‘I woke up and couldn’t move’: Scottish rockers ‘Twilight’s Sad’ on birth, death and collapse | music

TTo say that James Graham has been through it in the seven years since the last Twilight Sad album would be an understatement. He lost his mother to dementia, became a father, and his mental health struggles led to the band canceling a tour with The Cure. The day we talked about the Scottish band’s sixth studio album, It’s The Long Goodbye, turned out to be the anniversary of his mother’s death. “It’s all good,” Graham says. “Seems like a good day to talk about.”

Speaking from his home in north-east Scotland on a dark, dark evening, Graham is unflinchingly open about his experiences, often moved to tears as he recounts the past few years. “I was so sick at times while I was writing these songs, it was all a complete blur,” he says. “But the moments come back to me — why I wrote a certain song. When I listen to one of them, I can feel like, ‘Damn, I was really into that.'”

In every way imaginable, it’s the long goodbye In it As Graham comes face to face with his experiences. If you know Twilight Sad, they’re no less than you’d expect – starting with 2007’s Fourteen Autumn and Fifteen Winter, a band that always sounded as if they lived every ounce of their songs. They are therapeutic songs – about alienation and inner turmoil, rich with metaphor Graham’s evocative Scottish prog is able to sound delicate and threatening with guitarist Andy MacFarlane’s turbulent guitar.

However the metaphors have been dropped for this record. The result is a profound collection of tracks that serve as a memoir of Graham’s final years. “Waiting for the Phone Call” saw him capture the dread of preparing to hear the worst through a driving, pounding wave, then “deal with the darkness again” in an attempt to land the theme. “And this time we’re going to lose,” he sings, succumbing to smashing guitars. The album’s title was inspired by his experience watching someone he loved slowly disappear before his eyes. “It’s been seven years of saying goodbye so many times,” he says. “My mother lost her speech so quickly. It was like the worst horror movie. I tried to find a glimmer of light when we were together, but…” his voice trailed off.

“I have two sons now. And Arthur was born very around the time my mother was diagnosed. So while he was progressing, she was regressing, and at some point, they kind of met in the middle. It was kind of a head-scratcher.”

As 2023 came to a close, his mother was in her final months, while the band were about to support The Cure in South America, after previous tours with them in Europe and North America. Graham reached his breaking point. “One morning, I woke up and I couldn’t move. I just said, ‘I can’t do this.'” His voice broke as he spoke. “I called our manager and the decision was taken out of my hands. I immediately received an email from Robert saying, ‘None of this matters. to improve”.”

Robert is Robert Smith, singer of the band The Cure, now known to Graham and McFarlane as Rab. They’ve been almost inseparable since Smith asked the band to join The Cure on their world tour in 2016. It’s something Graham still can’t come to terms with. “Out of all the teams, I don’t know why he chose us,” he says.

Smith finds it easier to explain. He told me that he “immediately fell in love with the attitude, the intensity, the emotion, the spirit, the melodies, the textures, the words and the sound” after Mogwai’s Stuart Braithwaite suggested he listen to Fourteen Autumns. “I have bought every subsequent release and was a huge fan when they asked me to cover a song in 2015.” This was “There’s a Girl in the Corner”. “I spent a lot of time with them on that first world tour. We became really good friends. And over the last 10 years, that friendship has blossomed into something very valuable to me.”

Recalling the 2016 tour, a skeptical Graham says: “Some days it was just us and him backstage listening to the music and laughing. It was like: ‘Can you believe this?’” He’s one of the best songwriters ever, and he tells you that the songs you write are not only good, but that he loves them.

Smith appears on three tracks on “It’s a Long Goodbye”. But, says MacFarlane, speaking in a London café the day after my conversation with Graham, “He wasn’t just playing guitar, he was helping out with advice on arrangements and stuff.” He remembers Smith giving them advice on demos as well: “He would reach into his bag and pull out a notebook full of notes about each song. It was like getting a lecture from the teacher.”

Smith helped refine the record, which had been developed over seven years by Graham and MacFarlane, both now 41 and the only remaining original members of the band. “I wrote when I could and felt like I had to do it,” says Graham, while McFarlane focused on guitars rather than the icy synths they were also trading on. “It’s the yin and the yang. There’s energy and positivity to it, to go against the grain of the lyrics.”

“I felt really bad for Andy, because of the amount of bullshit he had to listen to,” Graham says. “I apologized to him a lot. But he also lost a parent, so he was there for me.” McFarlane, whose father died of cancer around the time the band started, recognized the impact of seeing “someone get smaller. I understand what it’s like to lose a parent and turn it into music.”

As the band prepares to join Cure on another tour this summer, there is excitement but also fear. Right now, Graham feels like a different person. His priorities have changed, and his world has changed. And in the “little little village” he now calls home, “everyone knows me as ‘Arthur and Norrie’s father.’ It’s wonderful.” His children – “the only thing that gets me up every morning” – are the focus of his attention and Graham says he is “more proud to have been able to still be there as a family member and a father than I am to be proud of this album”.

Looking back, missing out on the 2023 South American tour feels like a pivotal moment. “The project was scheduled to start in November,” Graham says. “My mother died in January. I know, to this day, that if I had done that tour, it would have been a disaster. I was put on medication right away. And it took from that point until the end of last year until I started to really feel… I don’t want to say okay… but to start feeling happy.”

His voice starts to crack again. He gestured with his hand, saying, “I’m so tired of being back there.” “I know what people are thinking. James is miserable blah blah. I know this is part of me. He pauses and takes a deep breath. “But I’m ready to be happy.” The words hang in the air. “I’m ready to show people that you can get through this and get to the other side.” He laughs softly. “Look at me, I’m sitting here crying in front of you. But I’m really excited to have a second chance.” You can hear that hope in the new album’s closing track, “People Still Throw TVs at People,” where Graham repeats the phrase: “It’s okay to feel this way.”

“I realized there’s no evidence that says this is how you’re going to feel,” he says. “I come from the central belt of Scotland, where guys don’t talk about their feelings a lot. And there’s an element, at the end of the record, where you still have those doubts because you’ve been told to push them down and keep going. But in this, the most extreme of circumstances, it’s like, ‘Why the hell us?’ no Talk about this?