The Twilight Sad Hide From Nothing in This Stripped Down Version of "Nobody Wants To Be Here & Nobody Wants to Leave"

How a band explores emotion and feelings is often what defines them. One of the most formative shows I attended was Mono with The Twilight Sad opening, back in 2010. I knew what Mono was capable of previously, and the wide range of music expressions they paint with such ease. What I wasn't expecting was The Twilight Sad. I had never heard of the Scottish band prior to the show, and being sixteen years old at the time I was only briefly introduced to the kind of music they play. Seeing them live was an affecting experience, probably one of the best I saw that year. The band has a keen intuition in how the effects of each instrument intersect with the timbre and power of the singer James Graham's voice. In a single performance, the band harnessed a level of emotional intensity and power rarely seen since. Getting to the core of their emotional resonance is why their new record, Oran Mor Session makes perfect sense.

The Twilight Sad is releasing Oran Mor Sessions, a record that shows the band taking their songs, and stripping them to their core. The post-punk, shoegazey band ditch all semblance of effects or alterations in favor of the songs standing on their own. To show this, we've got a video of the band performing "Nobody Wants To Be Here & Nobody Wants to Leave." The minimalism and conciseness of the performance is a direct contrast to the huge space they're playing in. The full song on their last record of the same name featured heavy effects and a sonic ocean of sound. Here, it's reduced to a single guitar and James' Graham's voice, carrying the song on as if it was always as sparse. The record shows the ins and outs of many of their songs, and you should absolutely order a copy.

We talked to lead singer James Graham about his personal history as a touring musician.

NOISEY: What was the first gig you ever went to?
James Graham: Manic Street Preachers when I was, about ten or twelve. The first band I ever bought an album I ever bought from as well, I picked up ‘Everything Must Go’ when I went to the store with my mom once. And my mom didn’t know I put it in the bin. When we got to the checkout, she just paid for it because she didn’t want to turn back. I picked that because of [the show] Top of The Pops. It was usually top 40 stuff but every so often there would be a guitar band that would get on it, and again when I was ten or twelve it was the main music program. They played their song “A Design For Life” on it, and then I went to the concert in Glasgow. I still remember everything about it, the gig was so crazy. I just remember it blowing me away and it having a lasting effect on me to the point where I still remember how it felt to experience a band playing live music.

And in the late 90s, Glasgow sounded like it had the best music scene.
Yeah, pretty much. One of the reasons I write music the way I do, is that the biggest influence on me over the years came from Glasgow like Mogwai and The Arab Strap. Without those bands I would’ve never thought of being in a band or writing music. Still the biggest influences in everything I do musically. They encompassed everything I was feeling emotionally and wanted to express through music. Not about being the biggest star in the world, writing music because you had something to write about. That was one of the biggest influences to write songs.

Right, when you first hear post-rock at a young age it just canvases this field of emotions that wasn’t super there before.
Absolutely. Mogwai for the first time changed the way I thought about music. Once you hear them, like I don’t write music in the band I write melodies and words, and Mogwai I find to be the most inspiring thing. Instrumental music is just so thought provoking and it inspires something in my head to write about. So when I started writing, they were the soundtrack for everything and then obviously Arab Strap changed what to write music about. Now to get to this point in our career we can call those bands friends and we’ve toured with Mogwai three times now. They’ve been supportive of the band, we’re friends with Aiden and Malcolm of Arab Strap and we’ve collaborated a couple of times. That’s mind blowing to tour with those bands, at a young age I’d probably tell myself to fuck off if I told myself that.

When did you start touring?
Tracing the band back is really strange because we’re all friends, I went to school with Andy and Mark stayed on Andy’s street. We were friends before we started playing music, and we played in a couple bands that were all rubbish when we were younger. When we were about eighteen or nineteen we decided to start a band called The Twilight Sad and write songs. The first four songs we recorded and sent out to our favorite labels. FatCat records got back to us in the space of two or three days, they liked what they heard and wanted to come see us. We played two gigs in two years, so we basically booked a gig just so they would come see us. They came with a contract in their hand, obviously a rough one but they wanted to see if we’d want to do a record with them. So they sent us over to America to tour for three weeks. So the first time we ever properly toured was 2006, and we hadn’t even played Edinburgh yet. It was pretty strange, I think we were rubbish at that time to be quite honest. [laughs] I think we learned a lot from that first tour, there was something about touring at that time that was pretty ramshackle but there was something good about that as well. We were four young guys sent to the other side of the world to play music to people.

Why were there so few shows at the beginning?
At that point we didn’t want to do the whole thing of, to become a band you play every weekend and stuff. We wanted to make sure we had the songs first, so we wrote twelve songs, they were the first songs and made up Fourteen Autumns and Fifteen Winters. I think we wanted to make sure we were occupied with writing songs. We all had jobs and Uni. We made sure to send a demo out, and the next thing we know we quit our jobs and quit Uni and took time out to record an album. From there we toured and recorded, toured and recorded. We basically gave up everything to do it.

Was that first trip to America scary?
I think it was more exciting, because it was in the years I had limited internet access. I had an email address, I didn’t know any music websites. I live in a small village with five streets and a pub, so internet access was pretty much non-existent. We didn’t know what we were going over to do, we knew we were going to mix our record and play gigs. Like we played CMJ and we had no clue what it was, we played a gig and it turns out it was a room full of America’s biggest music reviewers. After that trip we quickly began to realize what all these things were. At that point we were very naive, and I think there was something very cool about that. We just went over to play our songs, we just wanted to have fun and see what’d happen.

And after that tour it seemed like you guys kicked the shows into overdrive.
Yeah that’s pretty much been our life since. We had two or three months home at most in a row, and then you go out and do a six week tour or something. We’ve toured a lot and over the years, I didn’t really understand it where being away from home was quite scary for a guy my age. We’ve worked really hard to be where we are now, and we want to keep playing in front of as many people as possible. I’m always in awe when we go to the places we do, or people know us or what the fuck we say.

Is it weirder to be home than on tour now?
There’s a two week period where you’re tired and ready to be home, but after that you get edgy fingers when day to day routine goes away. We were on a ten week tour, with four weeks in America, one day off, and then six weeks in Europe. I came home for two weeks and then got chicken pox. My immune system hated me, so luckily I got two weeks to recover. But I started to miss touring a lot.

What made you want to revisit these songs and play them in a new light like this on the new record?
It’s weird, when we started the band we never thought about doing stripped back versions of our songs. Our release after our first record, Here It Never Snowed, Afterward It Did, that had some stripped back versions of songs from the first record. But this new record is basically Andy and myself in an old church at the end of Glasgow. It’s like this pub/club and a church at the same time. We recorded it in the amphitheater, I think it’s basically Andy on guitar and my vocals on each track, I think that’s it. We wanted to do this record because all the years we’ve been asked to do acoustic sessions, and we’ve done stripped down sessions where people could hear songs that way. We never realized how much people liked those versions of songs, and I think we tried to get a record out and that done so people would have those types of songs. I think a lot more people want us to do the full band, but also the stripped back stuff and I think through this record I want it to be showcased we’re songwriters first before we layer the songs up with all the effects. Shows we’re not one dimensional either.

Right, you have songs that capture these textures and feelings but at its core everything is driven by the song.
People say they’re like folk songs, which I suppose they kinda are. In the beginning they’re the folk songs, and then we ramp them up to be for the five piece. I think deep down the songs are about the form, and what happened to me and at its core I think that’s what a folk song is. Maybe it’s not something we want to connect ourselves to, not that we don’t like folk songs, but it’s become an aesthetic. I think the good version of folk music is the heart of a lot of good songs. It’s weird, we have been doing more gigs and it’s going pretty well, so more and more people have asked for us to play these acoustic gigs which is not something I think people would want to hear. There is a weird atmosphere when we play those gigs, it’s silent and people do pay attention to what we’re doing. I never thought people would react that way to our songs.

When you started singing did you ever have a problem being in front of people?
I definitely did, I still get nervous before we play no matter what kind of gig it is. When we play live I get lost in what we do, I think about when we wrote the songs in the first place and get lost up there and feel alone. As we play more and things like that, when we started I needed to get a lot drunker than I do now. And I hate to ever think of myself as a front man, what we do is all equal in that sense. As time goes on, you get a little used to but there’s always that bit of nervousness ten minutes before going on.

When you say you get lost in playing, are you thinking about purely the performative aspect of what you’re doing on stage or more about the situations you’re singing about?
I think it’s remembering what I'm singing about. When we go and play gigs, I still kind of think people come and see us perform those songs so every night we play I think about why I’ve written it, why I’m singing about it. I’ve never gone through the motions of it. I think it’d be cheating everyone, it’d be cheating myself if I just went out and sang for the sake of it. Even though the songs are not exactly the happiest of subject matters. It’s hard to put yourself in that kind of position from when you were writing it. I think when we go play for that hour and a half on stage it’s an intense thing, but I think it’s a good thing.

In your head, when you perform these songs a lot does the meaning of each song change for you when you start singing them?
I think so. There was one night a few years back where we were playing “Cold Days From The Birdhouse” and something kind of just hit me where I thought “oh shit, this is what this is about?” Like I knew what I was writing about at the time but just that night something clicked. A lot of the things I’m writing are subconscious, over time I realize what the song is about rather than what I thought it was at the time. I think it shows me there was more to the lyrics I wrote at the time than I thought. That song especially, it was like “ah shit, fuck.” I missed the next line in the song because of it. Figuring out what that line means. It’s a weird thing to think you’ve written something subconsciously you don’t realize until two years down the line.

John Hill is a writer living in Brooklyn. Follow him on Twitter - @JohnXHill