Ali Begg of Abor Green (Photo credit: Raquel Ventoso)
By Jason Barnard
Arbor Green is the project of Scottish songwriter Ali Begg, and Cue The Timeslip marks the point where that project becomes a full band. It is the second single from the EP, and it looks directly at the pull of constant phone use and the pressure that comes from watching other people’s lives at a distance. Begg’s 2022 debut grew out of years of home recording, mostly solitary work during a difficult stretch in his life, but this new material was built with a full band from the outset. Begg talks here about how working with other musicians has changed both the songs and the process for him.
‘Cue The Timeslip’ centres on the trap of doom-scrolling and measuring your life against everyone else’s. Was there a moment that inspired the song, or did it build up gradually?
That first line of the chorus (‘Do you grow tired of living on the small screen?) came to me at some point during one of the COVID lockdowns, when it felt like our entire lives were being conducted exclusively on smartphones and real in-person interaction was almost non-existent. Of course once you examine that sentiment you have to question whether it’s really that different outside of lockdown conditions. We all spend so much time looking at each other’s carefully curated performative online output and we convince ourselves that this is what keeping in touch with each other looks like, even though we all know better.
The closing sentiment you describe is that it’s chill, we all feel like this, and there’s plenty of time to do the things you want to do. Did you need to arrive at that reassurance yourself while writing it, or did it come more easily than the anxious parts of the song?
I’m not sure that I have really arrived at that reassurance, it’s more of an affirmation to hold on to: ‘though you may not feel it, the best of us are slipping in time’. I’m addressing myself as much as the listener there. On good days I just about believe it myself!
This is the second single from the Timeslip EP. How does it sit alongside the rest of the EP; do the other tracks handle this same territory, or take it somewhere different?
It’s a four track EP of songs written over the last few years, and they all handle quite different subject matters and sonic territories. The first single, Wanderer, is this kind of folky, emotionally intimate alt-country love song whilst Timeslip is a more up-tempo indie-rock thing with a horn section and these big electric guitars that’s trying to address something very different. The other two songs push in different directions again, but I think that backdrop of the anxieties of modern living is kind of there throughout the EP.
You’ve said this material sounds much more like a band, with everyone having authorship over the arrangements. What changed in the writing process; did songs start from a demo you brought in, or come together in the room?
My approach was mostly to demo stuff first and then give the band time to sit with those demos and develop their own parts. This was kind of the process for the debut album too, but I was playing a lot more of the instruments on those recordings myself (most of the electric guitars and all the bass guitar, for example) so there weren’t as many aspects of the fundamental arrangements feeding in from other people. On this EP all the bass lines are Sam’s, most of the electric guitar parts are Thomas’s and Simon had loads of space to develop the drum parts beyond my very rudimentary directions. I wrote some of Anna’s fiddle lines but all the best stuff she plays came from her. I think the only parts that I completely wrote for another player are the horn lines. Cue The Timeslip was even more collaborative because I brought the verse and chorus to Thomas and Sam before the rest of the song was written and we ended up working up the bridge together. It was the first time in a long time that I’d written with other people and it turned into something really fun.
Your 2022 debut grew out of years of home recording and solitary experimentation. What’s the biggest thing you had to let go of moving into a full-band dynamic?
I wouldn’t say that I’ve had to ‘let go’ of anything. In my experience you are always going to benefit from collaborating with other people. Every single contribution to an Arbor Green song from another person has made that song better in ways that I couldn’t have achieved on my own. That was true of the debut album and it’s even more true of this new material. It’s a real privilege to get to share the work with musicians who I admire and respect, and I’m so lucky to call them my friends.
The debut album’s themes were considerably heavier than this new single. Does writing something this hopeful feel like a natural next chapter, or did it take effort to get there?
That album was born out of a really challenging and traumatic period in my life. I wrote and recorded it slowly and it also took me a few years to work up the courage to release it once it was done. For that reason, there’s a lot of time and distance between the person that wrote those songs and the person that wrote these new ones. I’ve always written in a self-reflective, confessional style and it’s true that the emotions I’m processing on this EP aren’t perhaps as difficult or raw as those on the debut album. I’m not sure I’d describe the new music as ‘hopeful’ per se, I’m not out here knocking out feel-good radio-friendly bangers, but I think it’s fair to say that I am a happier and more stable person these days, and perhaps that allows for some more hope to creep in at the edges of my work.
Your debut single Margaret dealt with loss and ancestral resonance, and used archive footage from the Alston family. How much does that sense of place and lineage still feed into what you’re writing now, compared to the present-day anxieties of ‘Cue The Timeslip’?
I think things like place, family history, loss and grief greatly inform who we all are as people and that those things form a part of everything I do to some extent, but I was consciously trying to write from a more forward-looking perspective this time around. It’s important to me to hold on to where I come from, but it’s also important not to get lost in that at the expense of positive forward motion.
Growing up in Glenuig, a small Highland village, is a long way from doom-scrolling and comparison culture. Has that background given you a different vantage point on this song’s themes?
I mean I’m sure doomscrolling happens everywhere that there are smartphones/the internet and that we’re all vulnerable to the trap of comparison no matter where we are in the world. I did have a pretty tech-free childhood, though, more because of my parents’ attitude to it than living in a rural community, and I do miss not carrying the internet around in my pocket all the time. I don’t think that’s an unusual take these days. I was raised in a really small community and learned to value the closeness and interdependence that is inherent to that way of living, so I really hate the way that social media gives us the illusion of being in close contact with our people while we’re all actually sitting alone in our separate homes.
You’ve had contributors including Hannah Fisher, Beldina Odenyo, Brian McAlpine and James MacKintosh over the years, from different corners of Scottish music. Are any of them part of the band on this EP, and how has that pool of collaborators shaped where Arbor Green has ended up sonically?
It was really special to get to call in so many talented friends for that first record, particularly my wonderful pal Beldina (Heir of the Cursed) who is very sadly no longer with us. Every one of the people you’ve just named did me a huge favour in playing on those songs, but they were really standing in for the band that I didn’t have yet. They were all busy professional musicians with their own projects and full schedules, so they were never going to become a part of any permanent lineup. They definitely did help to shape the sound in my head into something real on that first album though, and that has inevitably informed the fuller, more developed sound on this new material.
With Timeslip pushing at the edges of what Arbor Green can sound like, where do you see the project heading?
I’ve written quite a lot of new material, and I’m revisiting some old songs that were never recorded, so I’m hoping to get to work on a second full-length album sooner rather than later. I’m keen to keep experimenting and expanding the different moods and sonic spaces that we can inhabit, and to make the whole process as collaborative as possible. I’d like to write more with other people and share production duties too – basically I want to keep moving away from me on my own in a dark cupboard and towards a collective musical approach where everyone has a hand in the process!
