radionotes podcast episodes

Dear John

by | Jul 17, 2022 | episodes | 0 comments

Dear John

Dear John letter writes the ending of a relationship. Sam Buckingham returns to radionotes to share where they’re at. Having just completed the first national tour leg for their third album called… Dear John. With more headline dates to be announced down the East Coast for the second-half of 2022, she has shared the stage as a support this year alone for Ben Lee, Kate Miller-Heidke and Tim Freedman (The Whitlams).

On the new album album she states is for all women and had them front of mind in the making of.

Sam joined John from her home fresh off the road for this catch-up chat…

Click ‘play’ to listen (may take few seconds to load): 

IMAGE CREDIT: Elize Strydom

Buckingham joined us last time back in episode 032 for a feature chat.

2022 second set of dates for the Dear John Tour – HERE (including where to book tickets).

Dates at time of publishing: Friday 19th August – Tintenbar Hall (NSW), Friday 2nd September – Ziggy Pops* at Newmarket Hotel (St Kilda, Victoria), Saturday 3rd September – Palais* (Hepburn Springs, Victoria), Sunday 4th September – Sooki Lounge* (Belgrave, Victoria), Friday 16th September – Ocean View Beach Club (Wamberal, New South Wales) and Sunday 18th September afternoon show – Bent On Food (Wingham, New South Wales)

*with Hannah Acfield

SHOW NOTES: Dear John – Sam Buckingham

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George’s 20th Anniversary Tour of Polyserena:

  • Full details of the 2022 dates and where to book for this tour are available on the LIVE NATION website

Feature Guest: Sam Buckingham

 

Next Feature Guest: From The Archives – Freedom Williams

This catch-up chat is also available on Podbean:

and over at Spotify:

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CREDITS

Theme/Music: Martin Kennedy and All India Radio   

Web-design/tech: Steve Davis

Voice: Tammy Weller  

You can make direct contact with the podcast – on the Contact Page

TRANSCRIPT

First version provided by REV team member Tariro M – check to audio before quoting wider

John Murch:
Sam Buckingham, you’ve just come off the national tour of the Dear John album. You’re about to hit the road soon again for a few more dates, so people shouldn’t feel like they’ve missed out completely.

Sam Buckingham:
So we did six weeks of tour dates which have just finished a week ago, and they were honestly, it’s been my favourite tour so far.

Sam Buckingham:
And it’s so funny because I loved being on tour so much, and I started to get really excited about coming back home. And now that I’m home, I’m loving being back home. I feel like I did a really good job over the last six weeks. I’ve been doing work to get ready for the next run of shows, and it feels like a really beautiful balance.

Sam Buckingham:
Before COVID, when I was touring a lot, playing six nights a week or something like that, I didn’t feel balanced. It was too much.

Sam Buckingham:
And then COVID happened and I wasn’t out playing any shows, and that didn’t feel good either. So I feel like I’m the Goldie Locks at the moment of touring. It’s not too much. It’s not too little. It’s just right.

John Murch:
As an independent artist, you get to decide how this course of your music’s going to be, which is the thing people need to remember. You are the example of how being an independent artist can work. It is hard. It can be tiresome. It can have rejection as well, but it can work. And when it does work, this is where we’re at. A place where it’s not too hot, not too cold.

Sam Buckingham:
Exactly. And the other important thing about that is in order to make it work, there’s so much stuff that goes on behind the scenes that the average person who doesn’t work in music wouldn’t know about, and so it’s really important. As a self-managed artist, I have a team, I have an agent, I have a publicist, I have an assistant, but it’s still so much work for me as a self-managed artist, not only get tours up and running, but to also just run my business, to do everything that’s required in order to be able to share my music.

Sam Buckingham:
And so I need that balance. I need to be on the road for a certain amount of time, and then at home, just sitting down at my desk, doing work nine to five for a bunch of time as well.

Sam Buckingham:
People sort of have this idea that to be working as an independent artist means that you’re just writing songs all the time or you’re just on the road all the time. And it’s not that at all. So I’ve really learned that no matter how much I love touring, it’s not sustainable for me to constantly be doing it. I need to rest, and I also need to regroup so I can make smart business decisions.

John Murch:
The strength of this record, that you want it to be for women.

Sam Buckingham:
Yeah. It was really, really important to me when I was writing the album, when I was recording the album, and it’s still really important to me, every time I speak about it, every time I stand on stage.

Sam Buckingham:
I had a vision when I was making this album. It was so clear. I knew that I was writing it for me and I knew that I was creating something that I needed to hear for myself. It was almost like I was writing into my own future, and I also knew that I was writing it for a woman that I didn’t know, and that I would never know, and that I would never meet. And I had a picture of her in my mind as well, and by that, I mean it was for women, it was for all women.

Sam Buckingham:
What just happened in the United States with Roe versus Wade and everything that’s constantly happening around the world for women, I feel angry about it. I feel sad about it. Sometimes I feel helpless. Sometimes I feel like I don’t know what I can do. And making this album was part of my solution to that. I can’t do everything, but I can do some things, and as an artist, I can use my voice to share my own experience, to share my own stories and to stand up on stages and to use social media, to whatever audience I have, at any given moment, and say, “Here’s what I feel. Here’s what happened to me. Here’s my opinion on this. Here’s my thought on this.”

Sam Buckingham:
And I believe that’s also my responsibility as an artist. If I feel really strongly about something, then it’s my responsibility to share that. This album for me, it’s more than just, “I made an album and I’m really proud of it.”

Sam Buckingham:
It’s, “I made an album. I’m really proud of it, and I really believe in what I’m saying and in the message, and I want as many people to hear it as possible.” Not because I think I’m the guru of all things related to women or because I think everything I say is the most right that it could ever be. It’s because I understand that my stories are not unique to me. My stories are so many other people’s stories and so many other people don’t have the platform, or they don’t want to use a platform to speak about them, so it’s my job to do that on their behalf.

John Murch:
On a podcast recently, and I’ll put it in the show notes, you were talking about you telling the truth every time, and of course, that’s your truth and the way that you are seeing the world. You’ve had discussions with audience members and people who’ve already listened to the album. What’s that truth been like to listen to?

Sam Buckingham:
You mean other people’s truth?

John Murch:
Mm (affirmative).

Sam Buckingham:
It’s so powerful.

Sam Buckingham:
And to be honest, specifically with this album, for the first couple of weeks, when I released this album, I really struggled to connect with the power of that. I felt so overwhelmed with the fact that I had shared my truth so honestly and openly. It wasn’t that I felt necessarily vulnerable or scared, or that it was right or wrong, or whatever. It was so big. It was such a big deal for me on a personal level, but also all of the work that was involved to put the album out.

Sam Buckingham:
And as soon as it was out in the world, I just had messages flooding in. I’ve never experienced anything like this before, people who were listening to the album and messaging me and saying, “I’ve been crying all day. This is incredible.” Watching my videos and saying, “This is so powerful. Thank you for sharing this. I can relate to this. This is my story.”

Sam Buckingham:
And it was so overwhelming because it was actually exactly what I had envisioned, but I didn’t really know what that meant at the time when I was writing and recording the album.

Sam Buckingham:
I knew that it was for me, and I knew that it was for every other woman on the planet if she wanted it, but there was no concept really of what that meant in the real world, of what that would equate to, and what experiences I would then have because of that.

Sam Buckingham:
And so it took a couple of weeks to really adjust and go, “Okay, this is how it is. I made this thing and I told the truth, and now the truth is reflected back to me and now people are responding to the truth, and now people are gaining something from me sharing my truth. This is how it is now.”

Sam Buckingham:
And once I settled into that and that feeling of overwhelm just calmed down a little bit, and I understood my place inside of all of it, it’s just become this absolute gift. It’s just so beautiful. And I literally am at shows every night and having people come up and tell me how these songs, this music has positively impacted their life, and as an artist, I don’t know if I can ask for anything better than that.

Sam Buckingham:
People are sharing their really serious stories, sometimes, with me, and I think that’s a privilege and that’s an honour to have somebody feel safe and seen enough to know that they can share that with you, so I don’t take that lightly.

John Murch:
I want to take you back to the studio space, which in fact was a lounge room, I believe as well. This is your fourth album, and yet again, you’ve worked with Kent Eastwood on this album.

John Murch:
Dear John, the title track was done, and within hours, maybe a day, you went back to Kent and said, “Look, that album that I had, that we were doing, I don’t have that album anymore. I’ve got a song called Run.” And so from Dear John, Run, you had the entirety of this record.

Sam Buckingham:
Yeah. That was really huge. So it wasn’t quite in a matter of hours. It was close, but it wasn’t quite. I had 12 songs written and of those 12 songs, I had Dear John, I had Chicken Wings…

John Murch:
Listener, that’s an actual name of a song. Chicken Wings is an actual name. That’s not a draft name. That’s not a bookmark, that’s an actual song.

Sam Buckingham:
That’s the name. I had Dear John, I had Chicken Wings, Not For Dinner, that song, and I think I had Stand as well. So I had three out of the 10 songs that now are on the album, but I also had nine other songs. That was the album that I had planned. It was basically just a collection of what I thought were my best songs. No particular theme, no particular style or anything like that. It was just, “These are the best songs I’ve got.”

Sam Buckingham:
And so we had done pre-production for Dear John, and we had started pre-production for another song of mine, which I haven’t ever released called Fractions. And Kent went home. So we were doing pre-production in my lounge room, a makeshift studio of his gear and my gear, and we just lumped it all together. And he came over a couple of days a week for a couple of months to do pre-production.

Sam Buckingham:
He went home one night and I went to bed and I wrote Run in the middle of the night. I woke up in the middle of the night and Run just came at me. And it was so clear to me when I wrote that song that I had more to say, and it was really about that. It wasn’t so much about, “Oh, all these other songs aren’t good enough. I have to write better songs.”

Sam Buckingham:
Run really showed me that there was so much more inside of me that I hadn’t yet expressed about my life experience, which for me, that’s what I’m writing songs about. I’m writing about my life experience for the most part. Not always, but for the most part. And it was this real light bulb moment, and I guess it is around that idea of truth of, “I haven’t been telling the truth. I’ve been living, thinking I was telling the truth, thinking I was writing songs that were real and based on my life, but they were actually songs that were written based on a version of what I thought was happening in my life.”

Sam Buckingham:
But I had since gained more information about the relationship that I had been in, and the dynamics of that, and specifically that it was emotionally and psychologically abusive. And I had been learning more about myself and I had, with the benefit of hindsight, been looking back on the songs that I had been writing and the place from inside of me that they had been coming from, and they didn’t feel like truth anymore. They weren’t truth anymore. And Run helped me access the new truth, the actual truth, the actual reality of what I was experiencing.

John Murch:
Not the convenient truth. I have a sense there was a convenient truth you were telling yourself. Not a lie, but a convenient truth to get you through whatever was happening at you, to you, through you.

Sam Buckingham:
Yeah, exactly. It was a more convenient, more palatable truth, and it was my truth at the time when I wrote the songs based on the information that I had, based on the knowledge that I had. But then as new information came in and I started to translate that into songs, and specifically Run, and I guess I put Run and Dear John next to each other as well and that informed a lot for me.

Sam Buckingham:
I was like, “Hold on a second. Run happened, and Dear John I’ve already written. Something is going on and I need to process that.”

Sam Buckingham:
So I wrote seven new songs to then make the 10 that are on the album. I wrote those songs within a month or two.

Sam Buckingham:
Writing those songs became me not only uncovering my actual truth, but also like I said earlier, writing myself into the future that I wanted. So I was very much in a process of healing from this relationship. I was learning and unlearning a whole bunch of things.

Sam Buckingham:
I was reassessing most things in my life, and I was making decisions about how I wanted to be, and who I wanted to be, and how I wanted to live, and what I wanted for myself and the world moving forward. And so the album became me creating that through my affirmations, which were my songs.

John Murch:
What kind of producer is Kent Eastwood? And I guess what I’m asking by that is, what does he bring to the record? What do you share with Kent? How does that working relationship work?

Sam Buckingham:
We co-produced this album, so we both produced it together. for my previous albums, he didn’t produce with me or perform me. He played instruments. So he’s a multi instrumentalist. He’s an incredible producer, an incredible multi-instrumentalist. He plays all of the pianos that ever existed. All of the guitars that ever existed. He has a brilliant mind for music, and so it felt like a natural progression then to work on this album together as co-producers, because we’ve been friends for a long time. He’s played in my live band for a long time. He’s played on my records for a long time. And to be honest, I don’t think there’s anybody in the world that understands me musically in the way that he does. We speak that same language.

Sam Buckingham:
And because we’re such close friends, we’re brutally honest with each other, and we challenge each other in a really awesome way because we have this beautiful friendship where we just want each other to be our best self and we believe in each other’s best selves.

Sam Buckingham:
And so it was so great because what he brings as a producer is so multidimensional. He brings years and years of musical experience as a songwriter himself and a performer himself, as my right hand man, in a lot of ways, as a multi-instrumentalist, and as a complete music nerd.

Sam Buckingham:
He is the biggest music nerd, and he has spent his entire adult life learning about how music works and self studying that, and teaching himself how to do things like create string arrangements, and play the bass, and play the cello, and he’s just constantly thirsty for more musical information and for more creativity.

Sam Buckingham:
He brings this really broad range of influences to the work that he does, and then obviously, I bring mine as well. And for some reason, when the two of those come together, it just makes sense.

Sam Buckingham:
And so we were working on the production ideas for this, and for this particular album, what we did was we created a blueprint for the whole album.

Sam Buckingham:
I would come to him and be like, “This is the song. This is what I want to record,” and we would write all of the parts, all the guitars, all the keys, wrote all the drum parts, the bass lines, the backing vocal arrangements, the string arrangements, all the percussion parts. There’s not anything that you hear on the Dear John album, as it is released in the world, that we didn’t already create in pre-production.

Sam Buckingham:
We wrote all of that, and then we took it to the studio for the musicians and we said, “Can you please play this exact thing, but better?”

John Murch:
From the vision that you had from what you call the blueprint, rightly so, to the final album, did you get that sense of that each song was its own piece of art?

Sam Buckingham:
Absolutely, yeah. And we were very intentional about that.

Sam Buckingham:
When we were in pre-production we were constantly asking what serves the song? What is this song trying to say? And what is the feeling of this song? Which is a very different approach than being in the studio and jamming with a bunch of musicians and seeing what sounds good and feels good, which is an easy way to make a record. But for this one, I wanted every single instrument to tell a story within the story. That was incredibly important to me.

Sam Buckingham:
We had a lot of conversations, Kent and I, about the vision for the record and the vision for each song and the meaning behind each song.

Sam Buckingham:
We weren’t interested in fitting into any particular genre or doing anything really cool with production, cutting edge or whatever. We were just like, “What is the song asking for?”

Sam Buckingham:
That’s the only question that we have. And so that was informed by what I was singing lyrically or what I wanted to do with my voice, or by how I wanted someone to feel by the time they got to the end of the song.

Sam Buckingham:
I love approaching making music in heaps of different ways, but for me approaching this particular album in this way, what I feel like it created was, like you say, each song feels like its own piece of art, but it also creates this really cohesive story because interestingly, when you can get so granular and so detailed about each specific piece of a story, then all of the details weave together and you take 10 steps back and you look at the overall piece of art, and it’s this intricately woven thing that makes sense as a whole piece. But you don’t get that if you don’t have all of the tiny little details in every little section.

Sam Buckingham:
It’s almost like, I don’t know why this has come to my head, but like Harry Potter. We know the characters so intimately because J.K. Rowling introduces us to the characters and she writes the characters in a way so that we know their tiny little idiosyncrasies, so that we know certain personality traits, so that we know exactly how their face is going to respond to this, that or the other. She puts in all these tiny details for us to really understand who each character is, and that’s how we know what their role is in the greater story of the magic that is Harry Potter, I’m a big Harry Potter fan, and their role within that friendship group, or their role within that school, or their role within community of wizards and witches. We only can understand that because we understand exactly who that person is.

Sam Buckingham:
And I feel like it’s the same with these songs. We can only understand the true message of the album by getting really clear on the true message and the true energy of each and every song.

John Murch:
Let’s talk about now, the live element, because you’re about to go back out on the road again and do a bit more of the Dear John tour, which I’m sure for every John in the world walking past the posters like, “Oh, what have I done now?”

Sam Buckingham:
Sorry, not sorry.

John Murch:
Who took the album photo first?

Sam Buckingham:
A woman called Elize Strydom took that. She’s a friend of mine and Kent’s actually. And she used to live in the Northern Rivers area. She’s since moved.

Sam Buckingham:
We did a photo shoot quite soon after I did the album actually, and a lot of people have come up to me at the show saying, “Are you Sam? Where’s your hair?” Because I’ve since shaved my head, so I’ve got the cover of the album is me with hair, and the tour poster is me with hair. And then I show up to do the gig with almost nothing on my head.

John Murch:
See, normally people do that post the relationship, but you waited till you’d written the album about those kind of relationships, not necessarily the same one, then you shaved the head for the film clip. You made it art.

Sam Buckingham:
That’s right. I did. I did.

John Murch:
Something more film clip in the show notes. Check it out.

John Murch:
I want to ask about how’s it been touring, particularly in the way that you’re currently touring? It might change for the next tour, but the tour you’ve just come off of was very much a solo tour. Can you talk to us about that process in deciding what is on the Ableton Push machine, deciding what goes on that and what you do live, what you’re going to loop, what you’re not going to loop. Talk to us about that process, and I guess the liberation you got from actually being able to do something by yourself across the nation, right across Australia.

Sam Buckingham:
Firstly, it was amazing that the sense of liberation I felt. Absolutely. It was so interesting because once I had done the album and I knew that I would be touring it at some point, and this was all still happening while COVID was quite a thing and there was no touring, I knew from a practical perspective that touring with a band wasn’t going to be possible. It’s so expensive already to tour, and especially now, because prices of everything have gone up.

Sam Buckingham:
And even though I’ve had amazing response to the album and amazing response to the shows, I’ve got so many people come to the shows, heaps of those shows have been selling out. I was aware that there was a risk because people aren’t necessarily always as super keen and ready to come out at the moment. So I was really factoring all of those practical aspects, and I knew that I had to and wanted to be touring solo.

Sam Buckingham:
But we did such an amazing job on the production. I have to showcase that. And I wanted this show to be more dynamic as well.

Sam Buckingham:
And the show is constantly evolving. I’m actually working this week on adding some more songs that I do on the Ableton Push for the show.

Sam Buckingham:
At the moment I’ve got, I think four songs that I use the push for and the rest is me on guitar, and so I’m adding in a few more for the next run of shows, or just to have the options so that depending on the mood of the show, I can decide what to do.

Sam Buckingham:
I’ve always been an artist that plays guitar and sings on a stage. That’s always been my thing. I started with an acoustic guitar. I started with actually a nylon acoustic guitar and then changed to full-size Maton. And then I changed to a mini Maton and then I moved to using a mini Maton acoustic guitar and an electric guitar on stage. Then I started playing around with a loop pedal for my vocals.

Sam Buckingham:
That’s always just kind of happened, and it felt like a natural progression to add something else in.

Sam Buckingham:
The Ableton Push, I feel so much freedom because I live loop my vocals. So there’s a song that I do completely acapella. I’ve got 24 different harmonies that I put on it and I do a whole bunch of stuff. Super, duper fun. I do a song like that. I have one, Rich Girl, which is super percussion heavy, and there’s all of these fun things going on, and I can trigger all the percussion sounds and really play with it.

Sam Buckingham:
And I think for me, performing as a solo artist, I really believe that a song needs to stand on its own two feet on just piano and vocals, or guitar and vocals, or whatever instrument and vocals. I think if it doesn’t do that, it’s not a good song, in my opinion.

Sam Buckingham:
But to be honest with you, I was getting bored just playing guitar all the time. I just wanted a bit of a challenge. And so standing on stage now and on this tour, I’m just playing the whole album. That’s all I’m playing. No other songs because that’s what I want to play.

John Murch:
Well, that’s also very important because this album is such a defining departure from where you were before. That it’s really introducing what the next stage would be. I’m going to ask this question from another podcast just to get more information of what you said. You say a new cycle is coming on. What is this new cycle now that you’ve put Dear John out?

Sam Buckingham:
I don’t know yet, John. And that’s the thing. I don’t know yet. I know that something else is coming, and it’s so interesting because I can tell when a new cycle is coming on because I’m no longer interested in doing things the way I used to do things.

Sam Buckingham:
When I was writing Dear John, I was in a very specific rhythm. I was doing things in a way. I was writing a certain kind of song and I got every single thing out that I wanted to get out. I said every single thing and I wrote the songs to sound exactly how I wanted them to hear.

Sam Buckingham:
And it’s so natural that then after you’ve done that, you’re like, “Okay, cool. What’s next?”

Sam Buckingham:
I don’t want to keep doing the same thing my whole life or my whole career. That’s just going to get really boring.

Sam Buckingham:
And even for years, and years and years, I’ve been much more folk Americana, I think even then my style changed quite a bit within that genre.

Sam Buckingham:
And so now I would describe my style as indie pop, alternative pop, something like that. Still sing a singer/songwriter very, very much, but it’s moved into that different zone.

Sam Buckingham:
I don’t know what’s next, but I think that it’s really important to let go of what you’ve done before to make space for what is coming. And I think part of the reason why I don’t know what next yet is because I can’t let go yet of Dear John.

Sam Buckingham:
I know something new is coming. I know that there’s another project that’s kind of bubbling that really wants to be heard, but I’m not ready for it yet because I’m still so in love with Dear John, and I still really believe in it as an album, and I want to work really hard to get people to hear it because I’m so proud of it and I see how much people love it.

Sam Buckingham:
So I don’t know what’s next.

John Murch:
So exciting to see where you were last time we spoke officially to where we are now, and to think that you can actually go even further is just brilliant.

Sam Buckingham:
Isn’t that a cool idea?

John Murch:
Whilst there is that strength, you’ve also been doing support spots. I feel like that was a warm up to your own gigs as well. Can you give us a bit of a brief insight of touring with the likes of Tim Freeman of The Whitlams, Kate Miller-Heidke; yes, the Eurovision, Kate Miller-Heidke, Australian entrant, Ben Lee who’s just done a song with Megan Washington about getting high as parents. And did that actually encourage you on your own tour on your own headline gigs?

Sam Buckingham:
Yeah, that was so important for me doing those shows recently and on so many levels. They’re all artists that I think are incredible and totally respect what they do and really like them as people as well.

Sam Buckingham:
When I was playing those shows with them, so that was kind of happening in that period when COVID was still very much… It’s still a thing now, but you know what I mean. COVID was still definitely a thing, but we were putting our feet in the water and we were trying to do some shows, and sometimes some managed to happen, and sometimes they didn’t. And it was kind of in that period.

Sam Buckingham:
So I made a conscious decision not to book my own tours in that time, but then I was given these opportunities and I was playing songs from the album when I was opening for these artists.

Sam Buckingham:
I don’t think I was playing any of my older songs by that point because I’d already recorded Dear John and I was already planning on releasing them. And as a songwriter, I was like, “My new songs are way better than my old songs. I’m just going to play some of those as a support spot, doing the shows that I was doing, theatre shows, opening for higher profile artists. I’ve got half an hour on stage, which basically means I’ve got five songs plus a little bit of talking. And so I want to pick my very best songs to present.”

Sam Buckingham:
And so it was actually really important to me because it started to give me an idea of how people were responding or would respond to these songs, which to just be a very much a human, it felt really important. It felt really good to, in real time, have those positive responses because I can make an album and go, “This is a really good album. I think people are really going to like it,” but if nobody has even heard it, I don’t actually know if that’s true or not.

Sam Buckingham:
So it meant a lot to me to be able to play those shows and not only have the audience members respond in such a positive way, but to have the artists that I was supporting respond in such a positive way as well. Really got a lot of great feedback from, from all three of them, Tim, Ben, and Kate.

Sam Buckingham:
I think that really helped me as I was preparing to release and tour the album. It really helped me to know that I was on the right track, which we all need to know that we’re on the right track.

Sam Buckingham:
It also helped me to understand which of my songs worked. I picked my five strongest songs that I thought to open those shows for those artists, and then out of those five, I saw what got the best response consistently night after night. And I’m like, “Okay, cool. Well, maybe that’s going to be a good single option or maybe I should make a video for that song.”

Sam Buckingham:
So it helped me get some information as well and make some decisions about what I was going to do. And I’m just so grateful for those opportunities, to be respected by artists that I respect so much and to be appreciated for my work by them.

Sam Buckingham:
People say you shouldn’t care what other people think. Screw that. Of course, we care what other people think. And it matters to me that those people appreciate what I do. So it was really important for me in that time.

John Murch:
This album you’ve made very clear in this conversation and throughout the representation of it, it’s for other people more than it is for you. So what music have you been listening to that has been part of your life? What other artists have been there for you?

Sam Buckingham:
Oh, I love that question.

Sam Buckingham:
Okay. So there’s an artist that I’m super into at the moment called D Smoke. He’s a rapper from the United States and he was actually on the show Rhythm and Flow. I think it’s produced by Cardi B and it’s America’s search for the next hip hop star, kind of thing. And me and my partner started watching it and got obsessed with it, and as soon as D Smoke came onto the screen, I was like, “This person is going to win. This person is going to win.” I just knew it. Spoiler.

Sam Buckingham:
And watching his journey throughout the show and then listening to his songs, and following him on social media and stuff, I would say he’s been one of my biggest influences at the moment, just in terms of not only how incredible his music is, but how he is as an artist, and who he is as an artist, and what he stands for and how he expresses that through his music.

Sam Buckingham:
So I’ve been listening to that and actually a lot of other rap and hip hop as well.

Sam Buckingham:
I actually like to listen to music that doesn’t have lyrics. I find that that brings me a sense of grounding and a sense of comfort. So I listen to like hang drum playlists on Spotify and meditation music, and things like that. And that actually really helps me to stay grounded while I’m doing all of these really big things.

Sam Buckingham:
But I think that’s a very separate thing to the music that I’m listening to that I absolutely love, and I could rattle off way more artists. Obviously I’m not only listening to D Smoke, but from a sense of what’s actually getting me through, it’s music that is meditative. It’s music that just helps my nervous system to stay balanced, and helps me to slow down, and be mindful and intentional.

Sam Buckingham:
I get so excited about work. I get so excited about playing shows, and making music, and doing the things that I have to do behind the scenes in order to get everything done.

Sam Buckingham:
I’d bound out of bed and I’m like, “Let’s do this. Let’s make stuff happen.” And I have this energy for it and I have this excitement for it. And that’s a really amazing, beautiful thing, and I need to balance that out with long walks on the beach, and going to yoga, and listening to music that just fills the house, or my car, or my ears, or whatever, with a sense of nothing.

John Murch:
The rhythm of this album has that sense of urgency but importance to it. Can you talk to us briefly, or longly, about how rhythm played a part? Because as we’ve said, there was a blueprint to where the songs were going, but there’s a particular rhythm.

Sam Buckingham:
When you say rhythm, do you mean my phrasing when I’m singing? Do you mean the rhythm like the percussion and the drums?

John Murch:
Yeah, your articulation.

Sam Buckingham:
A lot of that was quite influenced by Hip-Hop music, and I definitely do not think I’m a rapper, please. Everybody know that…

John Murch:
We all know what the fifth album is now.

Sam Buckingham:
I absolutely do not, but I have been very influenced by spoken word and rap, and the way that words run into each other. I became quite obsessed three or four years ago with very wordy songs. It started with Ed Sheeran, Shape of You, and it went on from there. I was devouring as many overly wordy songs as I possibly could.

Sam Buckingham:
And I actually went through a massive phase where I was just like, “Words, words, words, words”

Sam Buckingham:
I’m in a songwriting club. I Heart Songwriting Club and I share songs with my group and they share songs with me. And a lot of the people who I was in the songwriting club with at the time were loving these songs where you’ve just got no room to take a breath. And I became really obsessed with just words, words, words, words, words, just coming at you.

Sam Buckingham:
While I certainly wasn’t intending to write any songs that sounded like Ed Sheeran and Shape of You, or any songs that sound like rap, being influenced by that spoken word, that rap sensibility, I think meant that I naturally ended up with a bit of a rhythm in there to my phrasing that I wasn’t trying to do. It just came because I had an obsession with things that sounded a certain way.

Sam Buckingham:
It also happened in a natural sense in that, because I had so much to say, I had to fit it all in. And the sheer practicalities of just having to fit all of my thoughts into a song.

Sam Buckingham:
When I’ve done co-writing sessions a lot of the time, I’ve sort of come up with a way to phrase a line or something, and people look at me like, “Really? I would’ve never sung it that way.”

Sam Buckingham:
And I think maybe my brain just works in a particular way with phrasing and with rhythm where I want to put things in a place that they seem like they don’t belong. I want to go on the offbeat. I want to fill in that gap when someone else might assume there’s supposed to be a gap there. And I don’t entirely know why that is. It’s not just down to my obsession with whatever music I was listening to at the time. I just go with what feels really natural with the song in order to say what I need to say, and it just happened that with Dear John, I had so much to say that I had to find clever ways to fit it all in.

John Murch:
Our time is rounding up, but I want to talk about feelings. Are you feeling more complete now that Dear John is out?

Sam Buckingham:
I am feeling more complete than when I created Dear John, but I don’t think it’s because Dear John is out. I think that’s just the natural progression that my life has gone in. And from a work perspective, it’s not so much that I feel complete now that it’s out. I actually feel like things happened in exactly the right time.

Sam Buckingham:
People are like, “Oh, my God, you had to wait two years to release that album.” And I just feel like it was right on time. I don’t think I would’ve been ready to stand on stage and sing these songs or to share it with the world any earlier, because I had to go through my own personal process, so it’s a sense of now that it’s released, now that I’m touring, it’s a sense of, I’m on the same path that I was on and I’m in the exact right spot.

John Murch:
You’ve learned a lot more about yourself through this record as well?

Sam Buckingham:
So much. I still listen to the songs sometimes to remind myself of things that I’ve said to myself through the songs. I’m having an issue or someone’s offered to do me a gig and they want to pay me f*** all and a song lyric comes into my head of my own song, (singing) and I’m like, “That’s right. I told myself that I would demand to get paid fairly. Okay, cool.”

Sam Buckingham:
It actually happens a lot, and that was the intention of the album.

Sam Buckingham:
Like I said, it was for the woman that I didn’t know, and it was also me writing my own future to remind myself, because even though I wrote all these songs that I stand on stage and I sing them, it doesn’t mean I remember it all the time. It’s for me all the time. It’s not that like, “Okay, cool. I know that now, and I’m done, and it’s finished, and I’ve moved forward.”

Sam Buckingham:
It’s a work in process. I’m a work in process.

John Murch:
As you said yourself, it’s a feminist album, Dear John, and it certainly is.

John Murch:
Congratulations, Sam Buckingham. Thank you for releasing, Dear John, despite its name.

Sam Buckingham:
Thank you, John, for having me. Thank you for being one of the good Johns.

 

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