songdreaming | Sam Lee continues to connect with the land through song
The lush surrounding of Dartmoor is wonderfully fitting for Sam Lee’s latest single Meeting is a Pleasant Place, it is a Devon folk song, afterall. The single, featuring Trans Voices, is off Sam’s new album songdreaming.
songdreaming has its roots in traditional folk, but Sam brings with it a freshness, vigour and news eyes that can celebrate the old songs while making them relevant for a modern audience.
Across the 10 tracks, Sam delivers an album that ranges from more immediately identifiable acoustic songs to drone soundscapes through to the electric guitar and gospel choir propelled lead single.
Meeting Is A Pleasant Place is the recording debut of Trans Voices, a London based transgender choir.
It is an album that can incorporate the beautiful balladry of Sweet Girl McRee alongside the gospel tinges of Leaves of Life while also housing the whiteout noise close of album opener Bushes and Briars, a song that details Sam’s rage at the treatment and condition of the natural world.
Nature, and the natural world, remain Sam’s primary lyrical concern. He characterises the album as: “a mosaic of the emotions felt in my time outdoors, that artistically emerge in reflective moments when I’m permitted to recount and articulate the complexity of all I witness and thus feel responsible for”.
In taking songs that are directly related to the nature of the British Isles, weaved into its very being, Sam is continuing to reinvent and contemporise a tradition of communion with the land through song.
What that means to the listener is a rich and evocative journey through the complex emotions created for Sam by his engagement with nature and his deep-felt affinity for it, drawing on sources as diverse as the sacred music of European and global mystic traditions, the work of neo-classical contemporary composers, and the simple effectiveness of a well delivered vocal melody.
At the heart of songdreaming is a belief in the fundamental power of music to connect and inspire. For Sam, these reimagined and reworked songs are more than a history, they are a living, breathing connection to our very being:“Those people who are and were singing the old songs here at home were also looking after the land. When we stop singing to the land, the land stops singing back.”
It’s an album and sense of connection, that echoes through the ancient and modern land. The lush surroundings of Dartmoor are an ideal setting for those sentiments, and more.
songdreaming by Sam Lee is released on 15 March, in Vinyl Album, CD, and digital download. Pre-Order now.
Tickets are now on sale here
March
Friday, 15 – The Met, Bury
Sat 16 – Summerhall, Edinburgh
Sun 17 – Trades Club, Hebden Bridge
Wed 20 – Crookes Social Club, Sheffield
Thu 21 – Storey’s Field Centre, Cambridge
Fri 22 – Brewery Arts Centre, Kendal
Sat 23 – The Glasshouse ICM, Gateshead (formerly The Sage)
Sun 24 – Old Woollen, Leeds
Tue 26 – Norwich Arts Centre, Norwich
Wed 27 – Beacon, Bristol
Thu 28 – Philharmonic, Liverpool
April
Wed 3 – Komedia, Brighton
Thu 4 – Quarterhouse, Folkestone
Fri 5 – St Mary’s Church, Totnes
Sat 6 – The Gate, Cardiff
Sun 7 – Turner Sims, Southampton
June
Thu 13 – Round Chapel, London
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