Biography
Everything you can hear on a Samson Keel record is his voice. That includes the drums.
He is twenty-nine and he lives in Hull, ten minutes from the house he grew up in, which is the first thing worth knowing about him because it is not a detail — it is the subject. Hull is at the end of the line. Nothing passes through it on the way to somewhere else. You go there deliberately or you do not go, and a man who has stayed his whole life in a city nobody drives through has thought harder about staying than most people who left have thought about leaving.
He was in a band once. They were signed at nineteen, spent two years making an album with three different producers, and were told repeatedly that the songs needed a moment for radio. The album was never released. It exists on a hard drive. The band ended in the summer of 2017 without a last gig or an argument — a deal finished and four people went home — and he went back to Hull and took a job driving a van for the builders' merchant on Wiltshire Road, and then ran the trade counter there for seven years.
He is careful to tell people that those seven years were fine. He liked the lads. The money came every month. He was good at it. He has said, more than once and without any visible irony, that they were easier than the two years before them.
He kept writing the whole time and stopped trying, which turned out to be the point. Songs got made in the back bedroom for nobody, and somewhere in there the thing happened that made him what he is: he stopped writing for a band. No guitarist to leave a hole for. No drummer to talk round. Just his voice and one sampler, and the discovery that the songs got bigger the fewer people were involved in them — which is the exact opposite of everything he had been told for two years by three men who were being paid to tell him things.
So the records are made of nothing. His voice, chopped into the drums. His voice, stretched until it stops sounding like a person and starts sounding like a chord. Four notes of bass you feel in your chest in a car. Three chords, sometimes four. Verses that talk at you, fast, full of street names and shop names and first names and what things cost, and then a chorus of about four plain words that a room can sing back the first time it hears it.
And he leaves the room in. The count-in, the chair, a cough, the plastic click of the pads, the take where his voice goes on the last chorus and he keeps it because that was the one where he meant it. None of this is an aesthetic and none of it is roughness for effect — the records are big and deep and mixed properly. He just will not do a take again once it is true.
There are rules, all of them his own. No second chorus is ever a copy of the first; something is always taken out, never put in. No key change, which he regards as a lie. No features. Nothing fades out. A song stops when it is finished.
The obvious thing to say about him is that he writes the most immediately likeable songs on this label and is the least willing person on it to do anything about that. Both halves are true and they are the same fact. Suggest to Samson Keel that one of his songs could be bigger — kindly, correctly, with evidence — and watch him hear a threat, because the last people who said that to him meant something else by it.
He is warm, he is funny, he is the easiest person in any room to talk to, and after an hour with him you will have laughed a great deal and learned nothing whatsoever. That is not an accident. It is a skill, and he learned it standing behind a counter, and he has never once turned it off.
He plays sitting down. He builds each song from silence in front of you — voice first, then the drums made out of the voice, then the low end underneath it. It takes about forty seconds and nobody talks.