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| Photo courtesy of Monique Adriane |
Graham Snuggs, singer-songwriter from Tallahassee, FL, played a house show in Pensacola on October 7th. Before the show, Graham took some time to talk to me about his music, the Tallahassee scene, and the challenges of growing as a performer amidst the frenzy of other responsibilities that came along with his early twenties.
Nathan: If you could pick four words to sum up the themes you want your music to evoke for you and your fans, what would those words be?
Graham: I’d probably say, well, one, sadness. Two, introspection. Three, spirituality. And four, feelings.
Nathan: I think “feelings” encompasses your music pretty well. So introspection –– do you feel like you’re writing more for yourself or is it a combination of writing for both others and yourself to help make sense of experiences?
Graham: That’s interesting, I’ve thought a lot about that, especially in the last year. When I first started writing, it was solely to get out all the emotions I was always feeling. It was extremely cathartic to play shows, and then there was a significant shift in . . . I’d say earlier this year where I’d be playing shows and not really feeling much of anything. And so now I think I’m realizing that these songs are more for others as well as like for my personal thoughts and feelings, but they [the songs] are also for . . . I don’t know, I touch on a lot of things that people are scared to voice.
Nathan: And I’d add too that you’ve probably repeated some of those songs so much that they don’t resonate with you as much as they used to. You and I are friends on Facebook and I often see you share old, terrible (no offense) videos of you as a teenager futzing around with a guitar in your room and singing along for kicks. How many years have you been performing exactly and what role or purpose do you think performance serves in your life, both then and now?
Graham: I’ve been, like, publicly performing for . . . since high school. But seriously performing as a job for probably two years.
Nathan: How old are you now?
Graham: I’m twenty-two. Back then I think I was just . . . I thought I was good back then and I posted those videos because I wanted people to be like ‘oh, Graham is making progress,’ as you can tell. I mean, they’re not the worst thing, but when it’s just nine minutes of me playing a C and G-chord inverted and I’m just kind of screaming, it just kind of gets overwhelming *Laughs*
Nathan: Does performance, is it something you think you would miss a lot if you didn’t do it? Have you always been a performer to some extent?
Graham: Yeah, to some extent. Like, both my parents grew up doing chorus and musicals all throughout high school and in their respective church youth groups. And so I grew up, first I did sports, which is a type of performance, and then I started getting more into doing musicals and stuff. I did a lot of stuff at this youth camp called Mason’s School of Music, and we’d do like . . . put on a play in a week basically and it’d be a theme of like the Spongebob movie that came out nine years ago, so then when I started playing guitar at 10 or 11, um, I wanted to write lyrics as well. I was listening to a lot of scene bands, so I think performance to me is something so important and it’s like an outlet. I don’t think I could do without it.
Q. How long have you lived in Tallahassee for?
Graham: All my life.
Nathan: All twenty-two years?
Graham: All twenty-two. Well, I’ve had brief stints in Guatemala for three and a half months and in Costa Rica for three and a half months.
Nathan: And this is your first time in Pensacola. It seems like a lot of Tallahassee musicians have never played Pensacola and vice-versa even though the drive isn’t too far. Do you think this lack of exchange between our scenes is a self-imposed problem or is it logistically complicated for Tallahassee artists to play Pensacola because of the time change and such?
Graham: I think with a lot of the scenes, especially in Florida, but specifically Pensacola and Tallahassee, they’re both very similar. But I think with Tallahassee, it’s more, everyone’s kind of in their own respective scene, you know? So we have people from Gainesville, we have people from Orlando, all the way down to Miami and up, we have some people from Pensacola. But I think that’s the main factor, is that we don’t have a lot of people from Pensacola [in Tallahassee that are encouraging a connection with Pensacola]. I don’t think it’s an intentional thing. I don’t think we’re trying to pigeonhole Pensacola in their own place or put them in some spot, but I think like, I was driving here today and it took me like two and a half hours and I was like ‘this is so weird, like why don’t I play here more?’ I think also, on a different note, a lot of people don’t have connections out west. Even though Pensacola isn’t even nearly as west as, like, parts of the West but I think that’s also something people think about.
Nathan: That’s a common thing here too. People tour down into South Florida and it’s almost strange to see anybody go out west to Mississippi or Texas, something like that. Maybe it’s more competitive out there, I’m not sure. Anyways, I love your song “That’s What They Tell Me” from the American Dream EP. The track seems to criticize both the church and hardline acceptance of capitalist doctrine that is often an unlikely key part of church culture in the US. I grew up in churches like that, and this brand of Christianity seems to prioritize economic stability and material desires like Disney trips over living their religion. Can you talk a bit about the inspiration behind “That’s What They Tell Me”?
Graham: Yeah, um, it’s funny, I was in Costa Rica when I wrote that song, and I, uh I was listening to this band called the Collection, and they’re like an alt-indie spiritual band and I don’t know, I realized I was frustrated, I mean this was even before like the election, I mean now, it’s easy to be frustrated at politics and like modern day Christianity or what have you, but I don’t know, my time in Costa Rica, I thought a lot about how wrong it is that, you know, we just birth people to go to war. Or like we send people . . . I think a lot of what I don’t like is war. Um, I’m a pacifist, I have a tattoo about pacifism. Also, at that time I was reading this book called Jesus for President, and so it talked a lot about like, what we spend per year on our [the United State’s] military budget. It’s over 600 billion dollars, and like the marginalized people here in America, they aren’t getting a dime. And so I think a lot of the inspiration for the song was just that, and also, by definition I’d say I’m a Christian, but I think I’ve been very frustrated for the last two years towards it, because you know we kind of just either judge people or we lump people into this category that . . . the people that I think need to be reached the most, but instead we call them sinful and say they’re not worth anything to us, and so, I don’t know, I think it’s interesting when I have, uh, kind of this platform to play a song like that, which is you know, politically and spiritually charged. Um, cause I think it’s important we challenge the things that we were grown on.
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| Photo courtesy of Operation Artist |
Nathan: That’s cool. Socially-conscious Christians is a rare thing in the South. So marginalized peoples, that area of study is a big part of your life. You’re a student at Florida State, I believe, and you’re studying social work, correct?
Graham: Yes sir.
Nathan: Nice, we’ll talk more about that later. You also seem to be a pretty big fan of Noah Gundersen. Your music is similar to his, similar dynamics, similar instrumentation, and some voice elements as well. Gundersen is an artist that . . . he had an initial career that was sustained by a bunch of really excellent EPs, um Gundersen kind of struggled to duplicate that feel, the feel of those EPs, a shorter release, when he started making full albums. You’re preparing to release, or record a full length record. What are some of the challenges that you face in translating your music from EPs, which you’ve also released mainly, to a full record?
Graham: Yeah, mhmm, I don’t know, I had a pretty big anxiety attack about it two weeks ago. Um, I think the one thing is with all the EPs, it’s just me and a guitar. There’s no click, there’s no . . . it was just me and my buddy Chandler like sitting in his room recordings with two mattresses as soundproofing or whatever. I think there’s actually one track where you can hear a plane flying over, and he’s like ‘Do you want to cut that out’ and I’m like, ‘nah, that’s cool.’ So I think the easy thing about that is that they’re just shotguns. You can shotgun that whole EP in like twenty-minutes, uh, maybe fifteen. So, I think the problem I’m facing with this full-length is that I’m putting way more time into it, it’s not just me for three hours just getting it done, it’s like sessions. I’ve been recording since . . . like uh . . . the last bit of August or so? Um, and all the songs I’m playing to a click, there’s gonna be drums, there’s going to be violin, um piano.
Nathan: So it’s a lot more ambitious overall.
Graham: Exactly. Cause, I mean, it’s funny because I take a lot from Gundersen, I take a lot from a lot of folky Americana artists, but one thing I do realize is that with my friends that are like singer-songwriters, EPs are usually the easiest thing to do. It’s not as much time and you’re at least getting a good five-song, four-song thing into people’s hands, and I think that’s what I wanted to do firsthand. I had a lot of songs and a lot of time just to like record them. I think the thing with the full length though, it’s going to take people more time to listen to it than you know . . . it’s going to be probably forty to forty-five minutes long at least, which is you know, almost double the length one of my EPs is. So, I think for me, it’s just I want people to keep interest from the first song to the last song. You know, that’s the challenges I’m facing with that.
Nathan: So, the two main parts of your life it sounds like are school for social work and music. How do those two parts connect to and inform each other, if at all? Is school sort of a necessary evil for you that gets in the way of music, or are your studies, career plans, and music more compatible with each other and inform each other more than it might appear on the surface?
Graham: Yeah, um, it’s weird. I hate school, a lot. I’ve taken lots of time off. I, um, I just got done taking a year off and now I’m starting my bachelor’s in social work. So, but I did, I just got engaged two weeks ago, so now even more so it’s kind of this push for me to have something else other than just like the coffee shop that I work at and the shows I’m playing, you know?
Nathan: Right.
Graham: And I want kind of a more adult job, and don’t get me wrong, I think I’ll still play shows and if anything happens from it, like I’ll just take off and do that. But I think, um, a lot of what I inform people on in my songs touch a lot on my major in social work. Social work is predominately about serving the marginalized people in America or just all over the world, um, and people that are struggling with anxiety and depression, or people who are impoverished, or orphans and what have you, and I think a lot of my songs kind of reach out to that population, like the marginalized, kind of ‘down-and-outs,’ quote unquote. So, but on the opposite end it’s like one is career-focused [social work] whereas the other is not career-focused at all [music]. I mean don’t get me wrong, I think it’d be awesome to pack out stadiums or pack out my favorite venues that I’ve been going to my whole life.
Nathan: But one’s a lot harder.
Graham: It’s a lot harder when, you know, it’s not the 90s, it’s not all heresay, like talking to each other about like what’s going on, it’s like, how good is your Facebook? How good is your Instagram? Do you have a Soundcloud? Are you on Bandcamp? Like, are you putting all your music on Spotify? You know, it’s all so many more different things, and like when a band like Nirvana, they just like were really awful for four years and then they just like, made it.
Nathan: And someone just found them.
Graham: Yeah.
Nathan: There’s definitely a lot more of a business side to music today, I think that’s grown exponentially. All right, well thanks for talking to me man.
Graham: For sure!
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