Interview: Sam Amidon on Salt River and More

By his own admission, Sam Amidon’s head is swimming in music about “twenty-three and a half hours a day”, and chatting with this 21^st-century renaissance man ahead of the release of sublime new album ‘Salt River’, he certainly talks like a man with mind and ears alive to all the wonderous potential sonics and folklore have to offer. The record is as eclectic in its range as you will hear on any new 2025 release, and it takes a heavy roller approach to genres and boundaries, finding connections and unlocking doors that previously lay dusty and unexplored. Sam was talking to KLOF Mag via Zoom, and our wide-ranging conversation began with enquiries about the creation of ‘Salt River’…

How long has this record been in the making?

Well, that’s always a funny question because there was very little pre-meditation in this record in a certain way, but at the same time, in terms of the material, I was gathering it over time the way I always have. I’m not very disciplined about my own music; I’m not somebody who goes out to the studio for x hours every day. It’s more around keeping my antennas up to what I am listening to and keeping my instruments out, catching little guitar riffs as they come under my fingers. So, that takes time, and I don’t really push it, it just kind of happens over time. Then, it’s a kind of collage process of bringing all those different elements together. The clear element is the recording of the record, so that part is very fast often, and it was in this case. Sam Gendel and I have had a long musical friendship. We had the idea of getting together, and I went out there, but we didn’t speak at all about what we were going to do until I arrived. So, there are different ways of answering that question because the recording happened in just a few days.

So you didn’t have any prior talks with Sam at all?

Until we sat down to work, it wasn’t clear if we were going to do a brand new collaborative thing between the two of us, but I did know I wanted to make a solo record. I had that idea in mind, and I love Sam, so in the back of my mind, I thought, “Oh, maybe some of that will be here”, but it just ended up being what we did.

It was a session played as a trio with percussionist Philippe Melanson. How does that work? Do you enter the studio with some songs in mind or start with a completely blank canvas?

So Sam had the idea of bringing Phil. I knew Phil as well from playing with him a lot, and I had seen them play as a duo the previous fall, and I really loved what they were up to. They both do a lot of different things, but in the case of this duo concert, which is also true on the record, Philippe is primarily playing a little electronic drum pad with his fingers, and Sam was playing a lot of synthesisers, we were all just plugged into the laptop, we were actually in his living room basically just huddled around the laptop. I think of it as a campfire, but the campfire was his laptop. On the one hand, the music I make draws on folk, but ironically, the technology, which is very digital, allowed us to have this very organic experience sitting in a circle right next to each other. There were no buffers, and we were tracking live as a trio. The material sort of grew; I brought in things like I would start playing a guitar part I had prepared, and then he would play, and we would build on it. In maybe two-thirds of the cases, I had a song to go with it, but in some cases, it was just a guitar part. Then, when I got home, I would find something to sing over the top. It was like a normal recording session in that sense; I didn’t set up any music in advance; I would just start playing, and we would jam on it and shape it as we went. It was very playful because you would press play on a sound, and you had no idea what sound it was going to be because of the nature of the synthesiser. You are using these things to increase the sense of play.

I was reading with interest that you have a “treasure box of collected songs”; when do you consider a song ‘collected’? Is it when you add it to your repertoire or add it to a playlist? How does that work?

It’s that kind of symbiosis; a lot of my songs start as a guitar part, and I don’t have a song yet, and then it kind of mixes with things that are in my mind and melodies that might work over the top. With the record, you don’t really know what the connections are; you just follow your instinct. One element that happened is the three covers: the Yoko Ono song, the Lou Reed song, and the Ornette Coleman song, which is a song he wrote with lyrics. There might have been something in the back of my mind where I think of Sam as this deeply experimental musician, and playing with them was a side of my love for that music. When I do folk music, I am thinking of some of the great elders of that style: Dock Boggs or the fiddler Tommy Peoples, Martin Carthy or my parents or whoever. So here I was, thinking, who are the elders of our world? It would be Yoko, Ornette or Lou, these iconoclasts who are now passing away and leaving us to figure out what’s next, you know? Not that I’m them or anything, but they’re the masters of this style, so that was in my mind a little bit, and the way that the Ornette Coleman song ‘Friends And Neighbours’ is so much about community music making, which is what I’ve done since I was a kid in Vermont. Those lines between improvisation and folk music.

So, as you put the album together, are you actively looking for that connecting thread, or is it just a case of if one emerges, you run with it?

The thread, yeah. In my daily life, I listen almost entirely to instrumental music; I don’t listen to that many songs. I admire people who are great songsmiths and song writers, especially, but I listen to tons of jazz and fiddle music and Miles Davis every day. Thelonious Monk. My conscious mind is a lot more thinking about sound, but of course, the stories and the words matter in the songs as well. It’s hard for me to talk about that part in a way. I can tell you every single person who plays on every Miles record and which year it came out, but I don’t know that many folk songs beyond the ones I sing. I know a lot about folk music, but I am not a folk song collector.

I’m not boasting by saying that; I admire people who do that, and I am thankful for them, but for me, the whole thing with folk songs has just been like it’s always needed to be very personal. The songs have been in my mind for a very personal reason at that moment. So this album also has a couple of shape note songs, ‘Cusetta’ and ‘I’m On My Journey Home’; that music is very important to me from growing up. But then, when I come together with Sam and Phil, what they are playing and their sounds spark other things. The synthesiser world they were in started to remind me of a few records when I was younger in the eighties. Some musicians in the folk music world who weren’t scared to engage with that kind of sound on those records back then. The opening tune on the record is called ‘Oldenfjord’, and it’s by Grey Larsen, and that’s a tune that literally popped into my head while we sat down to play. I hadn’t heard that record for… and didn’t go back to it; we just played it. That record is a beautiful album of original folk music compositions from the eighties, but it has little synths and stuff around the edges. It’s funny if I think back to my childhood in the eighties because I was living in Vermont, which was kind of like a refuge from the eighties. We were almost in hiding, pretending the eighties wasn’t happening. I grew up with no television, and all the music I heard was acoustic folk music. I didn’t know the radio existed beyond public radio; I didn’t listen to pop radio when I was a kid. I would see pictures of Prince or Madonna, but I didn’t know at all what the music sounded like. I think we had one Cyndi Lauper and Talking Heads cassette, and that was it. But then there was these few records that I mentioned, the Grey Larsen and a group called the Horseflies who were amazing, that were engaging with the music around them. I think that became some of the imagination of my childhood that I was replaying in this record with these very wonderful experimental musicians.

Yes, some aspects of the record were outright free jazz. However, I also noticed that the more I played the album, the more each listen revealed a new layer of charm. Does that reflect your listening preferences? Do you prefer music that requires some time and attention?

Yes, it is something that I am proud of with this record and something that I think Sam really helped with, which was the idea of an album as a wandering path. As you know, these days you can listen to an album and after the first five minutes think you know the whole record and sometimes that’s true! But I was really wanting an album where you’re like, “Where have we turned to now?” It’s funny, I’m thinking of something interesting related to what you just said. When I was a kid, I heard about the idea of psychedelic music. The idea sounded so amazing to me, and I would listen to what was called Psychedelic Rock, like the Grateful Dead or whatever, and it was just white guys playing the blues; it made no sense to me. Of course, I loved Grateful Dead after, and I loved Hendrix; he was the only one that really gave me that sense of that. ‘Electric Ladyland’ changed my life as a teenager because he really did that, but a lot of what was called Psychedelic Rock was just blues music played with a little more effects pedals. For me, someone who has grown up with all the BLACK folk music and Bessie Jones, I just wasn’t really interested in it because, for me, the old field recordings were weirder than that. For me, when I hear Sam, the way he uses electronics, it is giving you an hallucinatory sense of reality, and yes, with an album, when you listen to it a first, second, third time, hopefully, you are uncovering new paths.

You say you want to “recontextualise folk music”, so can I dig into that a bit? What do you feel makes a song folk music?

I think my record company said that, not me (laughs). I’m almost wary of the word ‘recontextualise’; I think sometimes people put values on folk music that are giving a lot of pressures because they are not put on other genres of music; because of that idea of tradition, heritage and culture, it can feel very heavy with these ideas of preservation, authenticity and these intense ideas. They are all valid territories for discussion, debate, and exploration for sure. I don’t think those things don’t exist with folk music, but I think it can cause people to forget to notice, just on the musical merits, just how deep some of this stuff is, you know? For me, if I listen to a singer like Bessie Jones, where my Dad would always say, “She’s one of the great American singers” as if she was Aretha Franklin, and so I have always heard Bessie Jones in the same way that I would listen to Miles Davis or Yo La Tengo If I listen to any music it would be for what I could learn from it or be inspired by on a deep musical level. The whole thing about the field recordings is these are just master musicians in the same way that John Coltrane was a master musician. My albums reflect my life and my listening, so if somebody heard that and it turns them on to folk music, that’s great, or if it sends them down a path and they’re checking out Ornette Coleman, that is also great, but there’s not too much of a difference for me. But it is also fun to put things next to each other and see what happens, obviously. That juxtaposition in different zones is beautiful, and storytelling is beautiful. I think in terms of recontextualising, yes, I probably did say something like that because the stories of these folk songs are so fascinating with the imagery, and for me, it is fun to try and find new settings that bring out different sides of those stories. Like the ‘Golden Willow Tree’ ballad on this one, we tried giving it this very monotonous but hopefully moody background that lets you kind of swim inside the story.

Going back to you saying that this album reflects your listening habits, a little crossover you have with me is the choice of the Lou Reed cover, ‘Big Sky’. I have always loved that song as well, but I still found it a pleasantly surprising choice, what with it being buried at the end of a Lou Reed album that you need to be a fairly committed Lou listener to get to

Yeah, as you say, a lot of people don’t even get there. Well, my favourite Lou Reed album is ‘Magic And Loss’, a deeply moving, incredible, fascinating record and this album I don’t know as well, but I love it, and I heard the lyrics, and it struck me that when you hear the song, you’re hearing it in the context of Lou’s personality but actually if you look at just the words of that song, it is like a folk song. “Big sky, holding up the sun” almost sounds like a children’s song. There are more ominous verses, but I didn’t use all of the verses of the song. I exacerbated that folk-like quality in the verses I decided to sing. The repetitive structure of the lyrics is also very folk-like; I just felt that for all his New York edge, he was trying to give us a very simple, beautiful message.

You almost make it into another song; his is a very bombastic, almost anthemic, rock song.

I just felt that there was something tender in there that was more real for me in terms of what I engaged with.

The first song we heard from your record was ‘I’m On My Journey Home’, which has a very dizzying, hypnotic, almost drone-like effect, similar in fact to the kind of sound Lankum have been producing of late. Is that something you always felt was in the song, or did it emerge during the recording?

Thank you, I hadn’t thought about it like that, but I love Lankum. They’re great, and they are doing very deep work. The first part of that song, I must have heard it at a shape note thing, but I didn’t really know it that well. I was going to see the film ‘Ferrari’, and I was walking, listening to these old shape note field recordings on my headphones, and I heard this recording from the Twenties of this old quartet singing this Sacred Harp song. Usually, Sacred Harp music is sung by twenty, thirty or forty people; this weird hymn-singing tradition, it usually sounds very loud, very wall-of-sound and very stark. This recording by the Quartet was almost like a barbershop quartet way of singing Sacred Harp, and they had this kind of swing to it that interested me. It came into my head, and when I got home, I found the guitar arrangement that was just responding to the swing I heard in this acapella recording from the 1920s. That was the first track that we made as a trio because I think Sam and I were recording for a few hours before Phil showed up, and when he came in, he plugged in his little drum pad, and it was literally first take, right there. Sam would have done a bass overdub, I think, but that is the track right there; it’s a live track.

That comes through, it feels very fresh, and in the moment, it doesn’t feel like a click-track kind of recording.

Totally, and it’s interesting thinking about this record; nobody is going to think it sounds live because it’s electronic, but there is no click track almost anywhere on the record, maybe one, but it’s actually all the people playing together all the time, and something I think Sam and I share as well is that fact of leaving in…. You have to find the humanity inside the machines and inside a recording; even an acoustic recording is going to be set, so for me, a lot of those mistakes… There is a track on my first record. I did a version of ‘Head Over Heels’, way back at the beginning of my career on my first record, and at one point, the guitar cuts out because my screen had frozen like it had gone to sleep, and I had to wake it back up with my finger hitting the mouse. But I just thought it was funny to leave it in with the guitar cutting out for one second. With Sam and I, it was very much a first-thought, best-thought situation for sure.

Can you tell me a little about the film you made to accompany ‘I’m On My Journey Home‘? It has a little bit of a pagan horror feel. Is that what you were going for?

Well, I was working every day with Michael Keegan Dolan and the dance company on ‘Nobodaddy’, developing this piece from scratch over those eight weeks, then performing it in Belfast and Dublin, and I just had this one day off, and I drove out to Wicklow, it’s where that film ‘Frank’ was made, in the background, you can see the rehearsal studio. Allyn Quigley directed it, and he just responded to the ritualistic groove of the song and the shape note thing. It’s funny because they’re all wearing hoods, but when you look up close, you can see they’re just raincoats. Again, it was just kind of like countering the synthesiser with the forest and, yes, messing around.

Are you interested in tapping into the kind of jazz-folk hybrid that was explored by a band like Pentangle?

For me, it’s more about individual musicians and what they’re bringing; it’s less the idea of genre and hybrid and more the idea of finding the right balance. For me, I guess the main inspiration would be someone like Miles Davis, who, as a bandleader, the way he would balance these different spirits within the band. Or Paul Motian, this drummer who had a trio with Bill Frisell on guitar and Joe Lovano on saxophone and Joe was playing all this really intense post-Coltrane notes, and Bill is playing like three notes in the same space that Joe is playing a hundred and yet they’re both listening to each other so deeply because they do have some shared stuff. For me, it’s like trying to bring my musicianship to people who are going to counter that in interesting ways. So, I have Nico Muhly doing orchestral arrangements on my early records, and in this case, Sam, his grounding is in jazz, but also he’s rebelling himself against jazz right now in terms of his use of electronic sounds. Like a saxophone solo is not an acoustic saxophone, it’s a wind controller that he’s playing through the synthesiser. He’s rebelling against our ideas of what’s organic and what’s synthetic because what if you can find something deeply organic within a machine, you know? I always think the most interesting music is when you are hearing these strange mixtures of spirits or cultural elements or sonic things, so I am just looking for that wherever I can and whatever corner I can. I deeply love improvisation, and jazz isn’t always about improvisation, but when people really have it, it’s very powerful.

You are something of a Renaissance man, with your many varied projects, which lately have included theatre work and coaching actors in singing. Is that born out of necessity, or do you like having various things on the go?

It’s been different at different stages of life. I grew up playing the fiddle. I was an Irish fiddle player with a very specific grounding around folk music, and then I became interested in improvising, playing in different bands and collaborating. As a listener, I was listening to stuff that’s taken me to different paths. I mean, the ‘Nobodaddy’ show was an amazing adventure in terms of the pieces born out of Michael Keegan Dolan’s imagination and working with dancers; there is theatre inside that piece as well. A lot of the music is from my repertoire, so that’s very much in line. The sound film that I’ve been doing some work on with those actors has been really beautiful because it’s drawn from a short story called ‘History Of Sound’ by Ben Shattuck, who in turn was very influenced by a lot of the folk music I grew up with. So actually, that project is more connected to my childhood folk music than more recent explorations in a way. My parents are singing leaders, so that’s a comfort zone; I have a Patreon, which has been a very creative space once a month that I call ‘Banjo Zoom Yoga’. People think of teaching as something you do because you don’t have enough gigs, but actually, teaching can be a really beautiful, fascinating experience. Wherever I am, I still go out to play Irish or old time sessions in pubs, so I think it’s just born out of different friendships; it’s necessity, but it’s also variety, you know?

Your record is coming out on vinyl; is that important to you? Are you a record collector?

It’s funny you should ask that. I have just put my record player upstairs for the first time in ages, and I’ve been pulling out the records. I was the CD generation; my collection was my CDs–I still have a lot of them. I wasn’t ever a serious crate digger type person, and I am very much an earphone listener as well. Lately, though, I have been putting on a side in the morning; it’s a deep way to listen.

You live with another musician, Beth Orton. Who is in charge of the music in the house?

(Laughs) My stepdaughter! She has the best taste of all of us. Arthur, my son as well, he’s going to be competing more now he’s getting older; the kids know what’s happening.

What’s the immediate future holding for you, are you going to be playing live?

I am always working on new music in the background, but yes, I will hit the road. I play a lot as a duo with my drummer/multi-instrumentalist Chris Vatalaro, who’s on my last four records, not this most recent but the previous four; we tour a lot as a duo. He’s American but lives here in London. Sometimes with bigger bands when it feels right, different projects. There hopefully will be some more ‘Nobodaddy’ concerts, some more collaborative stuff in the future and obviously, improving my rebound at my Monday night basketball!

Are there any dream collaborations you have yet to fulfil? Who would you like to work with, given the chance?

I’ve been so lucky because some of my absolute heroes I’ve been able to work with so I’m extremely thankful for that. There are so many great people in the folk scene right now, so many young musicians coming up. Brighde Chaimbeul, the bagpiper who is also on River Lea, her records, I think, are incredible; she’s doing really interesting stuff. We’ve played tunes together, but it would be cool to record something at some point. And I was just in Japan at this festival called Frue Presents; there’s a Japanese artist called Manami Kakudo who I was singing with, and she has a very interesting sonic world, and we really connect well, so it would be interesting to do more stuff properly with her. I’m always checking out what people are doing. There’s nothing better than a good tunes session, so for me, the first thing is to get together with some people and play some nice tunes; that’s the best.

Finally, are you in this for life?

I seem to be; I don’t think there’s anything special about being a professional musician compared to a musician who does other work. I’ve done other work in my life, not much, but I have done it. The goal is [to] keep going as long as you can. My parents have been musicians their whole lives, but the way they made it work was sometimes they were touring artists, sometimes they were music teachers; my Dad is now a chorale arranger; they’ve given a model where I’ve seen, through life, it can mean many different things. I’m in music in my mind about twenty-three and a half hours a day, so that’s all that matters.