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Jun 9, 2022

 

TRIPPY TROUBADOUR SAM TUCKER GETS GROOVY WITH BRAND NEW PROJECT




Montreal, QC June 9, 2022 – Sam Tucker is a unique and accomplished artist standing on the edge of greatness, but he finds himself living a very different life than he might have expected. The British-born singer/songwriter was originally studying linguistics in Jolly Ol’ England, absorbing plenty of music at home, but a chance encounter with the Canadian wilderness led to him settling down in Quebec’s Gaspésie region, where he found his voice; a community of like minded musicians to collaborate with; and now a new project that takes him way out his comfort zone, and the results are fantastic.

GROW: PART I is a new side project for Sam, a culmination of a series of events, realizations, and disparate influences all coming to a head during a worldwide pandemic in which artists were forced to stay at home and re-evaluate their output. Sam, who had been mostly a touring folk musician prior to Covid, decided to re-tool his approach to making music to be more bedroom friendly when venues and studios started to close. As a longtime fan of EDM and electronic music from his British youth, Sam found himself listening to a lot of lo-fi hiphop beats and atmospherics from YouTube at home, and, taking inspiration from those slow burn beats, he built an entire collection of trippy new songs with the use of swampy and somewhat muted beats and bytes he found online.


“I wanted to create, educate myself on music production, and evolve my art in general. I didn’t know how to track a bassline or add ‘swing’ to a high hat groove, but all of a sudden I had all the time in the world to try”, says Sam. “The whole thing felt very liberating musically, which contrasted with the short-term incarceration we were all experiencing at that moment”.


Sam’s impeccable sense of melody and musicality makes this collection of songs extremely pleasant to listen to. It’s the type of music that melts into your mind, and then takes root and stays there for a while. The guitar playing and vocals are both breezy and very deliberate. Sam’s got a light touch when making music, and with this project, his sounds are quite processed, resembling the vibe of artists like Mac DeMarco or Tame Impala, to name just a few. With the help of his good friend, production wizard, Connor Seidel (who was showered with much praise at the recent Juno’s for his contributions to Charlotte Cardin’s success), Sam assembled a handful of songs that play like a greatest hits collection of songs we have not yet heard… but they are all instant classics.


According to Sam, “this music didn’t start out as something I wanted to release, it was just a creative outlet. Then gradually it became a sort of ‘side-project’ that I could maybe release under an obscure pseudonym. Then, I realized that this music is as much a part of Sam Tucker as the folk tunes and blues-rock music, and so it became a Sam Tucker project, too. It’s not a ‘new direction’ for Sam Tucker, who is ‘putting down his classical guitar for something cooler’. It’s just adding another piece to the puzzle of ‘who is Sam Tucker?’...

GROW: PART I is available NOW.


Here, in Sam’s words, are a rundown of each track:


RUNNING is a fairly chill track, which started out with simple vocal harmonies that I looped indefinitely. One of the first tracks I worked on for this project, this song was initially about nothing, really. Just vibes. But the lyrics gradually became a symbol for how I was feeling at the time - locked down and sequestered in a chalet because of COVID, needing to break out and run. Anywhere. The guitar solo in the middle was a first take that I recorded on a battered acoustic guitar that you couldn’t play past the 12th fret. I was planning on doing a better one at some point, but Connor and I decided to embrace the weirdness.


HOOLYWUD is just all about a good catchy hook. Everything that was played on this track was just meant to feel good, and not to be over-thought. Later on, in the studio with Connor Seidel, we tried and tried to re-track a better version of the chorus vocal, to clean it up a bit. But in the end, we went with the original scratch vocal that I recorded in one take, sitting in the solarium of a chalet in Notre-Dame-Du-Portage. Covid was a weird time.

GROW was a track I wrote and recorded in the space of 3 or 4 hours, in my own home ‘studio’. It was so simple, and the track just clicked immediately. After that, apart from the mix, nothing ever changed. This song talks about relationships in all forms, and how they flourish or wither during pressure periods such as a COVID lockdown.

SWWM The meaning behind this acronym is to Say What We Mean. I took a lo-fi drum loop but I found it too fast, so I stretched the sample to slow it down. It became all slushy and drunk, but had a cool groove. This was one of the first tracks where I decided to sing with a lazy falsetto voice in the chorus, just to try something different. This track talks about communication and how important it is. With your partner, the people you work with, or anyone. In a society that lives half online and half in reality, sometimes the clarity of what we’re trying to say falls down the crack between the two.



SAM TUCKER:


 

Source : Audiogram


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PRESS CONTACT – QUEBEC:

JOHANNIE MICHAUD | Account Manager, annexe




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