For The Night by Elephant Sessions is sound of summer – the Inverness band are due to play the Ironworks on September 22
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Elephant Sessions’ new album For The Night which is out on Friday was written in lockdown. Shut your eyes and listen.
The band have said the music expresses the “desire for summer days and long nights” they felt during that time. And listening to the tracks, you can close your eyes and imagine yourself back to that summer night, light just fading as the stage lit up in colour, when Elephant Sessions played their euphoric live gig in Inverness at The Gathering.
At the time, it was an emotional feeling watching an inspiring example of live music in action again, couples dancing in front of a band on fire, as Elephant Sessions returned to headline the Northern Meeting Park festival.
But luckily we don’t have long to wait till the next live appearance – Elephant Sessions play the Ironworks on September 22.
And now, at the other end of the summer, it’s time for the band to share the music of For The Night, an album the band’s fiddle player Euan Smillie confesses he had almost forgotten about as the release date approached!
Euan reflects: “There have been quite a lot of reschedules from the past two years and quite a lot of festival schedules overlapped, so some we will be doing next year.
“But most of the actual tour dates, though they were rescheduled, they were done quite a few months ago in May and June, that kind of time.
“So pretty much from June onwards it has just kind of been nothing but festivals which has been great fun and they have all gone really well.
“With all things considered, travel problems and festivals struggling financially, and all the rest of it, it has all gone really smoothly - and it has just been brilliant to get back out.
“To be honest, for a while I actually forgot about the release of the album!” he laughs.
“It just felt like all the work had been getting it to print and for me that was the project finished.
“I suppose I wasn’t really prioritising the album for the last two months till about two weeks ago when it suddenly clicked ‘It’s nearly time to release that thing we made!’.
“And because we have been playing two or three tracks from it over the summer, they feel very embedded into the setlist now.
“They’re all going down really well and we are so comfortable playing them, it’s just such a great atmosphere when you are playing some new music for people - and offering something else after all this time! But we sort of forgot that there are a whole bunch of tracks that we haven’t been playing live, so I went back and listened to the album and thought ‘Yes, we’ve got a lot more here to work with!’, so that felt good and we have been building up over the past few weeks for the release.
“We have been doing lots of interviews and I think people are excited about the album.
“We’ve had loads of pre-orders coming in, so we’ll see!”
And the band has been working on the live set, though not every one of the new tracks will be at every gig, Euan explained.
“They are pretty heavily rehearsed, transferring from album to live is quite a difficult thing.”
The band loved working with a new team on this album, Duncan Lyall producing and Garry Boyle the studio engineer.
Euan said: “Certainly making this album, it was so studio focused and very much ‘These tracks are to make an album’.
“They are going to be exciting when we do them live, but we have worked out how to do that down the line.
“Certain sounds that are amazing on the album may sound different when played through a live PA.”
You start to get an idea of how important choreographing their live shows is to Elephant Sessions, to ensure that almost unmatchable live charge.
“Also, just where things are going to go in the setlist, where they will fit. We plan our setlists pretty carefully. So when we tour a festival show, we are touring a specific show rather than ‘What are we playing tonight, lads?’.
“But we feel that that gives people the best show because it is really tight, and feels more professional and the whole thing flows.”
Talking of flow, Euan is speaking about the album as he gets set for surfing later along the Moray Firth coast, a hobby he got into during lockdown.
As the musician reveals how the band reads the subtle shifts in an audience to keep the party mood dancing at a gig, it sounds not a million miles away from a surfer learning to balance on water.
But the sunny day is maybe not the natural environment for Elephant Sessions and their latest album Of The Night.
“That is our comfortable space. We are most comfortable at midnight in a dark space with hundreds of people, that is where we thrive!”
