Interviews: Sleeping Souls prove they’re more than just a backing band on ‘Just Before The World Starts Burning’

Last year, The Sleeping Souls released their debut album called Just Before The World Starts Burning. They have spent decades being one of the hardest working bands in the business touring relentlessly with Frank Turner and this album showcases their exceptional amount of skill and their ability to branch out into different styles of music. Just Before The World Starts Burning is avilable everywhere via Xtra Mile Recordings. The Sleeping Souls recently played at Frank Turner’s Lost Evenings festival in Toronto, Ontario both as a backing band and on their own. They are currently touring Europe with Frank Turner.
Toronto-based writer Graham Isador caught up with Cahir O’Doherty and Matt Nasir at Lost Evenings to talk about the album, overcoming nerves, playing their first shows without Frank Turner, touring, and so much more. Read the interview below!

With Frank Turner, The Sleeping Souls have sold out shows at the O2 arena, headlined major festivals, opened for Bruce Springsteen, and represented their country by performing at the opening ceremonies for the London Olympic Games in 2012. But on a Tuesday night in Glasgow at a bar sporting a two hundred person max capacity, the band is a bit nervous.
It’s the first live show The Souls will ever perform without Turner. Fronting the group that night is guitar tech and occasional pinch musician for the group Cahir O’Doherty. It’s the debut of a half dozen shows he’ll play with the band across the UK in support of their new album Just Before The World Starts Burning, which he co-wrote along with the group. The first time playing the songs in front of an audience should be a triumph, still, pre-show jitters aside, the weather that night is being uncooperative. Rehearsals have been limited to downtime stolen after sound checks at other shows, with even those cut due to some lingering sickness. An hour before doors and O’Doherty is wondering…is anyone going to show up? And will the band be ready if they are?
“I was really, really fucking nervous,” said O’Doherty. “I realized that I hadn't fronted a band in like 10 years or so. But the guys were great with me and I had that sort of security on stage knowing the band were fucking good and on it. I trusted it was gonna be fine, even if I couldn't sing a note, even if I squeaked and honked my way through the set…When I got on stage, kind of two songs on, it all just came together. It was like -- oh yeah -- we love this.”

The decision to write and tour an album as The Sleeping Souls was not some kind of mutiny against punk rock’s most notorious singer/songwriter, nor did it mark the end of everyone working together. But playing as Frank Turner and The Sleeping Souls was meant as a creative outlet for Turner; a chance to showcase his songs and support his vision. While the band members had each had their own various projects over the years, a life constantly on tour meant there wasn’t a lot of room to create outside of their proverbial day job. On a practical level, writing together just made sense, but that much time spent in close collaboration meant it made sense on an artistic level too.
“Matt Nasir and I wanted to write together forever, so we experimented a bit. I wanted to sort of write an album out of my comfort zone. Challenge ourselves acoustically for more piano and soundscape,” said O’Doherty. “Matthew's great at string arrangements and soundscapes and melody and this was a chance to really expand on some ideas. “We were very proud of the record. We tried to dig deep on it…but it’s also been great that Frank has been so supportive of the project. It shows how in this we are as people, even outside of working together.”
Recorded over three years between Frank Turner’s rehearsal space in Oxford and Badlands studios in Ireland, The Sleeping Souls first album is twelve songs that feel decidedly outside the realm of the folk-adjacent and punk rock tunes the band cut their teeth on. “Caught Up” is a track that would fit comfortably with any alt-rock college radio of the 90s, while “Ceremony” hits an introspective and contemplative tone adjacent to later Jimmy Eat World. While creating a kind of Frank Turner-lite project might have been the easiest and most obvious path, there wasn’t much interest in traveling over well-covered territory. Through branching out the hope was to do something that stretched their artistic boundaries and also prove that the group has legs beyond a backing band. Still, creating that kind of work, they weren’t entirely sure there would be an audience.
“I think if we naturally wrote music that sounded like Frank it would probably be an easier sell,” said Nasir. “But a really cool thing is meeting people at the shows that had already connected with the music on its own terms. They’d come up to us and say how much they loved the album. There were actually some people who had flown in from the US and far off places to see us play. That was just really amazing.”
With the album coming out in November of last year, it seems like the bet paid off. Just Before The World Starts Burning was lauded by critics who called the album timeless and an incredibly well put-together body of work. Similarly, the band has found fans autonomous to their work with Turner, playing to packed houses across their first UK tour and being championed with glowing remarks across socials.

The seemingly never-ending tour schedule of Frank Turner — an upcoming gig playing to a sold-out 10k theater for the musician’s 3000th show — means that there isn’t a lot of time for The Sleeping Souls to pursue a larger tour of more music in the immediate future. But a strong debut and a wash of new ideas, coupled with a lot of time on the bus between gigs, means that there are a lot of things brewing behind the scenes. Whenever they’re ready for the public, it’s sure to be a great listen.