Floor Jansen
Dutch singer, songwriter, and composer Floor Jansen celebrates her birthday today!
(Photo: Selbymay)
She is considered one of the most versatile, charismatic and powerful vocalists in the history of heavy music, a musician with a rare vocal range of over three octaves who can equally easily master classical opera singing, rough belting rock and aggressive growling, and the woman who led the world's largest symphonic metal band, "Nightwish", for a decade and a half, alongside a glorious legacy with "After Forever", "ReVamp" and a thriving solo career. Here are 38 interesting facts about Floor Jansen...
1. She was born on February 21, 1981, in the town of Goirle in the North Brabant province of the South Netherlands, and grew up in a bustling home alongside her younger sister Irene Jansen, who also became a respected rock and metal singer.
2. As a child, she did not dream of becoming a rock star, but rather aspired to become a biologist and work in nature with animals, a field that fascinates her to this day, alongside her great love of horseback riding.
3. The amusing connection to her childhood dream was closed many years later, in 2017, when she played the character of The Biologist in the science fiction concept album "The Source" by the super project "Ayreon."
4. The first instruments she played in her childhood and youth were the flute, piano, and guitar, instruments that helped her develop a harmonic ear and the ability to compose independently at a young age.
5. Her professional journey in the world of metal began in 1997, when she was only sixteen years old, when she joined the Dutch doom and death metal band "Apocalypse", which was formed by guitarists Mark Jansen and Sander Gommans and changed its name shortly afterwards to "After Forever".
6. At the beginning of her career in the band "After Forever", she was intended to serve only as a background singer alongside the throaty singing of Mark Jansen and Sander Gommans, but it quickly became clear that the power of her soprano voice magnetized the audience, and she became the lead vocalist and face of the band.
7. In April 2000, when she was nineteen years old, she released the groundbreaking debut album "Prison of Desire" with "After Forever", which is considered one of the first albums to shape the Beauty and the Beast formula of European symphonic and gothic metal, and which already featured vocalist Sharon den Adel from the band "Within Temptation".
8. In 1999, she began studying at the Dutch Rock Academy in Tilburg, where she honed her singing, composing, and stage skills while performing for the first time in Europe.
9. On the band's second album, "Decipher," released in 2001, the combination of her operatic voice and orchestral heavy metal reached its peak in songs that became genre classics such as "Monolith of Doubt" and "Emphasis".
10. In 2002, founder Mark Jansen left "After Forever" and formed the symphonic metal band "Epica", a move that made Jansen, at the age of only twenty-one, the main lyricist and melody writer of "After Forever".
11. During that time, she continued to deepen her academic education at the Tilburg Conservatory, where she completed musical theater studies and a year of classical opera singing studies, training that gave her perfect technical control of her vocal cords.
12. Back in 1999, she caught the ear of Dutch composer and multi-instrumentalist Arjen Anthony Lucassen, who invited her to participate in the masterpiece album "Universal Migrator Part 1: The Dream Sequencer" by his progressive project "Ayreon", released in 2000, the beginning of a collaboration that lasted over a long series of albums and live performances.
13. In 2002, Arjen Anthony Lucassen formed the heavy space metal supergroup Star One, in which Janssen served as one of the four lead vocalists alongside Russell Allen of Symphony X, singer Damian Wilson, and Dan Swanö, and participated in all three of the band's studio albums, Space Metal, Victims of the Modern Age, and Revel in Time.
14. As the lead songwriter for "After Forever," Janssen led the band to three more critically acclaimed and bold studio albums, the dramatic concept album "Invisible Circles" from 2004 that dealt with emotional child abuse, the album "Remagine" from 2005, and the powerful final album "After Forever" from 2007 that included the hit "Energize Me".
15. During her years in the band "After Forever", she had a long-term relationship with the band's guitarist Sander Gommans, and in 2008, after Gommans suffered from severe burnout and a physical and mental breakdown, the band went on hiatus, which led to its official disbandment in February 2009.
16. After her youth band disbanded, she began giving workshops and professional courses for voice and performance development under the name Wanna be a Star?!, in which she taught young singers how to sing powerfully without damaging their vocal cords.
17. In October 2009, she formed her new symphonic and progressive metal band, "ReVamp", together with former "After Forever" keyboardist Joost van den Broek and guitarist Waldemar Sorychta, and in 2010 the band's debut album, "ReVamp", was released, in which she demonstrated aggressive and heavier vocals than ever before.
18. In 2011, following an exhausting tour in South America and an impossible schedule, she suffered from severe physical and mental burnout, which forced her to cancel performances and suspend all her musical activities for many months to restore her health.
19. She translated the shattering experience of mental breakdown and recovery from it into work on the second album by "ReVamp", called "Wild Card" and released in 2013, in which the preparatory suite of songs "The Anatomy of a Nervous Breakdown" stood out.
20. Back in 2008, she met the guitarist of the prog-metal band "Pagan's Mind" in Norway, the virtuoso Jørn Viggo Lofstad, and the two decided to write a rootsy, non-symphonic hard rock album together, inspired by bands like "Led Zeppelin", "Deep Purple", "Foo Fighters" and "Skunk Anansie".
21. The secret project with Jørn Viggo Lofstad lay in a drawer for an entire decade due to the duo's busy schedules, until it was released in October 2018 under the duo's name "Northward" and received widespread praise for its raw, rock 'n' roll sound.
(Photo: Tinyex99)
22. The biggest historical turning point in her career occurred in September 2012, when the Finnish symphonic metal band "Nightwish" abruptly parted ways with Swedish vocalist Anette Olzon in the midst of the world tour of the album "Imaginaerum" in North America.
23. Nightwish leader and keyboardist, composer Tuomas Holopainen, called Janssen in a hurry just as she was at her sister's wedding, urging her to fly to the United States to save the band's tour.
24. Janssen had only forty-eight hours, most of which she spent on transatlantic flights with lyrics and a music player, to memorize an entire setlist of fifteen complex "Nightwish" songs without a single full rehearsal with the band.
25. On October 1, 2012, she took the stage at the Showbox club in Seattle for her debut performance with "Nightwish," and despite the paralyzing fear she admitted she felt before going on stage, she took the audience and the band by storm from the first note.
26. On August 3, 2013, her performance with Nightwish at the Wacken Open Air Festival in Germany was recorded for the official DVD "Showtime, Storytime", with her peak performance of the ten-minute piece "Ghost Love Score" becoming an unprecedented viral phenomenon with tens of millions of views and thousands of reaction videos from voice teachers and musicians around the world, with her vocal ending in the song being nicknamed Floorgasm by fans.
27. In October 2013, she was officially announced as the third permanent vocalist in the history of "Nightwish", alongside the permanent addition of British Celtic flute and wind instrument player Troy Donockley, and in 2014 she even moved to the city of Joensuu in eastern Finland for a year and learned the Finnish language in order to connect with the band's roots.
28. In March 2015, her first studio album with "Nightwish" was released, the monumental work "Endless Forms Most Beautiful", which dealt with evolution and the beauty of science and nature, inspired by the writings of Charles Darwin and featuring evolutionary biologist Professor Richard Dawkins, who contributed narration to the album.
29. In April 2020, she released the ambitious double album "Human. :II: Nature." with "Nightwish," in which she demonstrated breathtaking vocal flexibility in songs like "Noise", "Shoemaker" with the complex operatic section at the end, and the heavy and tribal "Tribal".
30. In 2019, she participated in the popular Dutch TV show "Beste Zangers", where she performed moving arrangements of songs in various styles, including a chilling acoustic rendition of Lady Gaga's "Shallow" and a historic operatic duet of "The Phantom of the Opera" with Dutch opera and stage singer Henk Poort, a performance that topped the charts and made her a household superstar in the Netherlands.
31. Following the huge success of "Beste Zangers", she was awarded the prestigious Popprijs award at the Noorderslag Festival in January 2020, the most important award in the Dutch music industry, given to the artist who made the most significant contribution to Dutch music that year, and her first solo tour in the country sold out in less than twenty-four hours.
32. In 2018, she received a rare and moving scientific tribute related to her childhood dream as a biologist, when German scientist and researcher Andreas Weigel discovered a new species of cicada beetle in New Guinea and gave it the official scientific name Tmesisternus floorjansenae in her name.
33. In her personal life, Janssen is married to the drummer of the Swedish power metal band "Sabaton", musician Hannes Van Dahl, and the two live on a pastoral farm in Sweden and together raise their two daughters, Freja, born in March 2017, and Lucy, born in October 2023.
34. In October 2022, she bravely revealed that she had been diagnosed with breast cancer that was discovered during a routine checkup, underwent successful surgery to remove the tumor, and in November 2022, she announced to her fans that she had recovered and was declared cancer-free, and since then she has been working to raise awareness of the importance of early screening.
35. In March 2023, she released her first solo album, "Paragon", an emotional, bright and empowering pop-rock album that included successful singles such as "Fire", "Storm", "Invincible" and "My Paragon", and went straight to the top of the charts in the Netherlands.
36. Standing at an impressive height of 5 feet 10 inches (1.83 meters), Janssen was known for her powerful Viking stage presence and iconic Windmill move, the rapid twirling of her hair on stage while singing extremely high notes.
37. In September 2024, she released the band's tenth studio album and her third as a soloist, "Yesterwynde", with "Nightwish", concluding a philosophical and scientific trilogy that began nine years earlier with "Endless Forms Most Beautiful".
38. In June 2026, she opened a new chapter in her solo career with the single "Run" from her second solo album, "Hytress", and in October 2026, she announced the end of her collaboration with the band "Nightwish" after fourteen glorious years in order to focus fully on her independent work and her family.
We wish Floor Jansen lots of luck, health, and many more years of powerful and exciting creation!
"Face/Off" - Israel's Rock Blog
Comments