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Sam Amidon
Interviewed By: Eric Stein
Date: 2008-09-14
Heralding form Battleboro, Vermont and from a family of professional folk musicians, Sam Amidon has had ample traditional influences in music from a young age. Fluent in the instruments of the trade himself, Sam has continually created and preformed his own style of folk music, gaining notoriety of late for his last two full length recordings, But This Chicken Proved False Hearted, and the more recent, All is Well. The later being recorded in Reykjavik, Iceland at Greenhouse Studios, under the wing of Valgeir Sigurðsson’s Bedroom Community (Sigurðsson is the producer behind much of Björk’s output and has worked with other artists including Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy), has been received with enthusiasm and much critical acclaim. Mentions in Rolling Stone Magazine and performances at Carnegie Hall are proof that the media and listening public alike invite the stories Sam plays with open ears. Sam takes these stories of the trials and tribulations of 19th century America, seemingly buried long ago, dusts them off and polishes them up so they shine bright once more. Those who wrote these folk songs over a century ago speak of things that still resonate with our lives and culture today, and Amidon brings them to us in artful and harrowing compositions that find themselves simultaneously at home in the past and present. Hearing these songs for the first time, what initially takes hold of the listener is the raw, and yet, soft voice that sets the mood of the words being sung and tales being told. Sparse accompaniments of piano, horn, guitar and banjo keep the music feeling traditionally rooted yet their arrangements have a noticeably progressive feel to them. What is most exciting about this music is the feeling that you are being either put back in front of the men who wrote these songs, often quite personal laments and honest tales, and are living their experience all over again, or they are being brought into the present. Either way the result is something communal and comfortably mutual. With such attention being paid to various incarnations of folk in recent years, Sam Amidon creates a direct connection to the birth of the movement all those years ago without ever sounding dated or redundant. Currently on tour in Europe, Sam took the time to speak with us about the influence books have had in his life, what he is into now, and how it all fits in with his music. Growing up, how did reading play into your life? How did these books help you grow? “My parents were idealistic and we had no television growing up. So in theory I should have been one of those kids that read books all the time. But I was more into basketball and playing the fiddle, or thinking about those things, and then in high school I was a movie addict and that took up a lot of my reading brain. When I was a kid we had a ton of cassette tapes of storytellers telling folktales, so my brother and I would listen to those. Around 6th grade I got addicted to reading catalogues. I would come home from school, make myself a bowl of cereal, and lie on the floor listening to story tapes and reading catalogues. “I read The Thief's Journal by Jean Genet in high school and my friend Gabe and I, who had a free jazz band called Billy Budd and the Homoerotic Tensions, got really into the moral regimen element of that novel- that Genet is a character who for some reason needs to steal from people he loves in order to achieve some kind of higher consciousness. So Gabe and I had our own moral regimen, which basically consisted of threatening to shoot each other with supersoakers in a spiritually anguished way. We decided that the late 80s Miles Davis album Amandla was a product of the moral regimen, that he was making a terrible cheesy record in a form of musical self-flagellation. His trumpet playing is so beautiful on that album! “I also like comics - my new fighting technique is unstoppable, Maakies, Shrimpy and Paul.” You can check out some Sam’s favourite comics here - www.maakies.com , www.comicspace.com/shrimpy What are your favourite books? Are there books you re-read? “Much of my taste in literature has been prompted by my friend Thomas who plays in my band and also I play in his band Doveman and he reads more than me. I met him when we were 7 years old and he'd just finished reading The Lord of the Rings Trilogy - he'd basically read his way through Umberto Eco's novels by the end of sixth grade. So he really likes to read! Three of my favorite writers were people I got into because of him - Herman Melville, who’s book Pierre, or, The Ambiguities is a favorite; late Henry James, especially Wings of the Dove; and more recently Evelyn Waugh, the early funny shit. I just re-read A Handful Of Dust.” You sing many 19th century/turn of the century Appalachian American folk songs. Do you search out any reading material from or about that time period as well? What is it about this era that intrigues you so? “I don't really think about those songs as so much being a product of the 19th century specifically, it's a more continuous thing. Some of the original melodies or stories might have come from Europe and maybe earlier in the previous century; and where I actually learned the songs from was either people I know who are alive now, or recordings made by the young musicians of the 1930s, or those same musicians, much older, when they were 'rediscovered' in the 60s and 70s. But I will tell you that what is intriguing about the songs is the mystery and ambiguity in them, both in the melodies, the way people sing them, and the stories. Those stories are amazing! It's less a matter of a connection to an era, and more a matter of getting lost in the stories that the songs tell, in the way that you get lost in a book, or in the woods (see http://vimeo.com/1266520 for more information).” Do the characters or resonating themes from the books you read connect with the music you create? “Since I haven't ever written lyrics yet, not really in a direct way. Themes yes, just shapes and ways of operating that books have can be inspiring for giving you ideas of how to work on stuff.” What are you reading now? “Dostoevsky's The Idiot. It is blowing my mind. I'm going to go read it right now!!! My dad gave it to me for my birthday last month. He read these books when he was a few years younger than I am right now. Around that time he wrote a song that has a very happy melody and these are the words: It's a long, long road to the bottom Does being on tour and traveling to new places affect what you read? “Sometimes, I had a lot of fun reading Sherlock Holmes when I was in England this past May.” What type of non-fiction do you read? “I read instructional texts such as Lost Illusions by Balzac, The Best of Stuntology by my friend the genius Sam Bartlett (this book cannot be too highly recommended), The Wu-Tang Manual by the RZA, Beyond Good and Evil by Nietzche, Born Standing Up by Steve Martin, Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Chuck Amuck by Chuck Jones, and Buster Keaton: Interviews.” For Sam’s tour dates visit - www.brassland.org/802tour Purchase Books Links:
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