James Alan Gourley

What's The Song About?

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The song more or less wrote itself. At the time I was a little disillusioned after playing in a rock band and not getting signed... 

 

I was getting into Nick Drake at the time and trying to figure out how he actually played, so I went online and got a couple of tablatures of Nick Drake and the first song I learned was Time of No Reply.

 

Once I'd learned that I started playing about with it a bit more, realising there was so much I could do in this tuning that I wasn't able to in standard tuning. It was like opening a new door to a new fret board...

 

So I just starting playing about (with it) and found a couple of chords that I really liked and it was very much a jigsaw puzzle...

 

Eventually stringing together these different chords and once I got the first few bars down I realised it was going to be an instrumental...

 

The Things In The Attic, the title, was just the feeling that I got while playing it, that feeling that you get when you discover old photographs that you haven't seen for years that have been sitting in the Attic and before you know it three or four hours have passed and you've gone through these memories in a wistful reflection...

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It's basically about lost memories, missed opportunities and people you remember from the past. The kind of things you find gathering dust in the attic. It can be haunting but it's not without hope.

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(Paraphrased from a live interview with James Alan Gourley)