This month saw the release of Sam Carter’s new album ‘Home Waters’, a Featured Album of the Month here on Folk Radio that was recently reviewed by Glenn Kimpton. In this special guest feature, Sam talks us through the story behind the song ‘Surprise View’ which is accompanied by a film by Thom Atkinson which was recorded live and filmed at Eridge Village Hall, Kent, October 2019.
You can buy Home Waters here: https://samcarter.bandcamp.com/
Story Behind The Song: Surprise View
I lived in London for 12 years, moving there in my early 20s. The people I met and the experiences I had in the capital left an indelible mark on me and my music-making. By the time I hit my 30s however, the financial realities of getting by in London on a musician’s income had made maintaining a decent quality of life there increasingly tricky. I felt like I was presented with a stark choice: a change of career or a change of location. After weighing up some options, I moved to Sheffield in 2016.
A big part of the appeal of Sheffield for me was the thriving folk scene, not least a small but dedicated group of Sacred Harp singers, a community I’d been an active part of for several years. But it was easy access to the striking gritstone ‘edges’, bleak moorland and glistening reservoirs of the Peak District that swung it. I rented a small terraced house on the west side of the city and made friends with some of my neighbours, who quickly became my Peaks walking buddies. After a few months of settling in and with a renewed sense of perspective, I began writing again in earnest, working on the songs that would become Home Waters.
Then a couple of the people closest to me lost people close to them. It is tortuous to watch someone you know going through the turbulent and disorientating process of grieving a loved one. There is an agonising sense of futility about it; despite a deep desire to help, there is nothing you can do or say. For a few weeks, this gnawing sense of helplessness accompanied me on my walks through the Peaks, and followed me into my writing time. One afternoon, these internal and external landscapes coalesced. A propulsive guitar figure settled into a steady walking tempo, and a hymnal melody gave rise to a story. The song’s narrator developed into a grieving widower making his annual return to the spot where he remembers his wife most vividly; a beautiful Peaks viewpoint called Surprise View.
Seeing those close to me go through the mill of losing someone taught me something about the nature of grief; that, as Dr. Who writer Jamie Anderson observed, “grief is just love with no place to go”. Surprise View was intended to honour and acknowledge this intense need to give grief some kind of focal point, to locate the lost person, to give them an enduring presence somewhere in time and space, even after they’ve gone.
For me, songwriting has often been a way of processing experiences that I’m struggling to come to terms with in any other way, a sort of psychological counterbalance. It’s often the things that irk me, grind away at my insides, that prove to be the most potent sources of creative inspiration.
Surprise View
On Surprise View on a clear day
When the sky opens wide
I can almost hear her breathing by my side
So I come here every summer
And I walk on ‘til I stand
Where we’d lay down in the heather
Where I asked for her hand
And it’s how I’ll always see her
In a pair of walking boots
Soaking in the morning sun
Up on Surprise View
Now her old boots line the hallway
Gathering dust, laces loose
In the same place since the day she heard the news
I was shaking and the sunrise
Was the last thing on my mind
But she asked me if I’d drive her
To Surprise View one last time
And it’s how I’ll always see her
In a pair of walking boots
Soaking in the morning sun
Up on Surprise View
As the sun sinks and I’m leaving
I think back to those days
Though she’s gone now she’s not missing
Cos I know where she stays
And it’s how I’ll always see her
In a pair of walking boots
Soaking in the morning sun
Up on Surprise View
Order Home Waters via https://samcarter.bandcamp.com/album/home-waters