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teach them a lot in schools… is not just that her singing is great, the kids’ singing is great, but that her tambourine playing is incredible. The album’s just voice and tam- bourine. She has the deepest sense of rhythm, incredibly complex rhythms, incredibly powerful beats. I remember lis- tening to Bessie Jones’ You Never Mind and walking around when I was 15 and thinking, ‘God, this is amazing, someone should put a beat under this. I should remix this.’ And, literally the next week, I read about Moby’s Play record…”
material, which started off with writing his own guitar riffs, often for Doveman. He discovered the flexibility he had in putting songs into totally different har- monies. “The sort of thing that Paul Brady did in the ’70s in Ireland, which was almost overwhelming to me as I was nowhere near there as a guitarist, but I found inspiring. In Irish music, the melody is set, you don’t really improvise that much on the melody but the melody is open in terms of what chords can be used, quite ambiguous often. There are a huge number of arrangements you can play with. I realised that it was the same with folk song. You could take the melody, put a totally different riff underneath it. Not a ground-breaking revelation, I know, but I suppose that working with Doveman, there were a whole different batch of riffs and sounds that I had in my ears.”
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Despite the wealth of innovation with the songs, Sam doesn’t feel the pressure to create his own material. He cites his heroes as a rationale:
“Some fiddlers write tunes but it’s all about interpretation. With my favourite fiddlers, like Tommy Peoples (though he’s written lots of great tunes), I love the way he twists the melody, his phrasing, his sense of time, that’s enough for me. I don’t need anything else. I’m a real jazz nerd. A lot of those guys just played standards. They never wrote their own songs. Miles Davis got a lot of his bandmates to write material. My heroes are not really singer- songwriters. Also, maybe this is crippling in terms of writing songs, for me I could never write lyrics like O Death has!”
Mistakenly, I wonder whether he feels a sense of responsibility or tradition- bearing in singing these songs.
“When you listen to the old field
recordings, the singers have no sense of preservation, they just own a banjo. If they own a pump organ, then they’ll play it on the pump organ! For me, folk music is just a history of bumbling accidents. There’s some incredible ambiguity in many of the songs and half of that is acci- dental. There’s a wonderful mystery to it. A song might be ambiguous because that particular recording that was made, they forgot the third verse!”
The element of ‘accident’ is one that Sam embraces and relishes. Both the first two albums of songs he made were “wide open-eyed experiences. I’m very glad that Valgeir and Thomas who did those with me were sensitive enough to allow that to be part of the process!” The first album using the formula of reworked folk songs and collaborations with friends began with Thomas who, as well as being Sam’s housemate at the time, had bought some
hilst he might have missed out on that particular niche, Sam has developed his own unique style of interpreting traditional
new home-recording equipment. But This Chicken Proved False-Hearted, currently out of print, was created with ‘rabbit caught in headlights’ energy!
“My idea of a good take was the one
where I didn’t totally screw up the guitar part – that was my only criterion. I was doing songs where I was reading lyrics off the computer. On the Tears For Fears cover, Head Over Heels [the only non-trad track] you can’t hear the guitar for a second because I took my hand off to ‘unsleep’ my computer screen. I couldn’t see the lyrics so I had to bat the mouse and then go back to playing the song. It was still all very new. I was so shy about it that I would only record the songs if I was alone in the house. Thomas would only put his stuff down when I would take a walk. That’s sort of ended up being the model for the next couple of records that I did, even when I was more comfortable with the process. It was almost a way of keeping that field recording quality, to put it down alone like that. You might as well be who- ever that someone has come to record.”
Consciously, Sam has chosen to work
with people who don’t have a background in folk music, with the exception of Thomas. Both the last two albums have been record- ed at the beautifully clean and airy Green- house Studios in Reykjavik with Valgeir Sig- urðsson, who has previously worked with the likes of Björk, and has now established his own Bedroom Community label.
New York composer Nico Muhly had taken Sam to Iceland initially to work on a piece called Two Sisters, based on The Wind & The Rain that they had worked on together (“a wild, 17-minute long, full-on, post minimalist, modern classical collage composition! He bought all the versions he could find on iTunes or wher- ever, Martin Carthy, Jody Stecher… we looked at all of the lyrics and came up with a version which suited us. It’s nuts!”). Nico had previously shared a CDR of But This Chicken Proved False-Hearted with Valgeir and they had discussed the possibility of recording.
As Sam had brought a bunch of songs with him on the trip, they headed to the studio one night, drank some whiskey, sat down and recorded all of Sam’s songs. Sam remembers that Valgeir was engineering but, as he was lying down on the floor with his headphones on, “he may well have been asleep!” The whole process then became like a game of consequences with each adding their own parts, without the knowledge of the other, in two separate countries. In New York, Sam added some guitar parts, some “weird little violin things”, some percussion, his friend Eyvind Kang’s viola playing. Meanwhile in Iceland, Nico came up with arrangements of string quartets plus trombone, French horn and bassoon. Then, Valgeir and Sam came together to carve one All Is Well out of it.
With the more muscular I See The Sign, Sam felt more engaged and confidentwith the recording process, laying down tracks initially with multi-instrumentalist Shahzad Ismaily, then arranging with Nico Muhly, singing together with Beth Orton and finally sculpting an album out of it with Valgeir. “Valgeir is a genius at mixing. His sense of sound is very much… a sound garden. He has a wonderful balance of Ice- landic clarity whilst also allowing room for those human aspects, the sound of a scrape on an instrument or Shahzad breathing or the rain outside. He keeps his radar open for all that stuff!”
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alking of picking things up on radars… depending on your universe, you may well encounter some of Sam’s immi- nent projects. He’s busy, he has fingers in pies… live work with London- based experimental jazz percussionist Chris Vatalaro, collaboration in Germany with Bill Frisell, the End Of The Road festi- val, a firm-footing in the New York indie scene, posting silly videos on YouTube (which “might not seem like folk music but I think of them as self-inflicted field recordings, inspired by those field record- ings where, y’know, the dude takes his teeth out when he sings! A lot of these people are just nuts”), an audio- visual show cut with his live performances based on his surrealist drawings, not to mention impending fatherhood. And – hopefully with the exception of the latter – it’s all pretty accidental.
“If someone comes up to me, even to
this day, and asks what I do, I’ll say I play fiddle. It’s still what I feel like I do well or I’m an expert at. Fiddle has become like a very passionate hobby for me again and I kind of like it that way. It’s not even like art or music; it’s like doing tai chi every day. I could teach a fiddle class but I couldn’t teach a guitar or a singing or a folk song class. It’s one of those lessons of life. You have all these conscious ideas about what you think you should be doing in life, and what your goals are and then something else comes along and you have to go with it. Otherwise, I would be a failing session guitarist right now, if I’d have pursued what I thought I should be doing. Actually, that’s still what I want to be. My goal is still to be a failed electric session guitarist… and I’m getting closer to that goal right now!! I need to find a teacher, a jazz teacher, so I can become a mediocre jazz musician too. To become a mediocre jazz musician would make me so happy! I’m giving myself ten years – by the time I’m 40!”
www.samamidon.com F
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