By the time Afghan Whigs parted ways in 2001, the muse had already steered Greg Dulli toward something new in 1997. On hiatus from the Whigs, Dulli was led through a revolving door of musicians, assemblages that would end up spanning 10 years of his life and make him cross paths with lifetime friends, collaborators, and bandmates like the late Mark Lanegan and guitarist Dave Rosser, and more musical souls that remained with him long after.
The Twilight Singers were born from an entirely different swagger than the Whigs, from a freedom Dulli says brought him “back to” his “teenage days.” The Twilight Singers were an experimentation and something sweetly soul-burning. Without tethers or expectations, a miscellany melting pot of musicians and collaborations lived under the umbrella of The Twilight Singers.
“I started the Twilight Singers literally as a side project,” Dulli tells American Songwriter. “I had every plan in the world to continue with the Whigs, but obviously that didn’t work out.”
Everything started in 2000 with the Twilight Singers’ darker soul, Motown-dipped debut Twilight as Played by The Twilight Singers, which also featured previous Afghan Whigs collaborators guitarist Harold “Happy” Chichester and singer and songwriter Shawn Smith.
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Blackberry Belle, featuring Lanegan’s gravelly mark on the closing duet of “Number Nine,” was the “it” album for Dulli, opening newer confessionals and sounds. During the making of the album, Dulli was also dealing with the death of his dear friend actor, and director Ted Demme, who suffered a heart attack at age 38 in 2002.
“When Ted passed away, it gave me a chance to fuse those two sounds of the first Twilight record and the rock and roll that I like to play with the Whigs,” shares Dulli. “I feel like the first Twilight record is interesting, and I’m proud of it, and of stepping out of what I had done up until then, but ‘Blackberry Belle,’ that turned a page for me. That’s who I was going to be after that.”
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He continues, “That record, in particular, set me free in a way that I could never remember being, except for when I was a child just learning how to write songs.”
Prior to his death on February 22, 2022, at 57, Lanegan, who also made one of his final recordings on the Afghan Whigs’ How Do You Burn?, also penned the introduction for The Twilight Singers box set Black Out The Windows/Ladies and Gentlemen. “Much more than a simple document of a second act, this box set is an Everest-sized testament to my dear friend’s genius and his continuing relentless pursuit of a muse that refuses to let him be,” wrote Lanegan, “for which everyone who hears this music should be thankful.”
The limited edition deluxe 13-piece vinyl box set spans all six of the band’s recordings from Twilight as Played by The Twilight Singers through Dynamite Steps in 2011, along with reimagined album covers.
“He heard that I was doing the box set,” laughs Dulli of Lanegan’s participaton. “And Mark loves to write. Outside of songs, he had started cranking out novels, books of poetry. He started to really indulge that talent, and he said, ‘If you need me to write anything for it, just let me know,’ and I was like ‘Start writing it, dude.’ So that was that was an easy one. I had that in my back pocket before I even started.”
Extended essays within the 56-page book reveal more intimate stories from Guns N’ Roses’ Duff McKagan, The Church’s Steve Kilbey, Twilight Singers bassist Scott Ford, producer David Katznelson, manager Keith Hagan, and fan Marisa Buxbaum, who shares her life-altering personal story of the band and their album Powder Burns, along with previously unseen photos by Sam Holden, Danny Clinch, Chris Cuffaro, and Andy Willsher, among other photographers.
Curated by Dulli, the set also features remasters of all the Twilight Singers albums, along with an EP and bonus album, Etcetera, featuring 11 tracks of previously unreleased songs, including the uptempo “Andiamo,” recorded in Sicily, Italy in 2003, along with “Two Kinds,” and the spectral Shawn Smith-penned “A Glass of You.” Twilight Singers covers include Leonard Cohen‘s Death of a Ladies Man track “Paper Thin Hotel,” “Don’t Call,” originally recorded by Canadian electronic duo Desire, and “Fair Colonus” pulled from the 1983 musical Gospel at Colonus.
After the commotion of Blackberry Belle, the Twilight Singers approached a collection of covers on the 2004 album She Loves You with Lanegan adding his vocals to more tracks, including Björk‘s “Hyperballad,” the Billie Holiday classic “Strange Fruit,” Mary J. Blige’s “Real Love,” Skip James’ “Hard Killing Floor,” and John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme.”
By the time the band had reconvened for their 2006 release Powder Burns, they were recording parts of the album with power generators in a deserted studio in New Orleans, following Hurricane Katrina. At the time, Dulli had returned to the U.S. from Italy, where he had relocated to work with the group Afterhours featuring singer Manuel Agnelli, and later Twilight collaborator, and found himself in an unbelievable setting.
“I’m coming back from Italy and was already supposed to make the record in New Orleans and obviously it was under martial law for a while and as soon as it opened up, even with curfews, I was down there very soon after the hurricane,” says Dulli. “That was a really tricky time. I remember you couldn’t leave your home until 6 a.m., but I was staying in the [French] Quarter, and I would get up at 5 a.m., and I’d be on my bike by 5:30 [a.m.] riding through the French Quarter. You’re the only person in the world. It literally was the ‘Twilight Zone.’”
Powder Burns also highlighted a new army of contributors, including DiFranco, who guested on the title track, “Bonnie Brae,” and “Candy Cane Crawl,” and Agnelli, who co-wrote “My Time (Has Come)” and “The Conversation.” It also marked the introduction of Rosser, who later joined Dulli and Lanegan on the Gutter Twins and remained with the Afghan Whigs for their return album Do to the Beast in 2014 and follow-up In Spades before his death died on June 27, 2017, from inoperable colon cancer at the age of 50.
In 2020, Dulli filmed the video for “Lockless,” from his solo release Random Desire, in New Orleans at the beginning of the COVID lockdown with director Bailey Smith. “I had seen it before,” says Dulli of the empty streets of New Orleans during the Katrina curfews, “but I wanted to see it again.”
Once Lanegan joined the live band during Powder Burns, it led to The Twilight Singers’ 2006 EP A Stitch in Time, and began “paving the way for Gutter Twins,” says Dulli. After hearing Massive Attack’s “Live with Me,” Dulli immediately wanted to cover it and started playing it live and taking on the vocal, later covered by Lanegan.
“I remember we started practicing it and played it during soundcheck in Boston and New York, and performed it for the first time in Philadelphia, and I sang the whole song,” shares Dulli. “We crushed the Terry Collier part, so I called him [Lanegan] and he was free at the time. He was just gonna do New Orleans, Texas, and California with us, and at that point, we stayed touring together for the next four years, between Gutter Twins and Twilight.
[RELATED: Greg Dulli’s Debut Solo Release ‘Random Desire,’ More Music with The Afghan Whigs]
Before the end, what Dulli calls the Twilight Singers’ “grand finale” and last album, Dynamite Steps, in 2011, he reminisces on some highlights with the band. They covered “When Doves Cry” with Apollonia, who co-starred with Prince in Purple Rain, for the 2009 compilation Purplish Rain.
Another song featured on the extra tracks of the box set on Etcetera, “Deepest Shade,” was covered by Lanegan and McKagan but the Twilight Singers’ never released their original 1997 recording. “My original version has never come out until now,” says Dulli. “That’s a beautiful song, and I’m psyched that one is finally out in the world.”
Towards the end, Dulli admits that one of his favorite albums at the time, Groove Armada’s Black Light, influenced the final Twilight Singers release. “I’m not gonna say it sounds like ‘Black Light,’ but that record turned me on in a way that I had not felt before,” says Dulli, “and it pulses with the energy that I got from that record.”
Dulli still works Twilight Singers songs into his solo and Whigs live shows. “Since we got the Whigs back together, I can stay connected to that music,” Dulli says. “I get to go out and sing Twilight songs, which really mean a lot to me. They’re a big part of my creative life, so I love spending time with those songs.”
Returning to his muse, that inspiration is always shifting for Dulli from Twilight through Afghan Whigs and his 2020 solo debut Random Desire.
“The muse can be another person, someone who inspires you,” says Dulli. “But the muse must be within, I think. You have to interact with the muse, and conjure the muse however you get that to happen. I used to think that I’d just drift through life and wait for the muse to tap me on the shoulder, and I realized that that was a fairy tale that I was telling myself.
If I wanted to write songs, I had to get after it, but when you do that’s when these things appear. And the more you do it, the more they appear.”
The muse followed Dulli through the Afghan Whigs’ recent sessions at Joshua Tree, California in June 2023. “When we all got together in the desert to just play together for the first time since the tour [‘How Do You Burn?’] it happened right away, and we put five things down. It was popping because we invited it in, and we interacted with it. Like anything, you have to bring your own energy to it.”
Live in New York was technically the final release by the Twilight Singers in 2011. On September 17, 2011, the band played Blackberry Belle in its entirety for the first time at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco, California with Lanegan, and other special guests Petra Haden and Dave Catching.
“When we played the ‘BlackBerry Belle’ show in San Francisco, I felt like I had taken it to where I was gonna take it,” reveals Dulli, who was already talking to Afghan Whigs bassist John Curley about getting the band back together. “But I love ‘Dynamite Steps,’ and I loved the tour. I loved the band. I loved the live album. That show in New York was really one of the funnest shows of my whole life.
The Twilight Singers gave me some of the greatest times of my life. I met some of the most amazing people who are still my friends and my collaborators. It was a halcyon time.”
Photos by Sam Holden
