Even flow

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This article was published 14/06/2024 (526 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Sam Singer got his start writing songs about pizza parties and playing house concerts in the basement of his parents’ Garden City home.

He’s come a long way since then.

Now, the Winnipeg singer-songwriter has taken his Leonard Cohen-esque vocals and melancholy music on the road to promote his sophomore album, Where the Rivers Do.

The Free Press caught up with him on the eve of his departure. The 26-year-old was working in the family sportswear shop to earn some extra cash for his impending western Canadian tour.

“It’s nice to be around my dad and my uncle, but it’s kind of, like, really boring,” he says with a laugh.

Listening to music while screen printing team logos is the main perk of the job. The day’s playlist was a soul mix — Darondo, Jerry Butler and James Brown.

Singer got his first guitar at nine years old. He was determined to follow in the callused fingerprints of Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin, his favourite acts at the time.

“I begged (my dad) and he bought me a guitar. The first day I got it, I sucked and I started crying, but he said, ‘You can’t quit; you made this commitment,’” he says.

Singer didn’t quit. He started playing with friends and formed a band called the Nowhere Boys, which went on to become highly sought entertainment in the local bat and bar mitzvah scene.

The first song he wrote really was an ode to the pizza parties he enjoyed during Friday-night band practices. It was a stupid premise, he admits, but, at 12-years-old, it got him hooked on songwriting.

Where the Rivers Do, recorded at Winnipeg’s No Fun Club and released last week, is full of natural imagery and stories about personal connections — romantic and otherwise, fleeting and persistent.

“There’s a lot of double entendres in there, sometimes triple entendres,” he says, pointing to the name of the album as an example.

“It could be about where the rivers meet or it could be the saying, ‘You can’t touch the same river twice;’ rivers are constantly flowing and these relationships are like rivers.”

The record follows his debut 2019 album, Don’t Mistake Me for a Lover, and was largely written in a creative spiral during a sojourn to the West Coast.

Singer describes his songwriting process as a flow state. The words come falling out first and the music follows later.

While writing Where the Rivers Do, Singer took inspiration from a folder of personal mementos — family photos and handwritten letters from friends and hospital patients he met during bedside performances with the Artists in Healthcare program.

The album is a snapshot of a period in the artist’s life punctuated by comings and goings.

The waltzy opening track The Deal describes a chance meeting and later reunion. The song Born in June captures the feeling of springtime emergence following a long lonely winter. Two Trees is a klezmer ballad inspired by trees in the front yard of his childhood home that eventually merged together.

“I thought it was a very romantic idea. These two trees wanted to be together so badly they grew into one,” Singer says.

While the songs may have flowed out with ease, figuring out how they all fit together was less breezy.

Singer made Venn diagrams, plotting out which songs went with which themes. He spent hours puzzling together the record’s narrative structure and updated his bandmates — Ben Stokes, Sam Fournier and Holly Stratton — whenever he settled on a tracklist.

“I would always say, ‘OK, I’ve got the order,’ and I probably said that 50 times because it changed so much, but I really do feel like I got it and, I mean, you just have to say goodbye at some point,” he says.

With the album out in the world, Singer set off on the second tour of his career: a weeklong road trip from Winnipeg to Vancouver fuelled by beef jerky. He’s set to play a local show at the West End Cultural Centre on Nov. 22.

Where the Rivers Do is available on Bandcamp, Spotify and Apple Music.

eva.wasney@winnipegfreepress.com

X: @evawasney