I’m Still Dying: Belle & Sebastian on Playing Their Breakthrough Album in Full at Pitchfork Festival
Stuart Murdoch tells Paste about why his band can’t quit If You’re Feeling Sinister

Belle and Sebastian’s sophomore album, If You’re Feeling Sinister, released in late 1996, is riddled with faults. Lead singer Stuart Murdoch’s voice is quite high in the mix. The songs speed up by accident at points, showcasing a band that had only just started playing with each other.
But despite those few mistakes, it’s a near-perfect record that has become known as one of the best and most influential albums of the 1990s. And despite it not celebrating any meaningful anniversary, the legendary Scottish outfit is gearing up to play it in full—the first and last time they will do this in the U.S.—this weekend (7/20) at Pitchfork Festival in Chicago.
It’s the third time they’ve given If You’re Feeling Sinister the front-to-back album treatment, once in 2005 as part of the Don’t Look Back concert series and again for its 20th anniversary in 2016 at Royal Albert Hall, both in London. It’s not like it’s the band’s only hit album—actually, it’s their only release not to chart in the top 30 in the U.K. (it peaked at number 191)—so why do Murdoch and co. continue to come back to this release in particular?
“The one thing that draws us to doing Sinister is because the group of songs that were written,” Murdoch explains. “I wrote them just as the band was coming together, and I wrote them in a really short period of time. I wrote all of those songs in three months and that was during the period when we recorded our first LP as well, so it was a very productive period, and it was almost like this group of people coming together was a catalyst for me writing these songs. It’s almost like I was waiting for this moment to be inspired by the band to write this group of songs.”
And what a batch of songs these were. From the gorgeous “The Stars of Track and Field” through the mainly acoustic “Judy and the Dream of Horses,” Belle & Sebastian paint us a beautiful picture of Glasgow at the time, telling stories of a handful of characters all trying to work their way through heartbreak and a myriad of other issues. Reaching back to the ‘60s to essentially revive an entire new genre of twee pop, upbeat playful guitar lines (“Get Me Away From Here, I’m Dying,” “Mayfly”) interact with downtempo Nick Drake-influenced songs (“Seeing Other People,” “If You’re Feeling Sinister”) creating a succinct and saccharine sound that feels instantly classic.
But even Murdoch will admit that they were aspiring for something possibly too big for the young band at the time: “At the time, the recording process was a little underwhelming. We had a lot of fun recording the first LP [Tigermilk]. The second LP, Sinister, was more ambitious than perhaps the fledgling band. We didn’t technically pull it off because we wanted to make something that sounded in part inspired by Joni Mitchell or something. The thing is, the core of songs that jammed together really nicely, it was just a nice mixture of story songs, first person songs, love songs and out of love songs. As a fit of songs, they just hold together really nicely.”