Think you know all of Twinny’s best tracks? Bassist Ross McNae and drummer Craig Kneale unearth a few of the band’s lesser-known gems ahead of this weekend’s 2000trees.
I Am Alive, from GLA
Ross: This was one of the first songs written for the record. This was one of Sam’s babies. The majority of the structure stayed pretty true to the demo except we added the riff in chorus to give it some weight behind the long extended vocal. To me, it feels defiant. Musically the world is tumbling down around you through the movement of the guitars, but vocally you’re more sure than ever of who you are. The middle eight got a little bit more experimental on the final album version than it had been – something we usually do the opposite of when it comes to distilling ideas in the studio. Fun fact – The song never saw the light of day live because it was pretty tricky to sing and play and we just didn’t ever have time throughout touring the record to even begin to try and tackle it. Maybe we should try harder and whip it out one day!
Dreamember, from Free
Ross: I heard it recently, and it caught me because it’s got this weird kilter to the chorus and especially the verses that sounds quite playful and exciting. I’d kind of forgot about the song, but I’m quite proud that we stuck it on an album at that time because we were in quite a ‘rock’ zone at the time and this sounds a bit different. I love all the vocal stuff Sam’s doing in the verses too – it sounds like the kind of thing we’re into with the music we’ve made recently.
Old Grey Face, from Vivarium
Craig: A riff based 3-minute face melter with a genuine key change. Old Grey Face was a really fun song to get right. It took a minute. We played it now and again when we were touring GLA for a bit of fun and managed to get it right zero times – it even confuses us, and we wrote the thing.
A Guidance From Colour, from A Guidance From Colour
Craig: Does this count as rock opera? It’s over 6 minutes, and it has many, many parts, so I think so. It’s not as good as Bohemian Rhapsody (obviously) – but for a song, we made when we were teenagers it’s pretty cool. Features the closest thing we have to a metal guitar part near the end too – a route we stopped pursuing after this point as we couldn’t grow good enough hair.
Twin Atlantic headline 2000trees on Friday 13th July.
