In their most impressive lineup to date Avantasia welcome Nightwish’s Marco Hietala…
Therefore, on their upcoming album “Ghostlights”, which is scheduled for release on January 26th Tobias Sammet will be joined by: Geoff Tate, Dee Snider, Michael Kiske, Jorn Lande, Bob Catley, Ronnie Atkins, Olli Hartmann, as well as Robert Mason from Warrant. Talking about Hietala Avantasia’s chief revealed that he discovered Tarot (where Marco was the frontman) in 1997 while mixing “Vain Glory Opera” and that later on Edguy played with Nightwish in some festival. “I remember even though they had a great female vocalist how much I loved the rendition of Ozzy Osbourne’s ‘Crazy Train’ that they did which was sung by their bass player”, Sammet comments while he also made a joke about bassist since Hietala plays bass: “You know, a lot of bass players are bass players because they wanna be in a band too; and there’s only so much damage you can do to the sound of a band with just a bass. Sometimes they’re only in the band because they talk enough to organize things or they have a day job to finance the first demo recordings, nice stage clothes, or sun glasses, but at the end of the day, most of them aren’t taken seriously because… well, because they’re bass players. 🙂 And they’re always suspicious… 😉 Anyway – I don’t need a bass player because I play bass myself (not as good as Marco, but I am the cheaper solution for my own project, ha!). AND Marco is more than a bass player, he is a proper musician!”
