught me some chords and some Beatles songs. Eight Days a Week was one song he taught me to play. He also played in a band already which impressed me immensely. So of course very soon I wanted to


20/130

have my own guitar. That happened on the magical Christmas evening in 1973. Of course everybody who reads this knows that this instrument would take me to manyplaces in the future. I never thought or dreamed of anything like that. I just really wanted to have a guitar. I couldnt do much with it first because I couldnt play. There was a Guitar Class in the school where they taught some very rudimentary basics of guitar. I went there and learned my first song. I was so happy. I went every week and learned more things. I had found music and it felt very natural to me. My mother has told me that when I was only three years old, I liked music and that I was listening to the TOP 40 program on the radio and that I knew the lyrics to all the hits and was always leaning against the radio and waiting for the hits to play and then sang along. Not everything was rosy. I remember that my grandmother


21/130

had cancer and both her legs were amputated. I still remember my father carryingher upstairs on Christmas evening and placing her on a couch. She said that ina way it is great to have cancer because at least now she got the attention shenever had while still being healthy. I remember wondering if its possible to make the cancer within yourself. Now I think that that is in my opinion the basic mechanism for cancer. Not in all cases, but more than you would think. Everybody wasaround my grandmother giving her attention. Then she died in the next year. I dont remember being in the funeral although it is possible. She is buried in the same graveyard as my grandfather and my father. I will not be buried there. Deathis something abstract to children up until a certain age. It is not really understood. Or perhaps children understand and accept death in much more natural waythan we adults are capable of, the


22/130

reason being that death is another great taboo of society. It is simply pushed out of sight. Nobody really understands that they really are going to die one day. Maybe even tomorrow. You never know when. Children seem to take death quite naturally. And my personal opinion is that children can be our biggest teachers ifwe are humble enough to receive what they want to tell us. And they have a lotto tell. What I miss maybe the most is that fresh feeling you have when you areeight years old and all your senses are still so sharp how you look at the worldthrough a childs eyes. Despite of how you are being treated by your parents and school, being eight is still an age where you look at the world in a different way. You feel. You truly feel. You are not completely dead yet by the rules, dogmas and taboos that will be introduced later in your life. You run and play because that is what children do. Its very pure. Its very innocent. I remember it stillvery vividly. How the grass smelled. How


23/130

it was to play football with friends until the evening and then run home becauseI was so thirsty. How good the ice cream tasted in the summer. The feeling of freedom when the summer holiday started and you had the whole summer for yourself. How it was to tease girls. How it felt to smile and be happy. How it felt to skip school. How I hated mathematics and how I loved music. I remember all the places of my childhood with a certain kind of nostalgia. Those times will never come back. If I could have even 2% of that enthusiasm and happiness I had when I was a boy, I would be the happiest man on this earth. My father worked in a storethat sold electronics, TVs, radios and such. He had a vast collection of music at home and became really interested in that. The first band I ever started to like was ABBA. He gave me their cassette. I think it was their first album. I remember how much I loved those songs and how I tried to play them with my guitar. For a long time, ABBA


24/130

remained truly the only band for me. I still love their songs and I remember howfresh they sounded to me. I wanted to be like them. Their songs were just incredibly good. They had something like eight number one hits in a row beginning with SOS. A lot of Finnish music was also played in my childhood home and a lot of songs that I have written have their origins in there. There are even some embarrassing moments, but I never consciously copied anything in any song I have written. It just is a proof that your subconscious mind stores everything that happensto you when you are able to write songs when you are 40 years old and some of the melodies date back 30 years. So putting all this together it is not hard to imagine that music was getting more and more important in my life. But it happened very slowly. I dont remember it consciously. Being a child still, I had so manyother activities as well. I was playing


25/130

ice hockey on a team and also basketball. I was much taller than most boys my age and I remember really liking basketball very much. I really enjoyed swimming during the summers as well. It was a happy time, I would say I had a very happy childhood up until a certain point and then it turned to something completely different. A nightmare. The line in the song Forever that I wrote goes: Oh how happy Iwas then, there was no sorrow, there was no pain. Walking through the green fields, sunshine in my eyes truly reflects how most of my childhood was. Although this song was really composed for my father. Those green fields are still there. Ijust have to find them again somehow. Perhaps one day I will. Perhaps one day Ifind myself as a boy walking those green fields with sunshine in my eyes. In that moment I know for certain that I have arrived home. I have so many things totell to myself as a boy. So many things to explain and so much to share. I hopewe will meet on a


26/130

sunny road one day.

PLUNGING INTO PSYCHOSIS It happened gradually. Looking back, from around Christmas 2004 up until the autumn of 2005 I was in some kind of psychotic state of being. In 2004, before my nervous breakdown and I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, I had put together a state of the art recording studio called Goldenworks. Iput all the royalty advances and a bank loan into this studio, totaling around150 000 euros. When the studio was completed, they started building a parking garage under it. That meant almost constant drilling and huge explosions many times a day. It was evident that no customers would come there to record and mix under such conditions. It was my dream. Something for my future. My own studio. Andit failed even before it had begun. Only one album was recorded there: the BlackAlbum of Stratovarius. Subsequently, I had to go to court with the landlord who


27/130

refused to let me go from the rental contract. She simply said that there is nothing happening in the building that would harm the studio business. It turned out that she had known about the parking garage already when I signed the rental contract with her. And not only that, she was one of the owners of the parking garage. Despite all this, I lost the first court case. I appealed to a higher degree court and finally won there, but all in all it took four years of my life, and those kinds of things are very draining for me. My landlord had to pay almost50 000 euros of lawyer costs. And all I ever asked from her was to let me go from the rental contract. Everything truly comes back in this life. I still dont know if it was the medicine, the antidepressants, that started to drive me into psychosis. Certainly I was manic and felt really irritated about even trivial things. Loud noises made really angry. Everything made me angry. I think that maniaslowly developed into psychosis. Being


28/130

psychotic means that you are basically out of touch with reality and you can seethings that are not really there. It also can be labeled as being insane. For example, there was an E.T puppet in the studio that spoke six lines. One specifically when you squeezed its hand. Now this puppet was at times speaking itself without anybody touching it. Even Timo Kotipelto once heard E.T talking by itself when we were recording vocals for the Black Album. I remember having this weird sensation in my head. Like a mixture of fear and arrogance, but mostly fear. Once Iwent to a shop to buy some food and needed to buy butter. I was staring at thisbutter box because this brand had looked the same for 20 years. It still lookedthe same but the name had changed to a different one. It resembled the old one but was still new. I remember staring at that box of butter in terror thinking that I was losing it. I thought I saw the name wrongly in my mind. So it was


29/130

getting worse. One day a friend of the band called me while I was mixing the album and asked if he could come and listen to some songs. I said of course. Then Istarted to feel that this guy was Satan himself. It might sound comical in retrospect, but to me it was completely true. When he came to the studio, I was 100%sure he was the devil himself who had come to listen to our songs. So he was sitting at my mixing position and I was leaning against the mixing desk facing him. I looked at him in the eyes and I remember thinking: You dont fool me, I know who you are. And I dont even believe something like Satan exists. Yet perhaps on a deeper level I do. And this guy who came to listen to the songs is one of the kindest guys I have ever met in my life. I was plunging into the shadow world of psychosis. And not everybody comes back from that. Then came the time to go to Berlin to play some mixes for the record company. This was spring 2005. At the sametime there was the Berlin


30/130

Film Festival. In the evening I wanted to go to drink, so I called one Finnish film producer that was there, but he was already leaving home. He suggested thatI meet his friend from Iceland. I call him Yngvar. He called me and said he would come to the hotel and that he would bring his friend from Austria with him. Healso told me on the phone that he is the last viking. So they arrived at my hoteland I was waiting for them at the bar. His first words to me were:We know who you are but we dont know what you look like. That sounded very strange to me. Yngvarand Markus were very strange people. They said they were in the film business.They both had a black notebook and they asked me why I didnt have one. They saidHemingway had one as well. The purpose of the black notebook became clear very soon. It started already in the hotel bar. They went to every woman who they thought was good looking and asked directly for their name and phone number or emailaddress.


31/130

To my surprise, most women gave this information to them and they wrote it to their notebooks. All the time they were telling me that I have to get one myself.It felt really weird and absurd. But I was on a manic episode, so everything sort of made sense to me. When we were sitting in the hotel bar drinking beer, Yngvar started telling me things. He told me that he was the middleman between God and the devil and that he has come to pass the torch to me. He also told me thatI would become world famous in 2.5 years, maybe sooner and that people would cometo me. He said that I will die in my sleep peacefully when I am 70 years old. Healso said that I would have a bit bumpy road, but it was going to be just fine. All this was very frightening talk to me considering the state I was in. I couldnot understand this man. We went to some club and there they did the same thingwith the notebooks. I remember Yngvar giving me his jacket and asking me: Can I trust


32/130

you? I said yes and took the jacket. He returned after 10 minutes or so and tookthe jacket and thanked me and said that there was a gun in there because he had to protect me. The same thing continued in several clubs and Yngvar started to getreally drunk. We took a taxi and he and Markus were in the backseat and I was sitting on the front seat. Suddenly I had a feeling that Yngvar was reading my thoughts. I dont know why I had that feeling, but I had it nevertheless. I clearlyremember this, and this is one of the first paranormal things that ever has happened to me. I held a thought in my mind: If you are reading my thoughts, knock mein the back two times. In a few seconds, I felt him knocking my back two times.This man was really reading my thoughts. I know how tempting it would be to putthis all in the manic realm, but this really was concrete. It did happen exactlythis way. Naturally this really freaked me out. When we got out of


33/130

the car I was in some kind of shock. Yngvar told me that today I would finally let go of my father. How on earth did he know about my father? I shouted at him: What do you want?. He said: Timo I want nothing from you. But I want you to know that now you have a friend. We continued walking towards my hotel and sat in the lobby. Yngvar said that if there were 100 guys coming in from that door, he wouldtake a bullet for me anytime. Then the worst thing happened. Something that haunts me still to this very day. Again it would be very tempting to jump into the manic realm, but this just felt so real. Yngvar was really drunk now and he was standing close to me, sort of sideways. He was looking at me with a weird grin onhis face. I felt kind of humming in my head and then I looked at his back and Isaw a pair of black wings on his back. They were not very long. Maybe 40cm, butthey were black and looked horrible. And he clearly noticed that I saw them because by now he was grinning. I dont know


34/130

what he did and how he did it but somehow he projected those wings into my mind.The humming in my head must have been because of that. I could not believe whatI was seeing. Then he went again to sit in the lobby and started to complain that he never sees his kids. Then he said it was time to go and he left with Markus.I never again saw him. He was gone, leaving me in the state of shock, disbeliefand terror. And a pile of questions. After this event, I really entered into psychotic realm. His suggestions worked because I allowed him into my mind. I started to think I am something special. Gods messenger on earth and fully protectedso I could do anything. I could not see that he had simply played with me, maybeused telekinetic powers. I dont know how he did it or if it was my mania. But hewas playing with me for sure. Maybe some people get kicks from doing things like that to people. But these people do not have any morals. They are sociopaths that


35/130

just want to have fun with you and have no remorse. For me and the people closeto me this episode cost a lot. Everything was chaotic in the summer of 2005. Wherever I went, I started seeing people crossing their fingers in a praying position. I always thought it was because of me. I thought that they know who I am so they are praying but they keep quiet because they want to keep me as a secret. Itsounds insane afterwards, but in that summer it was reality for me. Or lack of reality. I live by the sea so I went to the sea shore when there was storm and told the sea to calm down, like Jesus supposedly. And I clearly remember that thesea calmed down. In the evening when I came home from the studio I usually listened to Into the West from Return of the King, hence the Messianic return. I remembelooking at the night sky and having a thought that it would be nice to see a shooting star and in that exact moment there was a shooting star. So in my mind, Ihad plenty of evidence that I indeed was special


36/130

and that I was on a mission. One evening I washed one grey tshirt in a bathroom sink and left it on the sink for overnight. In the morning I rinsed it and to my absolute horror, I saw a black figure, about 10cm in size, in the shirt that theday before had been a plain ordinary grey t-shirt. It was a gunman with a riflebut he was not aiming at me. But he was looking at me. This gunman is still today in that t-shirt and I cannot explain how it ever got in there. So naturally all these things that happened to me affected a lot to my behavior and to the people close to me and to the people I worked with. It was impossible to tell thesepeople what I was going through because everything was real to me. And I still believe that at least partially some things were real. Some things just cannot besimply explained with bipolar disorder. But I was getting more and more paranoid about everything. If I heard a loud explosion from a distance, to me that wasa sign that was meant only


37/130

for me. But at this point I was still under the wrong medication that was prescribed to me when I was hospitalized. I must have been in some sort of a semi-psychotic state, because I did realize something was terribly wrong. I did understandthat I was very far from okay and that I needed to do something. My mother suggested a psychiatrist that had treated her in the 80s. It turned out to be a blessing. Very quickly he concluded that my medication was totally wrong, and that weshould first run some basic blood tests. After that he prescribed me lithium carbonate, which is the most commonly used medicine to treat bipolar disorder. Formy anxiety and paranoid tendencies he also prescribed tranquilizers. This medication has been the same for me for five years and I probably have to take lithium until the end of my life. But since I started taking that, I havent had a majormanic or depressive episode at all. Sometimes I feel the mania


38/130

creeping in, mostly during spring, and then I increase the dosage myself. As mypsychiatrist says, I am the expert in my illness. But because of lithium, I wasable to work again, to make music and tour. The drinking days were over. I haventtouched alcohol in five years. Not a drop. I must say I dont really miss it, although touring is a bit weird being sober. After all, I have done most of my tours being drunk almost every day. But I have also discovered that in sobriety liemany good things too. And oddly enough, it seems to be difficult for some otherpeople to take.

THE BOY FROM BLUEBERRY HILL It really started without a warning. Out of nowhere.Before, my father had been almost a completely sober man, and now he started todrink. This started around 1975. He drank a lot and became very violent. To a nine year old boy who had been so happy before, that was a total shock. I could not understand why


39/130

he was like that. Sometimes he passed out on the floor naked. I remember that there were times when he cut himself with a razorblade. I still have a phobia about razorblades, those old fashioned ones that you rarely see anymore. When he wasdrunk, he was completely different really mean and vicious, especially towards my mother. I remember once him chasing my mother in our apartment. I remember trying to stop him, grabbing him by his clothes and telling him to stop. For a nineyear old, that was something beyond comprehension and that is when something broke in me. It is very evident in the school picture of the year 1976. In this picture is a boy who looks very sad. When I look at that picture now, it makes mecry because I was so happy before these events started to take place. Its hard todescribe the face I have in that picture. Maybe it is someone who didnt understand, who was very disappointed and very sad. It is a photograph of a crushed tenyear old boy.


40/130

On the back of the photo there is some writing that my father wrote. Sometimes he put me to sleep telling me how much daddy loves you with a burning cigarette inhis other hand and being completely drunk. The only thing you can distinguish from the writing in the photograph are the words: daddy will kill himself. The restwas drunken scribbling that was unreadable. God knows what was in there. But I could read that one sentence. My parents had lots of fights and I always heard them through my door. They were mostly in the evenings. Things were thrown, but never by my mother. Loud, sharp and terrifying sounds. I remember being very scared in my bed. I remember that I cried myself to sleep every night. I still remember how the pillow that was wet from tears felt against my cheek. My mother had placed a painting of a Guardian Angel that had her hands upon two children next to my bed. I remember thinking that the angel


41/130

could help us a bit more because it was getting totally out of hand. Many timesmy father got so violent that me, my mother and my brother had to escape from our home. These happened frequently. I was ten years old. Once he threw the wholeliving room table through the window with a horrible scream. Once again we fled,to some relative. They started to get used to these night visits. They were always at nights. I still remember how the ice cold winter air felt when we fled inpanic, wearing whatever we could when we had to leave. I remember the icy windows of my mothers car and the terror of the thought that my father was going to follow us. He never did. Things were getting more and more out of hand. My fatherhad threatened our neighbor with a knife. Other people were starting to be scared of him as well. He made my mother watch when he put out burning cigarettes onhis arm. It was clearly getting very out of hand.


42/130

Once, I remember him being unconscious on the floor from alcohol and tranquilizers. My mother called an ambulance. I still have vividly the picture in my mind of my father being carried out by two paramedics. He was taken to the hospital and returned the next day like nothing happened. Nothing is wrong with me, he said.Often he also asked why we left when we returned the following day after escaping one of his drunken episodes. I answered to that with the logic of a 10 year old boy: because we were scared. To that he answered: You should not have left. I reber my mother pouring full bottles of alcohol down the kitchen sink and I remember doing it myself too. It was a desperate attempt to stop an alcoholic from drinking. I also remember finding a brochure of body building equipment and I stillremember the picture of Arnold Schwartzenegger with his giant muscles in the brochure. I actually ordered this device, at ten years old, because I wanted to have


43/130

similar muscles so I could protect my mother and brother from my father. It sounds absurd but it just illustrates the desperation of a young boy facing a terrible situation. The whole thing lasted about two years, from 1975 to 1977. In those two years I remember clearly that I developed some kind of safety mechanism. Ishut my real self from the world. Sometimes when I was playing with my friend outside and we happened to run by one of our windows. My friend saw my father sitting in the room naked sipping gin, and my crying mother. He asked: What is yourdaddy doing? To that I simply replied: Its just my father. He is like that. I dontderstand how I managed to go to school daily and act like nothing happened. I guess thats when I really started to develop what I call my false personality. The true one being locked inside unable to express what he truly feels about the insanity of it all. It was just too painful for a ten year


44/130

old to understand. I remember having plans of running away from home. I did notknow where I would go, being only ten years old. But I do remember that I had those plans. I did have a place where I frequently went to escape the madness. Itwas in the middle of a forest near our home on a hill. I called it Blueberry Hill.Many evenings I sat there and cried. I found comfort and safety from that placethat I could not have at home. It became my Dreamspace. I also dont understand howmy mother could cope with that situation and go to work every day like nothinghappened. I guess she had developed a similar safety mechanism that I had. She had to experience her whole life collapsing underneath her and she was completelyalone with two young boys. My mother has told me that I finally told her that if daddy doesnt leave then I leave. I dont remember that but I guess that must havebeen the point that she realized that


45/130

she had to do something. She filed for divorce. I dont remember much from those days and how that was handled but I do remember one thing. I remember the day myfather left and how it felt when he was gone. It was a bright and sunny day andwe had bought a small black cat that had no tail since it was born. I still remember how it felt not being scared anymore. I felt happy that he was gone. In just two years my father had managed to destroy almost everything there was to destroy. But I was happy that he was gone and I dont remember when I saw him next. Ithink it was at least half a year. And he was worse by then.

THEATRES OF THE MIND AND BODY

I entered psychotherapy in the year of 1999 in Helsinki. My life situation was in a place where I did not find any other solution than to go to therapy. I had just started to


46/130

investigate my fathers suicide and I think I was having a manic episode. My personal life was in ruins, my professional life flourished. I had just finished the Visions world tour. I looked for a therapist from the yellow pages. The first oneI called had an answering machine. The second one I called answered. He was a man with a very soft voice. That I still remember. I had been ordering books regarding psychology and human behavior already for a few years and I must have gonethrough over a thousand books. I thought at that time that you can actually gainwisdom or self knowledge from books. I did not see them yet as another self defense and an escape. Although there are much worse forms of escaping. I told thetherapist, lets call him Jukka, that first we would have an interview and he would decide if you take me or not. How do you know this?, he replied. He did not knowthat I had read this from my books and later those books would act as a defenseto a successful therapy.


47/130

When I went to see Jukka for the first time, I was really scared. I went to thisroom, before he had greeted me already at the door. I sat on a chair and he saton his chair. The only thing I could say was: Im really scared. He just nodded andthen he said that I am in some kind of a shock and asked if I am eating anything and that at least I should be drinking water. The hour went really fast and weagreed about the therapy schedule that was going to be once a week. Looking back now, I am sure he was wondering if I should be hospitalized due to my condition, but he had to make a quick decision. Eventually I could manage the situationsomehow and I could really start the therapy. In the beginning of the therapy Iwas often late or even missed appointments without canceling them. He would callme at this point and ask where I was and if I am coming. He got really angry once when I did not cancel an appointment that I had and did not show up. I remember buying him


48/130

some books in the beginning as a present and asking what he thinks about me. Hedid not give many answers and sometimes we just sat there the whole hour and didnot say much, just a few words. I spent the first years in therapy talking about Jesus, the universe and everything else except about myself. I was of course,again escaping the unavoidable: facing myself. Eventually I ran out of topics totalk about and I remember that I tried to ask about his life and what he did outside his work. This is not what the therapists usually do so I was really out of subjects. And yet every time I tried to talk about myself, I ran into this extremely heavy resistance in me. Jukka once said that maybe I have so much horrorinside of me that I am too scared to talk. He was of course, completely right. My life situations changed, I went through a divorce and kept going to therapy. Istarted to understand its value and what it meant to sit on that chair every week. Jukka


49/130

sometimes held group seminars that I attended. I remember the first one especially because originally it was supposed to last for a week but I was there only one day. I thought that everybody was crazy and that I had to get away from there.I did not understand that it was me who had so many things to discover about myself and that most of those people had been going to those seminars for years. It was me who had many things to resolve in myself. Slowly I started to have moreunderstanding what psychotherapy is all about. It was a slow and painful realization. My therapists humor was in its own class and many times I was roaring fromlaughter after I had been talking about some very painful thing, to which he had commented with just one sentence. That sentence turned the whole experience upside down and made it comical. Or maybe tragically comical. He told me that usually people stop therapy just when something starts to happen.


50/130

And of course, that happened to me as well. Many times. But I did always come back and he said that maybe something that has already been started cannot be stopped anymore. He was right. There was a process going in me that would transportinto the original pain and terror in me and would ultimately lead to my collapseand after that to a series of self discoveries, all through pain until I arrived to a frozen lake where all my hidden childhood and boyhood experiences were waiting. They had been waiting for me. I started to feel more and more pain. Not remembering how I was years back when I entered therapy, I asked him if this is what therapy is like. His answers were many times very vague. I understand now why. I should of course have come up with the answers myself. When I was crying inmy chair he was mainly just looking at me. That made me angry sometimes. I thought that he didnt care. But basically he was just observing the unfolding of my true self and waiting. I always remember


51/130

what he said in one session when I was feeling very desperate. He said that if the therapy succeeds well, the person has to decide if he wants to live or not. That sounded so brutally cold to me that I got really angry at him. But he was right. He was not the one who put all those emotions in me. He didnt do anything bad to me. He was just trying to help me. And he knew what he was doing. My therapy ended when I was hospitalized in 2004 and I am still convinced that it was thetherapy that made it happen and that it was the only thing that could keep me alive. Otherwise I would for sure have followed in my fathers footsteps. And I didrealize that I had already done that for many years when Jukka asked me if I amtrying to copy my father. Then I realized that I had been doing many things exactly the same way that he had been doing. My neurotic structure had to collapse. It had to be broken so a new and healthier structure could grow. The old had to


52/130

die, giving way to the new. But it was a struggle that I could not anticipate and I was not prepared for how long it took, but of course when you have been burying very painful emotions inside of you for over 20 years and you start to feelthem, it will take a long time. It is a process, like everything in this universe. I do not think I would be alive today without therapy and what it gave me. Itdidnt really rescue me, I rescued myself. But it made me understand myself better and ironically, most of the self discoveries would come to me later after I had finished the therapy. I cannot deny how much the therapy also affected my music. For example, the songs I wrote in the Infinite album were really influenced bythe therapeutic process. It was not a conscious thing, but it affected my wholecreativity and personality. Or maybe it was an unfolding of my personality in away that can be heard on that album, and on the


53/130

follow up Elements pt 1 album. These are both very dear albums for me. I stopped the therapy in 2004 when I was hospitalized and went back for three sessions in 2006. I havent gone back after that. I feel that I already know what I need to know about myself and that further therapy is not necessary. At least now. Since 2006 I have been seeing a psychiatrist who treats me with medication for bipolar disorder. But I am not going to psychotherapy anymore.

SUICIDE It was March 10th, 1978 when my father ended his existence here on thisearth. I was 12 years old and I had moved to a new home with my mother and brother. The place was much smaller because my mother could not afford better. I shared a room with my brother. But it was a place where we felt safe and it had nature around and the sea was very


54/130

close. I made frequent trips there to fish or just to marvel the wonders of thenature. I was still listening to ABBA and by now I also had found the Beatles, which I also really loved. I especially was fond of John Lennon and his humor andsongs, but the whole group became as important for me as ABBA still was. I wasplaying my acoustic guitar still and was learning songs from both groups. The divorce and the events before that had affected me deeply. It made me withdraw from this world in a way that I cannot explain. I searched for consolation from nature and music. I did not have many friends like I had had when I was eight yearsold. Although by then, I had seen so much violence, I was not prepared to facethe events that were about to come upon me. My father had moved relatively closeto me and my brother. I think the distance between the apartments was only 2kmor something like that. They had some kind of arrangement so brother and I wouldsee my father. I think it was


55/130

supposed to be every other weekend but I remember going there only twice. I hadnot seen him in half a year or so and I still missed him. I was a very confusedand scared 12-year old. I remember on either one of the visits I was watching TVwith my father and he was stroking my head gently. I still remember his touch.It is one of the only positive things I physically remember about him. I remember that the atmosphere in his new home was very far from happy. He had a new girlfriend who also had a boy of eight years old. Apparently the same behavior had been continuing with his new family as well. He had been drinking heavily still and even his new family had to escape him. I really dont remember going there morethan few times, but since then I have returned to that house and even to that floor many times. In 1998 or so I felt the need to find out what really happenedto my father. Nobody ever told me what really was going on there, how he


56/130

died or what the conditions were. In Finland you are entitled to have all the legal documents of a deceased one if you are related. So I called the police and Ivisited all the hospitals to get information about what had happened. I got a lot of documents and I was able to form a picture of what had happened to him inthe previous weeks before his suicide. Twice there was a call to the paramedicsbecause he had been drinking and taking tranquilizers. Once when he was taken toan ambulance on the way to the hospital his heart stopped. They managed to bring him back but it still amazes me that nobody was able to see what was about tohappen. One day before he killed himself, he bought a bottle of cognac and tooka taxi to the familys summerhouse. He got drunk and apparently violent. He had gone to the neighbor cabin, which was empty, and he had smashed all the


57/130

windows. They were covered in blood. His. He passed out on a bed with a burningcigarette in his hand and soon the whole place was on fire. Somebody saw the flames and the fire brigade came and pulled him out in the last possible moment. The whole place burnt down without anything left. He was first taken to a hospitalto get treatment for the wounds in his hands from beating the glass and from the flames. Then he was taken to a nearby police station and he was put into a cell for the time being. He was booked for breaking and entering but soon the police found out that he was part of the family that owned the building. Nevertheless, he was questioned many times. His replies were short and it took a long time.In between the questionings he tried to kill himself in his cell by attempting to take the screw of the light bulb off and using electricity. This did not succeed because one of the police officers noticed this. His father, my grandfather,was called to pick him up. He was the head of the family


58/130

business where my father was working. And he was angry. His behavior might havebeen the last thing that pushed my father into committing suicide. He took my father to see the burnt summer house and told him:Look what you have done. After that he took him to his home and told him that he was fired from his job. He was driving a company car and this was to be returned right away. My grandfather tookhis car keys. All these things I have read from official police documents. I hadjust turned 12 one week before. I remember that day because my father took me to a shop and bought me an aquarium as a birthday present. I remember him being incredibly serious all the time. That aquarium was a very dear present because Ireally wanted to have one. He always had aquariums and he was interested in thenature as well. The morning of March 12th , 1978 was the day that would change my


59/130

life forever. Never again would I look at the world in the same way as before. Ileft for the school around 7:30. It was a cold winter day and I always walked the 2km trip to the school. The house where my father was living was just beforemy school so I saw the house almost every day. The road did not go right by thehouse but a little further. On that sole morning, the only time I ever had, I changed the route. I still remember that I had a thought: Go the other way. The other way took me right by my fathers house and I never before had taken that route.When I arrived to his house, I accidentally looked at the windows on the 4th floor where he was living with his new family. To my surprise I saw him at the bedroom window looking at the distance. I waved to him but he did not notice me. I did not know that I was waving goodbye to him. I clearly remember a thought thatcame into my mind: Go inside. But I ignored it and continued to my school which was just 200m away from his house. I went inside to the first class. After


60/130

that and in between the classes, we always had a ten minute break outside. So Iwas standing outside. By now it was around 8:55. Suddenly I saw an ambulance anda police car coming and driving to my fathers house. I saw the whole school running there but I did not go. Because I already knew. Somehow I already knew. Whenpeople started to come back, I nevertheless asked what was it happening there.Somebody said that some man had jumped. I asked what kind of clothes he had andthe description matched the ones my father was often wearing. Incredibly I wentinside for the next class and only after that I asked the teacher if I could gohome because I felt sick. She said yes and I started to run and I ran all the way home. On my way I saw the balcony of the 4th floor covered completely in blood. When I arrived home, there was nobody there. The first thing I did was to callto my fathers house. A teary female voice answered and that was the final confirmation. Then I knew for sure that he was


61/130

dead. In a few minutes my grandmother arrived and took me in her arms. The wholefamily was gathered at my grandfathers house and I do not remember much else about that day. When I called the police for the documents about my fathers suicide,I found out that there were also photographs from the scene. It is customary for police to take photos when they investigate a possible crime scene. In suicidecases, the only thing they need to determine is if there was a crime involved or not. I asked the police officers about the photos. He said that there were seven of them and that in two of them the body is visible. One close up and one from a distance. I asked him what they looked like and he said that he has seen somuch of this during his career that he cannot really say. I ordered all the documents and the photographs without the body. When I went to pick them up my heartwas pounding. I got the envelope and opened it and there


62/130

were five photographs inside and all the investigation material. I looked at thephotos. They looked horrible. And to make it worse, in one of the pictures wasthe body from a distance. My father was lying in the snow under his balcony wearing only the outfit he used while being at home. Around 7:00 that fatal morningthe new girlfriend of my father left for work: the day after he was brought fromthe police station and after he was fired from his work. Like I have written before, I left my home for school around 7:30 and reached my fathers house around 7:45. That was only one hour before his death, so I was the last one who saw himalive. What happened in that one hour became clear to me from the police documents. He had gone to kitchen and taken a sharp fillet knife. Then he went to the bathroom. He sat in the bathtub and cut both of the arteries in his arms. First one, then changed hands with the knife, I dont know how, and cut the other arm. The first thing he did


63/130

was to make a deep cut in his finger that used to hold his wedding ring. Then heplaced the knife neatly in the shampoo holder. Nobody knows how long he was bleeding in the bathtub, but there was no water found in the bath tub. When the police arrived, there was about 5cm of blood in the bathtub. That is almost all hisblood. From the police photographs it can be determined that for some reason hehad stood up from the tub, perhaps going into a state of shock. Then he had gone to the bedroom and had sat on a bed. There were bloodstains on the bed and blood drops on the white carpet from the bathroom to the bedroom. He was still bleeding. From the bedroom he had gone to the balcony, which was right beside the bedroom. Then he had raised his leg over the balcony. This was seen by a witness.He had reached the other side of the balcony and was now holding onto the metalbar of the balcony. This explains the huge amount of bloodstains on the outer side of the balcony. At some point he lost the grip from the bar


64/130

and fell from the 4th floor to the street. He died immediately. All this happened in one hour, and his time of death was 9:45. The photographs are gruesome andthey were very hard for me to look at, but I needed to find out what had happened some 20 years ago. Now I knew. I even located his then girlfriend in 1999 andwent to talk to her. She told me basically what I could read from the police documents. There was no suicide note. My father had had life insurance. My brotherand I were the beneficiaries. He had changed this two months before his suicide.The new beneficiary was his new girlfriend. She told me that his behavior had been more and more violent and that she had been starting to think about terminating their relationship. She also told me about the last night before the suicide. She told me that my father was very restless and barely seemed to be sleeping.He probably had decided already to kill himself in the following morning aftershe


65/130

had left. She also told me that she woke up during the night and saw three blackfigures standing by the bed. But my visit was visibly upsetting her and I thinkshe was not really telling everything how it really happened. The funeral was held in a few weeks. I remember the crematorium and the white casket being there.A priest was saying something. I remember my mother, me and my brother going tothe casket and laying the flowers on it. I dont remember what my mother said. They say funerals are a way to say goodbye. But I was still in shock. I did not even know what had happened and I was a 12-year old boy. It would take a long timebefore I could understand what had actually happened and why. And the effect all that had on me was that I started to withdraw more and more into myself. I guess I decided that you cannot really trust anybody here. And so my father was laid to rest, if


66/130

that phrase can be used here, and life went on. But nothing was ever the same again. Nothing felt the same. In some years in some strange way I myself managed to hide all these events from my consciousness and lived almost 20 years before the whole thing surfaced again. My mother has told me that she had taken me to achild psychologist after the suicide. Apparently I had gone there for a while but the therapist had said that it seems there wasnt much she could do at that point. She just said that at some point in my life I will have to deal with this. And she was more than right.

LIVING WITH BIPOLAR DISORDER After I was diagnosed and given the wrong medication the first time, I really thought I would not make it. I remember being in themiddle of a long depressive episode and thinking, for the first time, that I might not make it. I felt fear. I clearly remember the feeling of


67/130

helplessness and despair. I did fight that episode through and eventually got the right medication so I am still here. I am still recovering from a series of manic episodes and depressions, not to mention the psychotic episode and the paranormal. It can take years for the body to restore itself. The problem is that very few of us have the luxury of just resting. Neither have I, so collectively I am in a way burning my candle from both ends. It is not easy to live with this illness because everybody holds you responsible for your actions when you are manic and of course, to a certain extent, you are. But for example, someone with a cancer would not be looked upon in a similar way. My psychiatrist has told me that this illness can be used to negate some of the things a person has done duringa manic episode and make them invalid in court. Some people buy a house or an expensive car or something just like that when they are having a manic episode. Those kinds of things can be reversed in court sometimes. I


68/130

think it is wrong to hold a person with bipolar disorder accountable for all their actions. First of all, the heightened suicide risk with people that have thisillness is statistically 25 %, which proves how serious the illness is. And I know that the heightened suicide risk with people with a loved one that has committed suicide, is also 25%. Secondly, when you are in the heights of mania and your body is soaked with dopamine, you do not think about what you are doing. Youare a machine that functions only with its instincts and impulses and there is no rational thinking. That always comes, if it does, during the depressive episode which always follows the manic one. I was recording and mixing the entire BlackAlbum of Stratovarius almost completely alone, spending hundreds of hours in a studio where the sounds of drilling and explosions were my constant companions. Surrounded with the financial troubles of a failed recording studio, the pressures of the production and everything else that was going in


69/130

my personal life, I remember spending Christmas of 2004 by manually inserting tom samples to Jrg Michaels drum kit. Every time he hit a tom, I inserted a sample underneath that. I inserted maybe 1000 tom hits manually during that Christmas, and then went for mixing. The thing I remember most from that album was that I was completely alone in the studio most of the time. And I worked really hard. Perhaps too hard. Remembering that at that time I was neither diagnosed having bipolar disorder yet, nor having a medication that could help me. Also, just eight months before that, I had been hospitalized due to a nervous breakdown. It is a bit of a miracle that this album was even completed. But it was. That kind of life situation can easily trigger a manic episode. For me it made me at least partially psychotic. People like me who are lucky to find a medication (or a combination of medication perhaps with therapy), can lead a relatively


70/130

normal life. It should be as stressfree as possible, which my work is not of course. Being in a rock band alone is extremely manic. I cannot think anything moremanic than a rock and roll tour. But I am a musician. It is the only thing I can do and the only thing I have ever done so my choices are pretty narrow. I am taking four pills of lithium carbonate per day. That is 1,2 grams per day. Sincelithium is a light metal, I am literally taking around 350 grams of metal each year. Now I have ingested around 1,5 kilograms of it so far. Its a bit ironic whenyou consider the music I play. I have been lucky that I did not die before I was diagnosed and before I found the right medication for me. I cannot say that itfeels the same. I do feel more tired than before I started taking the medication. But I have no alternatives really. After I started taking lithium, I havent had a long and major manic or depressive episode in my life except the ones


71/130

that have rational reasons. I dont mean that it takes away all the sadness and depression out of your life. There are rational and natural things one should feeldepressed about and should work through those feelings. That can take a long time. I mean those black depressions where you lie in a bed for half a year cryinglike I was doing before. Although in retrospect, that time was also out of rational reasons. I just did not know it. Many artists have had this illness. ErnstHemingway and Virginia Wolfe both committed suicide. Beethoven is said to have it. Kurt Cobain had it. If there is one other reason than artistic expressivenessfor me to write this book, it is to tell a story of a person, who has gone through a lot of things in his life and is still here today. I have been very open about my illness in public and in interviews and the reason is simply this: to give hope to people who are suffering from similar things. Sometimes I get mails from people


72/130

who are desperate and dont know what to do and are asking for help. I always write to them. I consider it my obligation as a human being to help where I can. Butnot anymore at the expense of my own health or life. I dont think I am Jesus. Anymore. I dont want to save the world anymore simply because I dont think it needsto be saved, and the arrogance of thinking that I could actually save it. The world simply is. And it is exactly the way we have designed it collectively. I am,like in a song I wrote, a Drop in the Ocean and I have finally understood that. And that alone is for me a huge leap from the person I was before.

GROWING UP IN THE BIRD FOREST AND FINDING A LIFE BOAT

In the late summer of 1978 we moved away from all those tragic events. Of coursewe all carried them inside of us, each of us in our


73/130

own way. I remember that we moved quite late in that summer so I had to continuein that same school until the summer holiday started and we moved. I remember returning to school and how scared I was because I felt ashamed of what my fatherhad done. I had, like many children do, turned the whole thing upside down andsomewhere deep inside had concluded that it must have been my fault that my father was gone. I was not aware of this and I still am not in a way, but I can reason that very well. Everybody was really nice and understanding. Teachers that had before been strict and almost mean, took an understanding and sorrowful attitude towards me. It was almost like my fathers suicide had touched the whole schooland made some of the most basic human feelings surface and people were projecting them to me. I would learn more about projections when I would become a knownmusician 15 years later, but that is another story. It felt good to have that kind of attention because I had of course,


74/130

witnessed events that nobody should see. I understood somewhere deep inside of me how horrible those events had been. How brutally violent. So violent that my 12-year old mind could not comprehend such things from my own parent. In the summer of 1978 I felt that melancholic loneliness that would become a big part of mycharacter later. I spent the entire summer alone, leaving my home when I woke up and returning in the evening. I spent a lot of time by the sea in that same place where I would later go after my nervous breakdown. I would just sit there andlook at the sea and feel this huge emptiness that I could not even connect to my father. I felt completely and utterly alone. Sometimes I would fish and I tookwhatever I caught home to my mother. I spent a lot of time in nature as well, just wandering and paying attention to the details of it... to the different kindof fish I saw in the forest river, or shiny leaves of


75/130

trees after the rain. I felt so at home in the nature. I guess I sensed no danger in there. I really had started to withdraw from the human race. Deep in me I must have decided that human beings are unpredictable and not trustworthy, and yet I must have understood that I would have to deal with them in the future anyway. These were big questions, big thoughts for a 12year old boy. That summer wasalso filled with ABBA and the Beatles. When my mother went to work I remember sometimes staying at home and crying about the loss of my father. It was the helpless crying of a 12-year old boy, who was caught in the web of a spider and couldnot escape, except into music and nature. Not many things have changed. It is still the same today for me. One of the days when I was alone at home I was playing an organ that was there and I remember I was crying while I was playing. Thismust have been just a few months after my fathers death. I came up with a melodythat


76/130

every Stratovarius fan knows. I had Finnish lyrics to that melody that I was singing and playing with that organ. They were: Why did you leave me daddy, I love you. The melody is now the beginning of a song called Destiny, sung by a 12year oldchoir boy from Cantores Minores the same choir I was singing in. Destiny was recorded 20 years after that. It was the first thing I ever composed in my life, although I was not aware that I was composing. I was crying and playing and in the future my music would have a lot of sadness in it. Then at the end of that summer of1978 we moved to a new place that in English would be called Bird Forest, translated directly from Finnish. It was some 40km from our previous home and it was anew start. It was truly a beautiful place in the middle of the Finnish countryside. It had a swimming pool outside and I had my own room. It had a wonderful view. A huge old birch tree was just a few steps from my window, lowering its leaves


77/130

beautifully over my window and giving me that nature-like feeling. I had my aquarium there, the one my father had given me as a birthday present one week beforehis death. I loved my room. Yet I did still withdraw from everybody, keeping mydoor closed. I explored the surroundings of my new home and found many places Iliked. I remember being very often scared at nights without any particular reason. The fear was in me. I remember being very scared of something. I had dreamsin which I was flying high above the world and then suddenly I started to fall.I fell very slowly and reached the ground and I remember really feeling my feettouch the ground in the dream. It felt so real. At this point the horrible events that took place some months or a year ago were pushed out of my consciousness.I am sure they were affecting me and my life, but I was not aware of them directly. Perhaps that fear was one of those things. I didnt cry anymore, I felt moreof a


78/130

melancholic longing, as I call it. But that emotion had no object. I did not feel that I was longing for someone. I just felt like that. I had no friends. ThenI heard there was a new student coming to my class that had moved from Lapland to another village near the Bird Forest. His name was Mika. He played piano and we became friends very quickly. It felt like it was meant to be. His parents wereoverly religious and later he told me that he had been beaten up many times when he was younger and he often talked about God and religion, which at that pointdid not interest me at all. I remember thinking that he must be just telling the things his parents had repeatedly told him. But since he kept those to a minimum, it was no problem for me. We played together. I had my acoustic guitar and he played the piano. I still remember the first time we played together in his home. It felt so good. We started to play at the end of the year school parties and other places as a duo. We were


79/130

playing cover songs, mainly what the people wanted to hear. We had a lot of funplaying together. Later on he would become the first keyboard player in Stratovarius, some seven years from that time. Then I heard a band called The Shadows, which was playing some kind of instrumental music but with electric guitars. I really fell in love with them. Their music was beautiful and exciting. The melodies were excellent and memorable. So I asked my mother if I could have an electricguitar and so in one day we went to this shop in Helsinki, and I got my first electric guitar and a small amplifier. The guitar brand was called Aria, but I dont remember the amplifier. I started to learn songs of The Shadows and very soonI could play along the records. Music filled my life and it filled something else too, a huge void inside of me. It gave me an identity. I played all the time.So the first three important groups for me were ABBA, The Beatles and The Shadows. Then one day my radio


80/130

was on and I heard something that was going to change my life forever. I heard Smoke on the Water of Deep Purple from the radio. That riff was so magical that I could not believe it. I had never heard music like that in my life. I became completely obsessed with Deep Purple and Rainbow, particularly with Ritchie Blackmore. He became my idol. He was my biggest hero. I inherited some money from my father that I was supposed to get when I would turn 18. By a special arrangement, my mother got enough money from that inheritance and bought me a Fender Stratocaster. It was silver colored. I think I was 14 years old when I got it. Soon my days were completely filled with music and guitar playing. I remember having a summer job in the family business, the same one where my father was fired, and thatI was transporting things people bought from the store to their home with another guy who was driving this small truck. It was a heavy job because I had to carry heavy refrigerators and washing machines


81/130

to buildings that had no elevator. Those things were very heavy, although two people were carrying them. But I got my own money and I bought a new stereo systemand a better amplifier for my guitar. I was basically in 7th heaven. I startedto take guitar lessons once a week. They were mostly jazz and things I didnt really like. But I learned some music theory and other styles of music. I was stillplaying with Mika in different places as a duo, only that I had an electric guitar now. I played J.S. Bachs Toccata and Fugue in d minor in church and I remember seeing my photo in a local newspaper, praising my playing. I played the same composition at the end of the semester school party with some 500 people as my audience. And I remember clearly that I was not scared the least bit. It doesnt take an Einstein to conclude that guitar gave me an identity I never had. It was my life boat. I told my deepest secrets to it and it responded by being faithful. Itwas something I needed because of my earlier life


82/130

events. I did not really have an identity until I found a guitar. I would laternotice that even guitar would not be a true identity. That a flower can grow through asphalt and the same applies to human beings and what we carry inside. Butin the Bird Forest I grew up in the middle of music and nature. I have fond memories of that place because that is where my musical career basically started. Mydays were filled with practicing, playing and listening to music. Going on nature trips and taking care of my aquarium. I read lot of books by Kondrad Lorentzthat were about animal behavior and territoriality. I found the animal behaviornot much different from human behavior. My favorite TV series was World War 2, which I watched with disbelief. I learned about Adolf Hitler and how many people were killed and why. It did not reinforce my faith in humanity. I could not understand how 80 million people could be killed and why. It did not make any sense tome. I could not understand


83/130

the concept of borders that exist to prevent countries from attacking other countries basically. And yet they did anyway. So these borders had to be protected. And this meant a thing existed called the army. What I did not understand at that point was that why people agreed to protect those borders. I had not heard of nationalism at that point yet. I was really starting to have a very bleak view of humanity as a whole. In December 1980 one of my heroes, John Lennon, was shot to death in front of his home. I remember that I was at school when this happened. Icould not understand this and I remember how bad it felt because I was a huge John Lennon fan and still am. He was shot coldly in the back with his wife standing next to him. Twentysix years later I would visit this place in New York when Iwas on tour. I stood there and was thinking about what happened to him right there and then. He had done his last interview just hours before the


84/130

assassination. In that he eerily had said: What does it mean when a pacifist getsshot?. I visited Strawberry Fields park next to his home and saw the concrete Imagne plate and hundreds of people gathered there singing and playing his songs. Atsome point I found some people that were interested in a similar kind of music that I was and we formed some bands and did some gigs too. I think it was as early as 1982. One of those bands was called Roadblock and the original Stratovariusdrummer Tuomo Lassila was singing in that. One of the bands was called Thunderbird. We played mostly covers and my songs which were mostly Rainbow pastiches. Ifound out that girls are much more interested in you if you play in a rock band. Or maybe they are interested in your image. I wasnt very much interested in girls before, mainly because I was so shy. I remember when I was around 15 that some girl, that I did not know, called my home and asked if


85/130

she could visit me. I was stuttering something like yes and she came. I still remember her. She had a long blond hair and she was kind of short. I was very tallat 15 already. She came in and sat on a couch, and I sat on a chair opposite ofher having a pillow on my lap. I remember being completely out of my territoryand did not know what to say or do. She said to me that: You dont talk much to which I responded: I guess I dont. Then she explained to me that she always saw me alone at the bus stop every morning when we went to school and that she felt sorry for me being alone. I dont remember ever seeing her before. I put some music on and I even remember the record. It was The Wanderer by Donna Summer that I sometimeslistened to. She left after sometime and we hugged and kissed at the door. Thatfelt nice. It was my first kiss. I never saw her again. Then in 1984 I got thatphone call to ask me to join Stratovarius and I accepted. I had found an even


86/130

bigger identity. Around 1986 Mika joined Stratovarius as well but he left just before we got a record deal with CBS. I still dont understand why he left. It wassome vague reason. I did not see him for ten years but we got in touch again around the time I entered therapy and stayed in touch until the summer of 2005. Inthat year he had tried to commit suicide by driving his car to another lane. Hewas committed to a mental institute. I remember calling him there. I sent him aCD player, music and books. He sent me very confusing letters where he wrote that he wanted to dedicate the rest of his life to serve God, and things like that. It sounded to me the same things he was telling me when we were 14. When he got out, he moved back in with his parents. I was on a holiday in Dubrovnik in the summer of 2005 when I got a text message from him that just said: How are you?. I never responded to that. Now I wish I would have. One week after that he jumped from the balcony of his parents home


87/130

and died immediately. My friend was dead. I was not invited to the funeral and Ihavent been able to even visit his grave. It is too painful. He was an extremelysensitive guy that was deeply wounded by the thorns of life, or more likely thorns of certain human beings. And although he was a world class keyboard player that was playing all the time, he always considered himself a nobody. And when that part of him got a hold of him, nothing could have saved him anymore. I dont have any doubt whatsoever in my mind that if he was alive today, we would be making music together. One day I will have the courage to visit his grave. I miss himso much.

GUITAR, MUSIC, FAME AND GLORY The headline is intentionally provocative. The first two words are real. The following two are not. When I really started playingguitar, it gave me a real sense of identity.


88/130

What I did not realize was that it was a very lonely identity nevertheless. Identity can only be complete if you have self-respect and you accept yourself as you are as a human being. And I was very far from that. My identity was largely based on mimicking other players and their styles but I was very far from creatingsomething that would really reflect who I was. Writing music is not a consciousprocess for me. In the early days it was of course more about practicing and practicing or having similar clothes as Ritchie Blackmore. The word practicing sounds unnatural to me in the context of music. It sounds like it should have something to do with sports. Of course later when I did start to learn a bit about who I was, I could let the music flow more freely. It is one of the most difficultthings to do. To switch your brain off and let the music flow. I did a series of Music Seminars in 2009-2010 in South America and in Europe concentrating on this aspect of


89/130

music and playing. Based on my experience, this is not taught in music schools or in guitar lessons. And unfortunately, it is very hard to teach. But not impossible. We are human beings and we all have feelings and emotions. They connect back and forth with music. Therefore it is natural that music has something to dowith emotions. And yet, nobody was talking about them. It was always just: How can I learn to play as fast as you?. Guitar playing has, in my opinion, nothing todo with scales. It is not mathematics. It is not mechanical. I do know that everybody plays guitar or any other instrument exactly identically to their character. And if you are not aware of your character, that is, who you really are, youcannot be in touch with your emotions and fully express yourself through your instrument. As my band Stratovarius started to get more popular and I got to touraround the world and play in front of thousands of people, I learned about fameand glory. In those days it was


90/130

very easy to get confused because everybody was calling you god, master and all sors of other glorifying words. Only later I realized what all those things meant.It is a very dangerous thing for a person to fall into the trap of fame and glory. There are a lot of sad examples of what can happen if you truly start believing that you are a god. There are lots of egos in music and in the music business. I have learned that being a musician has really a lot to do with being an entertainer. It could be something you are born to do. Or it could be that your lifeevents just in a way g

Documents

86117086 Loneliness of a 1000 Years