Sam Welch’s “Kamikaze Co-Pilot,” and its album, achieve transcendental playfulness
By Kurt Beyers
Sam Welch, by
design, does not do easy-listening music to create moods or feelings. The
lyrics and music go need listening. He wants his audience to put some work into
his songs.
Though the
lyrics are about thoughts — metaphysics, if you will — and deal with things
like relationships, life, death and the hereafter, his music gives a wry twist
that makes thinking interesting, trending toward fun.
And worth the
work.
As an example,
“Kamikaze Co-Pilot,” the single he is featuring from his new album, Last
Night on Earth. Right there, in the two titles, you can see the
metaphysical and the twist at work.
This is Sam
talking about the message, or messages, of “Kamikaze”: “I’ve defined my own
philosophical interpretation of this song, and I’m calling it ‘social
existentialism.’ Basically, it’s the idea that every relationship will come to
an end, this idea that everybody’s on the same journey to their destiny, but
that the journey in and of itself will divide us and separate us.”
Sounds heavy,
but the song begins with his voice, a high-register, floating, ethereal
vocalization set to a ringing instrumental that rises for three notes, falls
back, and drums enter with an upbeat tempo. Ten seconds later, a saxophone
leads in the lyrics:
Kamikaze
co-pilot the future can’t come soon enough
Kamikaze
co-pilot well this world is getting tough
Gonna
fly away with you it’s the past that I rue
Gonna
fly away it ain’t the future that is true
“I think if I
had done a really, really sort of hard techno, unrelentingly loud or
aggressive, it wouldn’t support the themes that I’m exploring,” said Sam.
“Kamikaze
co-pilot,” he pointed out, is an oxymoron. Who in their right mind would
co-pilot with someone on a suicide mission? And yet, he says, human
relationships and life, composed of individuals, are like that.
But Last
Night on Earth does not preach, it explores.
His music, too,
is an exploration. His previous output, which he called “transcendental techno
vox,” is giving way to more melody and instrumentation and less harmonization
and vocal distortion. The transcendental remains, but the techno is much
reduced.
Sam has begun
to play with his voice and his music. One song on the album, “Man in My Mind,”
could pass for a dance track.
His vocals,
almost entirely undoubled and undistorted, are much more prominent in each of
the 11 tracks. Fewer mixed harmonies and more of his own voice have been goals
“In each of
these songs, I’ve provided a lead vocal melody line, a solo voice. I think I’m
doing a good job of controlling the urge to just create more harmonization.”
“I think every
album that I do is better than the album before,” he said. “I’m always trying
to improve the quality of my music, and I feel like I’ve definitely reached
some new goals in terms of this album. I have worked very hard on trying to
create a very organic sound that supports the very, very rich themes that I’m
exploring poetically. The two things support each other.”
Another goal,
to produce an album each year, has been reached every year, beginning in 2017.
He had several albums before that, including one called Unitarian Hymns,
in 2005.
He has studied
piano since age 8 and received voice training at Columbia University and the
Longy School of Music. He started a barbershop quartet in high school and
participated in classical chorus performances and theater. At Columbia, he
toured with the male a cappella group The Kingsmen. He has written and recorded
music since 2001. This year, he has begun live performances.
In his music,
he explores “the convergence between themes of spiritual transcendence and
emotional disregulation.” He knows the first through his life as a practicing
Unitarian and the second from his own bouts with depression and psychosis as a
young man.
“‘Kamikaze Co-Pilot,’
the headliner for the album, is sort of about humanity and relationships and
destiny and the misfortune of having to die, which we all do,” he said. “It’s
more relationship oriented than I’ve been in the past, but still with the emphasis
on transcendence and moving along.”
In Last Night on Earth, consideration of relationships, transcendence, “emotional disregulation,” life, eternity, all come together, poetically, musically, playfully.
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