Folk Singer/Songwriter Andrew Samuel Pulls Apart His New EP

i still feel blue

A recent review called this song ‘unnerving in its bleakness,’ which I thought was brilliant. For me, although it’s dark, it isn’t a sad or bleak song. Depression and sadness have affected me in my life as kind of piercing sensations, powerful and debilitating; the mood of this song is more of melancholy and indifference. It’s walking around Newtown late at night, pretty drunk and turning on yourself and laughing about it. There isn’t one loss, or one sadness, that you can tie the lyrics to. Nothing in it is affecting me deeply. And to be honest I like that.

The guitars are looped and the entire song is two chords strolling back and forward, which sort of captures that kind of ambling around late at night feeling. I think it lets the lyrics come forward. Or at least that was the aim.

Ryan pulled his effect board out of his bag once we’d tracked the main instruments and got stuck into some reverb pedals, and knocked his guitar around a bit to make some weird sounds. I think these touches add to the feeling of walking around at night, and are probably what was freaking that reviewer out!

secrets of my own

As with I Still Feel Blue, there isn’t one theme or story I can tie this song to. It’s kind of an ode to loneliness, fear and murky secrets. It’s that panic about the future, longing for the past and staring at your life and realising that it all just feels very banal.

We used both electric and acoustic guitars for this track. I didn’t want the EP to feel like an acoustic record, but I wanted the lyrics to be right at the front, which the acoustic does allow for. So adding the electric in this track made it feel harder to pin down stylistically.

sitting here with nothing owing

This was the first song we tracked for the EP. Ryan had come over to my sharehouse in Enmore with a few microphones and a few ridiculous extension leads, and it wasn’t long before we were hanging some rather expensive condenser mics over the hallway balcony.

The guitar was tracked with me sitting at the bottom of the stairs, one mic right up against the body of the guitar and another off somewhere near the toilet. We wanted to try and make everything organically on this EP, and this set-up allowed us to create a natural reverb, which sounded great. A lot of people have likened the sound to a 12 string. It’s a big, vast guitar sound, that doesn’t feel over-produced.

This song is a kind of retelling of a relationship falling apart and all the discoveries you make in those moments when there is no hope of reconciliation. How you all of a sudden see how wise and beautiful someone is. And how you know you’ll be thinking back to this moment for years to come and you still don’t change it. How after all this time of reflection you’re still not sure whether you made the right decision.

hissing bitterness

We’d tracked the first three songs and Ryan had casually told me to record this last track on my own. “I think it’s just about getting the perfect live take,” he casually told me as we were packing up after our last session together.

We were due to do the final mix a week later, so I set aside a few evenings to record it. I was very close to not getting anything to Ryan. I was suggesting swapping in other songs, or just releasing a three-track EP. I just couldn’t get this bastard in a live take. It’s simple and needs to be subtle, and I couldn’t get a complete take I was happy with.

The whole EP began with the intention of trying to make something that didn’t sound too perfect, but this wasn’t about being a perfectionist. The song, like all on this EP, was built around two chords and needed to be carried by the vocal if it was going to work. It needed to have the emotion and the intensity the song demanded.

At 2am on the morning of the mixing I sent something to Ryan, with the words, “just don’t bother if it’s shit.”

Andrew Samuel's Hissing Bitterness EP is out now. Read our interview with Andrew Samuel here.