On a mild autumn evening in Zurich I met Soph Nathan to talk about her band Our Girl's second album. Nathan is on tour with Big Moon, who are opening for Glass Animals in Europe. When I point out to her that among the people waiting in line for the doors of the concert hall to open there are many teenagers and a particularly young audience in general, she jokes by saying: “Yes, there are a lot of very young people who don't have they ever heard of us! But it's a good thing!”. Six years have passed since Soph's debut with Our Girl, but the band can't wait to bring the songs of “The Good Kind” to the stages (hopefully also on the continent) and to experiment with new arrangements designed specifically for live performances.
I like that the album opens with an image of closeness. It almost seems like the intention is to comfort not only the person in the text, but also the listener.
Exact! I really hope that it can comfort the listener and also allows us to start some sort of conversation.
“It'll Be Fine” connects thematically to the second song, but more generally it seems to me that being close to friends who are suffering – both physically and emotionally – is a central theme in this new album.
Yes, that's a great description. When I was writing I didn't notice it, but throughout the album you can see this movement of comfort towards ourselves and the people around us in different ways. For me, writing songs is a bit of a tool to process my experiences, very therapeutic in this sense. It is therefore natural that the relationships present in my life, my partner and my friendships are poured into my songs. But in “Relief” I write directly to a young version of myself.
How did you choose the album title? For your first album you chose an excerpt from the lyrics of a song; now “The Good Kind” is also the title of a song.
We wanted to try to underline how in reality all the songs always have a positive and hopeful nuance. It seemed to us that the words the good kind summarized the emotions of the album well.
The song “Relief” is probably very personal, but I was wondering if for you it also represented a sort of political act: singing on stage that queer people are not alone in facing the discrimination present in a still very heteronormative society contains a message Of empowerment for the LGBTQ+ community and takes us back to that movement of comfort and closeness that we talked about at the beginning of the interview.
Yes, I suppose it's a political issue. I am aware that I am very lucky to live in an area of London where there is a lot of space for queer people to express their identities openly, whereas sadly this is not the case in other parts of the world.
Is it complicated for you to play your most personal songs live?
Not so much actually. “Relief” was the first we released after six years of absence from the scene as a group and I felt a little exposed when I realized that the public would listen to it and interpret it independently. But, when we're on stage, I don't think about it so much: these are the band's songs and we play them as a group, even though I'm actually basically singing about some of my own personal experiences.
For the visual aspects you focused everything on the colors red, orange and yellow. How come?
Artist Sophie Hurley-Walker created the paintings and collaborated with photographer Katie Silvester on the other visual aspects. Lauren and I are pretty obsessed with the color orange and fall colors. We wanted a painting for the album cover and we knew it had to be orange and that's what we told Sophie. The image should also have conveyed a sense of warmth, because for us on a sound level “The Good Kind” is a “warm” work.
As a musician and guitarist do you have a different approach when working on a Big Moon song or one for your band Our Girl?
Yes, it's very different, also because Juliette Jackson writes the songs for Big Moon. Now the process is more collaborative than in the beginning, but I have still always appreciated my role in trying to recreate the sound she has in mind. In general I like working in session of other bands and help them realize their vision. While for the songs with Our Girl obviously the situation is completely different.
To conclude this interview I would like to talk to you about one of your old songs, “Boring”. I really like the fact that it closes your debut album with so much energy. How did you arrive at the final arrangement for this song?
It was one of the first songs I wrote and one of the first we worked on as a band. For theoutro Lauren started making this weird, cool beat that Joshua and I weren't initially convinced by as it was completely unexpected. But now when we play it live the reaction is always super positive. THE'outro of “Boring”, like other exclusively instrumental parts in our pieces, are the result of the synergy that is created when the three of us play together in a room and enter into a sort of loops hypnotic during a jam. Very often we then have to cut some parts, as was the case for “Who Do You Love”: in the recording studio we launched into a jam about ten minutes!
(photo Credits by Katie Silvester; interview published November 8, 2024)
Antonio Santini for SANREMO.FM
