The special guest and opener for both nights, was surprisingly the Finnish artist Isaac Sene. Mostly knowing him for his very poppy/R&B entry, throwing his hat at the Finnish selection for Eurovision 2022, I was very curious what it would be like to see and hear him live. And I have to say I was very pleasantly surprised! With just a guitarist and keyboardist to support him, his music was mostly pop/R&B-sounding music, but everything had a slight rock touch to it. Especially when Isaac strapped on a guitar himself, he reminded me strongly of Lenny Kravitz and there is no denying that dude can rock the house! When not bound to his mic stand with a guitar around the shoulder, Isaac danced all over the stage, whipped his dreads around and sought connection with his musicians and the fans that showed up early to see him play. I was thoroughly entertained and wouldn’t mind to see him again on a stage!

People had been waiting for a long time to see The Sounds on the Tavastia stage. After a couple of postponements and a stellar new album under the belt, it was about time that this got to happen. When the lights dimmed, and the band came on stage, the energy coming from the crowd was palpable. And I’m pretty sure the band felt that as well, because straight from the first beat of the drums and snares being hit, they went on full throttle with hits like ‘Song With a Mission’, ‘Painted by Numbers’ and ‘Seven Days a Week’! And while everyone in the band brought quite the energy to the stage, the most attention easily went to frontwoman Maja. She somehow radiates rock ‘n’ roll and went about dancing and jumping around the stage, whipping and throwing her mic regularly and coming close to the edge of the stage to seek connection with her fans who were really exalted to see them rock the house. I was a bit surprised that the setlist only had about 3 songs from their latest album ‘Things We Do For Love’ with the title track, ‘Hollow’ and ‘Safe and Sound’, especially since they baptized their short tour with the record’s title. But then again, they’ve had such a fruitful long career already, have a big bag of hits to pull from and I saw no one complain when they were playing songs like ‘Thrill’, ‘Living in America’ and encore tracks ‘Shake Shake Shake’ and ‘Hope You’re Happy Now’, besides a cover of Yazoo‘s ‘Only You’. From start to finish Tavastia was on fire and I’m already crossing my fingers that it doesn’t have to take as long as it did for The Sounds to come back and party with us!