Come Cover Me: "Walking in the Air"

Ah, the joys of Facebook! Recently a FB friend of mine posted a cover of "Walking in the Air" done by Tarja Turunen, and if she hadn't, I don't think I would ever have known about it. It's lovely. We'll get to it in a minute.

Here is the original, written by Howard Blake and sung by Richard Auty, and it was used for the animated called The Snowman, which was adapted from a children's book of the same name, written by Raymond Briggs.



If you check out the song's Wikipedia page here, you'll see that it's been quite heavily covered by just about everyone under the sun, including Cliff Richard, Kenny Loggins, and Barry Manilow, who sung it as a duet with Celine Dion.

Most popularly, though, and of significance to a heavy metal music blog, the song was covered by Nightwish. It was released as a single and appeared on Oceanborn. Here is that version, sung live.



Tarja did her own version of the song, too, as mentioned above, and it appeared on one of her solo Christmas albums, Henkäys Ikuisuudesta. Here is a fantastic live version of it, the one my FB friend shared. Incidentally, the dress Tarja is wearing here has got to be my favourite Tarja outfit ever.



Beautiful! I actually like it better than the Nightwish version, to be honest; I find it to be much more expressive. And you have to love the red mic, too!