Booksology Reviewed: January, 2026Published: 2021, Rocket88Rating: 4.5/5Reviewer: JP
The good people at Rocket88 continue to produce fine Rock and Heavy Metal books and this month we are going to look at three titles from the publisher; books about Children of Bodom, Devin Townsend and Tarja. Please feel free to enjoy all three reviews in this little Rocket88 feature.
It is not surprising that one of the most popular Hard Rock/Heavy Metal vocalists on the planet would eventually publish her memoirs. It must be challenging for any artist who rises to international fame and becomes so inextricably linked to a single band or group. Like many things in life, most bands change and evolve. Some artists can successfully transition into another band or solo career, others may not. For the very few of you reading this who do not know who Tarja is, she rose to global stardom as the vocalist for Nightwish. In 2005, she was very publicly fired from her band she helped found back in 1996. Immediately afterwards, Tarja has very successfully developed a monumental, two-decade long, solo career and while she may not deny or ignore her past, she uses this wonderful book, SINGING IN MY BLOOD to emphasize all the amazing, positive things that happened since 2005.
The book itself is a lovely coffee-table book with a hard cover and that little velvet bookmark thing. The book arrives wrapped in plastic to protect the silver font/embossed cover art. There are several editions available for purchase but I grabbed the standard version at 215 pages. SINGING IN MY BLOOD is printed on heavy-duty, glossy paper which makes the colours really pop out. It also comes with a nice visual discography including singles etc. which I found very useful because as a North American, these items are virtually never seen in stores, because Tarja, while being a global superstar, has yet been able to make significant inroads into Canada and the US. Many of these singles and EP’s I had never seen before and they wisely included all the cover variants.
We start with a nice overview of her personal and family life growing up in Finland. It is quick but we learn that she grew up happy in a stable and loving middle-class, music loving, family and we get to see some photos of her as a little girl. A few pages takes us to the start of her professional career.
Now, we have to address the obvious and important questions that all fans will automatically ask. Does Tarja discuss Nightwish in this book? The answer is; No. She drew a distinct line and the band gets only mentioned in passing reference. Quite wisely, she does not air any dirty laundry, Tarja preferred to speak of her long and illustrious solo career and that is the focus of the book.
We get just the briefest explanation of how she met her husband while touring South America, her departure from Nightwish and her first solo album, a traditional Christmas album! Many fans know that Christmas is extremely important to Tarja which might explain why she has three Christmas-themed solo albums already! After that we really delve into her solo career.
Following a standard chronological pattern we go chapter-by-chapter across her solo career. Each chapter is loaded with stories of the writing, recording, production, rehearsing and touring of each album. Along the way various people closely connected to Tarja add commentary, costume designers, photographer, producers and other industry people have lots of nice things to say about Tarja. She also spends quite a lot of time talking about the visual side of her career, photography, makeup, wardrobe, shooting videos
What surprised me is how open she was with details about her personal life; good and bad. She discusses, life, love, marriage, kids, as well as the hard times, arguments with collaborators, injuries, stalkers, pain, loss, covid and more. She even had a stroke at one point and it took her about a year to regain her singing voice and confidence. Her life is quite an open book without being too revealing or intrusive. I learned so much about Tarja and her life and career. I much prefer this to a generic, sex, drugs, rock and roll expose style book.
The layout and design are very nice! SIGNING IN MY BLOOD is very much a visual history with hundreds of photos; candid, snap-shots, formal photo-shoots, live shots and pictures of her from around the world with her friends, family and band members. It looks like a pretty luxurious life-styles with several homes across the world but a lifestyle well-deserved from decades of hard work. It is amazing how many Metal people she has worked with on various projects over the years. Her resume is filled with work with the Euro-Metal elite.
I was surprised how ‘visual’ the book was and that comment was born from my own ignorance. Allow me to explain. Because Tarja has little to no media presence in North America I had no idea that she had shot so many videos, released so many singles and EP’s and done so many extra-curricular things; soundtracks, TV shows, special one-time concert events and so forth. To me, she is always ‘just’ an ‘audio-only’ solo artist that I immensely enjoy listening to the albums but to date I had never seen a Tarja video concert nor have I seen her perform live. This book showed me how incredible the visual aspect of her career is. I will certainly spend some time to go back and watch the dozens of videos she has released in her incredible costumes, shot in exotic locations like India and Iceland.
After Covid, her career, like so many other, sort of stalled out and (as of time of writing this review) she hasn’t released an album of new material in seven years, if you exclude her third Christmas album, DARK CHRISTMAS in 2023 and the EDM project ‘Outsiders’ that she collaborated on. This book leaves us wanting more and she finishes off the 20th year of her solo life with an open and clean slate. What will she do next? We can only wait with anticipation.
Perhaps one day Tarja might write her story of that glorious decade and run of five ground-breaking albums with Nightwish and if she does, I’ll be the first in line to buy it. Until that day, SINGING IN MY BLOOD is a detailed, honest and intimate look at this unique and mesmerizing performer.
Singing In My Blood
