AntiMusic.com recently caught up with former NIGHTWISH vocalist Tarja Turunen to discuss her new solo album, My Winter Storm. The following is an excerpt from her track-by-track overview:

Album theme: "After I chose the first songs for the album among the many I received, I found a strange connection in their lyrics. A certain story popped up from the songs. Some key words appeared in more than one song and some of the songs exposed a sort of different characters in their lyrics. With few changes, nearly every song seemed to fit this story very nicely. At the same time, the story is very vague and the songs are still not connected with each other in any way. You can listen to any of the songs out of the album and it will make sense on its own. But at the beginning it was easier to focus in the red line going through the album and was very inspiring for the kind of sound that I was looking for in every song. Also it helped me to create new songs for the album since I had a nice story in my head already from the beginning."

'Die Alive': "This is a song about living every moment of your life fully. Is a fight song without any swords or blood. A fight to do what you want to do in your life, in a way that if you die tomorrow, you die alive. Not like many people that are already dead while they are still living. Jim Dooley added the feeling of a movie trailer in the middle part of the song."

'Poison': "This Alice Cooper classic is still very much played in the rock radios in Finland. The lyrics are very funny if you consider a woman singing them. I cannot reveal myself as a die-hard fan from Alice Cooper, but I always liked this one and it also brings me back to my years as a teenager. We did quite many backing vocals in the studio with my friend Tea, my brother Toni and Daniel, the producer of the album. The original song has already a huge amount of backing vocals and it definitely took some time to get them done."

Go to this location for the complete overview.