A Conversation with Sam Lee: “I want every album to be filled with forests, and I want every forest to be filled with music”

Sam Lee released his debut album, Ground of Its Own, in 2012, and came to even wider attention when he began singing with nightingales in 2014 and then released his second album, The Fade in Time, in 2015; his performance of ‘Lovely Molly’ that year on Later... with Jools Holland introduced his music to a new audience. Since then, he’s released Old Wow (2019) and last year’s songdreaming, which

won Songlines’ Best Europe album award. Yet all of these exploits only give a glimpse of his career, as before his debut album, he had been collecting folksongs for at least nine years, a practice which he continued, while his climate activism has always been a huge part of what he does, perhaps now even playing a bigger role, with Lee outlining how nature is front-and-centre in all of his activities: “It’s time to really see how I shift as an artist into this new place of music and nature, because I think that’s what I’m going to be doing for the rest of my life”, he confides.

This year, Lee is an artist-in-residence for Kings Place’s year-long Earth Unwrapped series in London, curating events in March and September that bring together music and nature. Additionally, Lee has released a special version of his songdreaming song ‘Bushes & Briars & Birds’, which includes a guest spot from NATURE. The inclusion of NATURE is part of a campaign by Sounds Right to establish NATURE as a rightsholder in any song released that includes the sound of nature, with royalties going towards the conservation and restoration of nature through EarthPercent.

In this conversation we look at Lee’s early days of singing around fires and how nature was always the driving force behind his artistic practices. He also offers his advice on dealing with the climate crisis and optimistically discusses how music can be part of a new social movement driving change.

I wanted to ask about your childhood and how you got into music. Did you grow up in London?

I’m a Kentish Town boy. It was a very strange, very tough, urban bit of no-go London in the 80s and 90s – now it’s a very different story. My dad’s a musician; he was professional then amateur, a jazz guitarist. So, I rejected the guitar in my youth. There was a lot of music in the house. My dad used to sing with us… And my mum was obsessed with opera. She was also, for many years before I was born, the lover of Pavarotti. When she was a 20-something blonde Londoner, they met somehow, and she was one of his many, many women in different countries. We met him lots as kids growing up, going to visit him.

Was performance a big element in the house, in terms of people playing guitar or singing?

No, we’re a very shy family. For my dad, stepping up and singing was a brave act. I have inherited my father’s terrible self-confidence, which you would be surprised at because I come across as a very self-confident person.

That’s interesting because I’ve heard plenty of stories about yourself breaking into song in all kinds of places. Is singing a way to break through the self-confidence barrier?

We’ve all got one or two degrees of imposter syndrome somewhere buried inside us. I think the difference for me, and actually where my childhood experience of music has helped me overcome that sense of ego and self-awareness, is that I’ve been singing from a tradition which is bigger than me. It was easy to stand up and sing a folk song because I was in service to somebody else or a bigger entity that was more important. Also, the other part of my childhood growing up where music was very influential was in the synagogue, doing a bar mitzvah, learning to sing in a foreign language, and singing devotional music to these exquisite melodies that are five-plus thousand years old. I got a sense of what it was to be part of a tradition. And although I didn’t keep an interest in that, it certainly paved the way for a fascination into music with a lineage that spoke to higher powers.

I read that you were an artist before making music. Can you tell us a little about that?

I went to art school, and I confronted what it means to be a creative… But I rejected the art world because I didn’t like its vanity, its narcissism and its obsession with money and status. What I was interested in was nature, and that had no voice or role within the art world at all. I wanted to go into wilderness work and be a nature explorer, ethnobotanist, study anthropology, that was my passion.

Was it nature that led you into music then?

It was my big passion as a kid and that was fostered through my connection to the Forest School Camps, much like Jon Boden and Simon Emmerson who also came out of the radical left-wing progressive charity FSC, as it’s known, and that created an environment that fostered a relationship to nature through community, but also a very strong campfire-themed tradition, which had a lot of folk music in it. That was my encountering of folk music, not knowing that it was, I didn’t even know the word folksong for most of the years that I was singing these songs, but I was aware they had lineage and antiquity.

When did you begin collecting folksongs?

Since I was 10 years old, I have been singing these songs that people might now know from the protest movement of the 1960s and 70s, from the Waterson-Carthy repertoire, from the Burl Ives and Alan Lomax collections. When you’re growing up, there’s no way of finding out where these songs are from. They were just what we sang around the campfire. There was no internet to go and look things up. But aged about 25, I got into learning more songs, every weekend we’d meet up at people’s houses, we’d light the campfire in the back garden or go off to Hampstead Heath, light a fire, sing songs.

Then the internet appeared, and I started searching on Yahoo, downloading through Limewire and discovering the origins of them, discovering that they were sung by people like Harry Cox or Jasper Smith and then finding those recordings. I immediately discovered Cecil Sharp House. I joined the library. I got a volunteer role. And suddenly I was in the archives and listening to the field recordings. It was like falling down the well. All of my vinyl of rock’n’roll and soul and jazz never got played again. Then I met Peter Kennedy, who’s the Alan Lomax of the UK, who worked with David Attenborough in the 1950s. Nine months before he died, I went and did an apprenticeship with him, and he inspired me to go out and find who might still remember songs. So, I started driving off to traveller sites and meeting up with old Gypsy families, seeing who had songs.

The first family that I met was in a traveller site in Western Super Mare, the Penfolds, the same family in which the song ‘Meeting is a Pleasant Place’, which I’ve just recorded, is known [Rebecca Penfold’s singing of the song was recorded by Peter Kennedy in 1971]. I knocked on the caravan door at 8pm on a dark, cold October night. I was terrified and the door opened, and this enormous guy called Rob Dob Penfold was sitting there just about to eat his dinner going like, “Who the fuck are you and what do you want? Are you the police? Are you the church? Are you social services?” And I said “I’m a singer and I’m interested in Gypsy song. Do you know any?” He just said, “Come in and sit down, what are you eating?” And we spent an hour with him singing a lot of First World War and Victorian parlour stuff, he had songs that he’d learnt from his mother that were not songs that most people knew.

He was so moved that somebody had come to pay attention, because he loved his singing and nobody listened to him sing. Before I left, he said, “Stop, before you go I want to get something for you” and he went to the back of the caravan and pulled out a bottle of champagne. And that was it. Before I knew it, I was driving around motorways, looking for traveller sites, knocking on caravan doors and drawing up a map. It became spreadsheets and Google Drives and websites, an entire operation, searching out, finding informants.

How did you meet Stanley Robertson?

We met at Whitby Folk Festival. I knew some of his songs and, like everyone else, I assumed he was dead because the recordings that he was on were full of other people, all of whom were dead. I walked into the Yacht Club and there was a lineup of about five traditional singers from different parts of Britain and Ireland. This very unusual man stood up wearing a black suit and a black tie and a white shirt and a black flat cap. He had this broad, wide face, missing teeth and just a wildness in his energy, and he started to sing and instantly I knew it was Stanley Robertson. It was like a ghost had suddenly taken flesh and come back to life.

The life-changing Tolkien moment for me was after the gig: I followed him and his wife out of the Yacht Club and they were staying at the top of the Whitby cliffs, and it was late at night and he walked up the stairs and he got to the top of the staircase, which is like 200 feet of stairs, and this is an old man with a heart condition, and at the top of the stairs is this whalebone arch, and he stopped to grab the whalebone arch and clutch his heart and take a breath. And I went up to him and nervously said “Stanley, can I say thank you? That was the most wonderful concert.” And he just turned around, the seagulls were screaming and he looked at me and went, “I [know] a thousand ballads.” The next day I found him and he said, “Hi Samuel, I have a gift for you.” I was like, “How the fuck do you know my name?” He said, “Of course I know your name, I know who you are.”

And he’d come to the festival with a cassette tape of his songs to hand to me. About three months later, he actually died. He went into a coma, he had a heart attack and a stroke, and we’re about to switch the machine off. And then he had this miraculous comeback to life again, and there began four years of apprenticeship.

When you began recording your own music were you aware that you didn’t want to use typical folk instruments, were you trying to get away from that in some way?

I was listening to lots of revival folk music and loved it, but the music that I was listening to was contemporary, alternative, experimental music; I’m an avid fan of Late Junction on Radio 3.

At art school, I was listening to wild, wonderful sounds from around the world. Particularly, I was very interested in ethnographic music and different cultures… I was fascinated by how English folk sat within a repertoire of songs contiguous to tribal African, South American, North American, Southeast Asian, emotional music from around the world. I thought, there is no way that folk music should sound, all of it is unaccompanied folk song, the instrumentation already is unauthentic in its application. Fuck, let’s do what I like. I gathered all these instruments that I was fascinated with: gas cylinders, handpans, dulcimers, and created sound textures. I was very lucky that through my friendship with Lisa Knapp, I met her husband and producer, Gerry Diver.

And he presented [himself] as a sort of collaborator for me to go back to art school, to create a picture that’s out of sound. I didn’t know anything about music composition at all, but Gerry was a wonderful guide and teacher and sounding board, and I just sort of tried things out.

On Instagram you wrote “I’ve never made an album like this one”, talking about your latest album songdreaming. What did you mean by this?

This album has been a bit of a coming-of-age record. It’s an album where I have put a lot of my more grown-up midlife senses of what’s going on in the world, what my purpose is, my fears and my great loves. I’ve probably put a lot more vulnerability into this record than I have done before.

Are there any particular songs that you feel would illustrate that?

Yeah, ‘Bushes & Briars’ very much lyrically speaks about, for me, fear of ecological collapse, which is something, as an environmentalist, that once you’ve seen it, you can’t unsee it. It terrifies me on a daily basis. ‘McCrimmon’, which comes from Stanley [Robertson] originally, is one of just complete unashamed adoration. And then songs like ‘Dreams of the Returning’, which is me stepping out into the poetic realm of looking at my life, my failings, my ruptures, my turbulence, within the state of the river but also the ecological learnings, the learnings I’ve received from being close to different species.

Talking about ecology, and as this issue is very much looking at how we can be active participants in responding to the climate crisis, do you have advice that you would give to fellow musicians or listeners who want to take action?

I have many answers to that question. There are the blanket ones, practical things we can do. We are so limited in being able to exist outside the constraints of the fossil fuel industry, we need to fly, we need to drive a petrol car, because we can’t afford to take trains everywhere, and we can’t afford to have an electric car, but you can look at your life and know where your finances are, look at your diet, look at where your energy is coming from. Are your financial investments with HSBC, Lloyds or Barclays? If they are, get them the fuck out as soon as possible, don’t put your hard-earned energies into institutions that are investing in fossil fuels.

I’m not so bothered about the little gestures of reusable bottles. Yes, do these things, recycle. But these are sticking plasters to a bigger problem. Artists have to focus on the big picture, we need to decarbonise and we need to create a popular movement away from the investing and the legitimising of the fossil fuel companies, because it’s all coming down, the great collapse is all going to come down due to CO2 in the atmosphere, which is going up, increasing exponentially at the moment.

Then, I also think that there’s another side to it, which is we need artists to have greater access and appreciation and lean into the natural world. How do we start to become campaigners for species and for ecosystems locally? Because that’s where the social change is going to start to happen, where people see what’s really happening.

Does your artist-in-residence role at Kings Place’s Earth Unwrapped this year then feed into that ambition?

What we as environmentalists and campaigners are trying to do is to colonise as much space as possible to normalise that nature is something that we can celebrate in the arts. And more and more institutions and festivals are starting to embrace the ‘nature as artist’ concept.

It creates an opportunity, as I call it, of irresistibility [that] is going to activate people to go, “Next weekend, let’s go for a walk.” “Let’s go and listen to nightingales” or “let’s go bird watching” or “let’s go to the Lake District” or whatever. Let’s not take a trip to Marbella or some Greek island, let’s go and explore the treasure in our back garden.

When you’re making an album, are you trying to recreate the experience of music within a natural environment? Or do you think of recorded music as separate from the experience of hearing music in nature?

Sometimes I’m more in the forest when I’m in the studio and I’m writing because it’s like I’m tapping into the essence of an experience… I want every album to be filled with forests, and I want every forest to be filled with music. That’s my vision. Let’s take the art back to the land and look at that as a place of theatre and musical exchange and community building… Against all the odds – the worst ecological crisis in Western Europe is happening in Britain, the highest rate of nature decline, the highest rate of music venue closures and the pressures that are on musicians – yet the art is starting to find its way back to the land in so many places. We just need a popular movement. Rewild our artists, rewild our nature spaces and re-music our nature spaces.

+ Sam Lee will perform at Kings Place on March 15 and September 20