04-09-2006, 08:10 AM
Canoe article on Sammy, quite interesting
Quote:Somewhere in South Africa's Kalahari Desert, there's a Bushman responsible for Sam Roberts' sophomore album, Chemical City.
Really.
The Bushman in question, Hendrik Kooper, is even listed among the thank-yous in the liner notes for Roberts' new disc, in stores Tuesday.
"We've tried to get in touch with him since (but), they're not that easy to track down," Roberts, 31, said down the line from his Montreal apartment recently. "You have to go out and find them again."
It seems inspiration comes from the unlikeliest of places for Roberts, who became the poster boy for Can-rock with the rip-roaring success of his 2003 full-length debut disc, We Were Born In A Flame.
"I just knew I had to get the hell out of dodge if I was going to write anything," he said following the heavy touring that helped spawn Flame's success in Canada, where it won album of the year and two other awards at the 2004 Junos.
"I went out to the Kalahari desert with my cousin, who just loves going out to the Bush in South Africa. And we spent a week just firing arrows into a tree and just cruising around looking for animals. And then we met this amazing guy. He picked up my guitar and starting playing, then he handed it to me, and I played back.
"It was just this thing," Roberts continued. "I don't know. I just kind of let go of a lot of things. Maybe it was because of him. I don't know why, but from that time on, the songs just started coming out."
Truthfully, Roberts -- whose parents are South African -- and his band had demoed about a half-dozen songs at The Tragically Hip's Bathouse Studios in the summer of 2004. Most of them made it onto Chemical City, albeit in radically altered form.
But by the winter of 2005, the nomadically inclined Roberts, who married his high school sweetheart Jen in 2004, was ready to go somewhere warm to make his next album.
So Roberts ended up halfway round the world, recording in an abandoned church near Byron Bay on Australia's eastern coast.
"We did have Australia high up on the list," Roberts said. "We were looking for somewhere in the southern hemisphere because we wanted it to be hot. I didn't want to make another winter record. I honestly believe the weather influences the outcome in a big way and it was a freezing cold winter in Montreal. So Australia was just staring right in our faces and none of us had ever been there before."
The scenic location was scouted out by Chemical City's co-producer Mark Howard, a colleague of Canadian producer Daniel Lanois, whom Roberts met in an L.A. bar a few years ago following a gig.
"I was really fixated on this idea of making a home record," Roberts said. "Getting out of the studio, doing it in the tradition of The Band's Music From Big Pink and the Rolling Stones' Exile On Main Street, those were the two records whose music really stayed with me for along time, and I wanted to go and make a record like that. (Mark), before I even opened my mouth, said, 'You know, I don't really like studios.' "
So after a six-week stint travelling around South Africa, Roberts flew to Sydney, then took a puddle jumper another two hours to the small town of Newrybar, an old farming community founded in 1876.
The church itself was a renovated holiday home with high ceilings, good acoustics, a dormitory, multiple bedrooms, and a big communal kitchen.
"This was exactly what we were looking for in the sense that we really wanted to live, eat, sleep and make music all under one roof and have the whole experience in the album," said Roberts, who wound up spending three weeks Down Under.
And the surfing every morning didn't hurt either.
"I know that people laugh about it but I came to really rely on that," said Roberts, who has been riding waves since his late teens. "Just that couple of hours I spent at the beach every morning. I wouldn't be thinking about anything, in terms of relieving the inherent pressure of a situation, that was a great way to just get your mind off of things."
Like meditation?
"Absolutely. If you're not scared for your life, it's exactly what it is," he said.
The end result is that the songs on Chemical City are far more keyboard-based, expansive, dreamy and psychedelic-sounding -- check out the eight-minute-long Mind Flood -- than Flame's more commercial rock-pop hits like Brother Down, Don't Walk Away Eileen, Where Have All The Good People Gone? and Hard Road.
"I think it's more a rock 'n' roll record than (Flame) in the sense that where it's heavy, it's heavier, and where it's sparse, it's far more sparse," Roberts said. "I think that's where I really want to go with this one."
There's also some romantic acoustic ballads, one called Uprising Down Under featuring a guest appearance from East Coast rocker Matt Mays, who spent some time with Roberts in Australia before his bandmates arrived. (Roberts' cousin, Danielle Duval, sings back up on two songs, The Bootleg Saint and The Resistance, and has her own album.)
Roberts said any evolution in his sound is just part of a natural process that began back in 2002 in his live shows -- before We Were Born In A Flame was even released.
"I don't think there's anything on this that was necessarily brought out by the African sky or the Australian Bush," Roberts said. "Certainly in the details, perhaps, but in terms of an overall musical direction, that was being established well before we went on any of this trip. I think playing live, what was getting us off as a band, was toward psychedelic. And we've just been exploring it ever since."
Chemical City's third producer was longtime friend and former bandmate Joseph Donovan (The Dears), who, Roberts said, took "that pulp that we'd come back from Australia with and helped shape it."
And while Roberts admitted there's always pressure from the label, they were supportive of him going Down Under and he didn't make any changes once they heard the finished disc.
"I don't think the first (record) was intended be a commercial record, either, and I don't think any of us thought it was going to do as well as it did at the time," Roberts said. "This is just where I've been headed and Lord knows what the third record will end up like."
As for the dreaded sophomore slump, Roberts isn't sounding too concerned
"I do care," he said. "I want people to listen to it. I want people to either like or not like it, but just hear it and experience it. And, again, what comes after that is out of my hands. I don't really feel the curse of the sophomore album because I've been making records since I was a teenager. It's just only the second full-length record that we've actually put out there for public consumption. But in my mind this was part of a much longer chain of making music."
