__

BR: Can you tell me more about how you got into music and how you knew that this was the career you wanted to pursue?

Sam Drysdale: Yeah, I got into music. I was a bit of a late bloomer. Both of my parents are pretty musically inclined. My mom was on the radio- she was a touring musician first, and then she was on the radio for, I don’t know, twenty years as a disc jockey. And my dad is sort of like a hobbyist guitar player, and now he actually builds his own guitars. He’s a robotics engineer by trade, so he builds his own guitars, builds his own amps. He’s, he’s, he’s pretty musically inclined as well. So I was kind of pushed into music early, and I just totally resented it. I had like no interest in being in music. And then when I was about sixteen, I started, I listened to, I kind of got introduced to Pink Floyd, and I kind of went back to some of the music that my dad had played me when I was like a kid. So, like a lot of Neil Young, and my mom used to play a lot of Joni Mitchell and, and I just kind of like slowly found my way around some of the oldies. And then eventually I found John Mayer and I just became like a big John Mayer fan, a big Continuum fan, and kind of decided at the end of high school, when I was thinking about what I wanted to do, I, I wrote a couple songs and I just played them for some people and they thought they were all right. And I ended up going to music school. And, that’s that’s kind of how it started.

You spent some time writing and recording in your mom’s cabin in Purgatory Cove. What did that environment allow you to access creatively that you might not have anywhere else?

Drysdale: Yeah, for me, like, because I’m such a big I’m a really big lyric person. Like lyrics are kind of like first for me, I need to know what the story is. That’s kind of like where I build everything out from. And I find I have a bit of a tough time. Like in the music industry, if you’re, if you’re doing a lot of co-writing sessions and things like basically the structure is you’re going in and you’re, you’re co-writing with people for sort of like four to six hours, sometimes less, sometimes more. But I find that in those environments when I’m kind of like caged between a few walls, I just have a tougher time sort of letting my ideas flow naturally. And you get better at that. And I’ve definitely gotten better at it over time. But when I’m up in up in this cabin that my mom has, I just, I don’t if it doesn’t, if something doesn’t come right away, you can just go outside and jump in a cold lake or have a bonfire or have a glass of wine at one o’clock in the afternoon and then like something. You know, it just it just comes more freely. I don’t feel so sort of caged. The like my anxieties about songwriting and about like my artist project as a whole, they just they can’t creep in up there. So it’s, it just allows me to sort of be solely focused on, on writing and on processing my thoughts and emotions and everything that I want to put into music. And I mean, it’s just, yeah, I mean, that’s invaluable… I don’t know that I’ll do it a different way again. Like I’ll always write with other people and take writing sessions because I like doing it and it’s good practice. But as far as like actually coming up with a body of work that I really can stand beside, we just have when, when my producer John Fellner and I go up there, we just have like a really high hit rate on writing something that ends up making it, you know, where normally if you write ten songs, maybe two are good or three are good. When we go up there and we put our minds to, to, to, to certain ideas and directions. Like it’s like more like fifty percent, like one in every two ideas we had. We didn’t write that many songs for this album. We might have written fourteen songs on the record. We might have written thirty, like it was maybe just under fifty percent of the songs we wrote ended up making it. And to me, that’s, that’s like, you know, if an environment is curating that level of creativity, that’s what I want to be in all the time.

Who are some artists that influence your sound?

Drysdale: The more modern sound is definitely like, you know, for me, my, I sort of think like, like, first and foremost, I want to know where my music is going to live. I want to know what environment it’s going to sound good in. For me, having been in the pop music world when I was younger, I just realized like growing up in the country, being a bit of a country boy that like, I want music that’s going to exist around a bonfire really well. And so, you know, I mean, John Mayer is big for me. Hozier is big for me. Like Joni Mitchell, early is really big for me. Norah Jones was played in my house a lot. Like I used to listen to a lot of Norah Jones. She’s like a really great lyric forward, singer songwriter. And then, yeah, I mean, the modern in the modern sort of sphere, like the Noah Corns, the Zac Bryans, all of those guys are just doing exactly what I would love to be doing on like a higher level. I’m really into Joshua Sloane right now. He’s kind of taking over the world for for good reason. He’s got some really great lyrics. And I mean, there’s just like, I don’t know, like there’s, I could go on and on and on about, about inspirations. There’s, I also like have a huge, huge, huge love for the weekend. I’ve always been a big weekend fan. Just because I love how seriously he takes his world building. So from a more like artistic perspective, I’m a big, big weekend fan.

There’s sort of a tension on your project between isolation and connection. Was that intentional? Tell me more about that.

Drysdale: Big time. Yeah … originally, my album was not called Purgatory Cove. And Purgatory Cove is … the body of water that my mom lives on. It’s a part of a bigger lake, but she lives in this little inlet called Purgatory Cove. And the album was named something else initially. And then as I sort of like got to the eighth or ninth song on the project, I realized that like the album was basically about two things. It was about a period of time I spent after like a pretty big heartbreak and a pretty big life change. Just like wanting to be alone and kind of needing to be alone and not like alone romantically, but like, truly like just more alone in general and just to spend some time reflecting on myself and reflecting on sort of who I was becoming as a person, what my trajectory was. So like isolation was a big thing and heartbreak, obviously. And then I just realized that this name Purgatory Cove that where I had made this, this album and where my mom lived was like the perfect metaphor for this sort of journey that I’d been on, of processing heartbreak, going out into sort of like self-prescribed isolation and, and yeah, I mean, the whole album, it kind of just chronicles this, this person’s journey out to this place where they can hear and see and, and gain some perspective. And then by the end of the record, the last song, the title track of the record sort of teases the idea that maybe it’s time to come back and come back to real life and be around your people again.

You get really vulnerable on some tracks and explore deep, complex feelings. How were you able to take hold of those feelings and turn them into songs?

Drysdale: Yeah, I mean, it’s for me again, like lyrics are really big. Titles are really big. When I think about I love, like trying to think about titles that I haven’t heard before. And, you know, using that way for me, like a lot of these songs just came out of like one moment of like real emotional, sort of like vomiting that I would have when I would have a couple glasses of wine and then I would just like think about something. And then I would just puke out two or three lines. And having John like with me as John Fellner, who I truly think is like one of the best producers this country has right now. Like he’s just so, so, so talented. He makes it really easy for me as well because he’s just so strong in all the areas that I’m not as strong in. He’s really, really great. You know, like, he’s like a multifaceted instrumentalist, but he’s also a really great melodically. And I mean, he can just bring that stuff out of me as well. And he makes it really easy to talk through. And I mean, any songwriter knows like a good songwriting session is like therapy half the time. And he makes that, you know, I’ve never been happier to be stuck in a cabin with one person doing work for five days. Like, I never get tired of waking up and working with him. So he makes it really easy to.

How do you approach collaborations when you have a deeply personal story to tell that may or may not be relatable to the people you’re working with?

Drysdale: Yeah. I mean, that’s kind of an art form in its in its own right. Like it the, the sort of like veteran songwriter thing to say here is that being dishonest about your emotions when you’re in a songwriting session, even if it’s with two people you’ve never met before, is like always, it’s always going to do a disservice to whatever song you make because it’s just, it’s like better for everybody if everyone is open and honest and there’s kind of like an unwritten code that everyone keeps that that stuff in the room, keeps it personal, makes it a safe space. And that’s also like kind of the art and the craft of being a great collaborator, which John is, is to make somebody and an artist feel really safe and, and let them just like, as I said, like emotional vomit all over the place while you’re, while you’re working on a record, you need to be able to do that. If you can’t do that, you’re just going to end up, you know, in my earlier career, sometimes I remember having sessions with collaborators and it just the whole room. There’s like a palpable tension, especially if something’s not happening. Like if you’re not able to get an idea out there, just the walls very slowly feel like they’re going to close in. And that is like an environment that I have no interest in being in anymore, like at, at my age. And also it’s just not conducive to making good art. So it’s, you know, when I look for collaborators now, I’m super selective because it has to be that kind of vibe. And there’s plenty of songs on this record where we woke up the morning of, had no idea what to do, couldn’t come up with anything to save our lives, took the dog for a walk, had a, you know, second coffee, went out into the, into the lake, came back in and a song flew out in forty five minutes like the. The scaffolding of a song came out in forty five minutes. It happens all the time. So yeah.

Do you have some favorite songs on this project?

Drysdale: Yeah, I have like there’s three that I that are really that I really like that. And like they kind of change all the time. I guess there’s four, but the, the one that is my sort of like my like real bedrock is the first song we released on the project before we even knew it was going to be an album. It’s called The Astronaut. And that song does a really good job at encapsulating both themes of the record heartbreak and isolation. And that’s a song I’m really, really proud of. I love playing it live. It’s my favorite song to play because I just play it on my own. So that song means a lot to me. The sort of lead single of the record is a song called A place. And that song is about a camping trip that I’ve taken with my, like, some of my best friends for the last ten years. And that’s the song that really sort of paints the picture, like the cinematic, nature driven picture that I want to be affiliated with this album. And so that song is really important to me as well. And then the other two songs I really like. I’m really proud of the title track Purgatory Cove. It’s the album closer, and that song to me is like, I. I started writing it really close to when we had to have the album done, and I knew I kind of wanted to write a song with that title, and I wanted to write a song that wasn’t maybe structured the way that a traditional song is verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus out. Like I wanted to have something that was more cinematic, longer drawn out, constantly evolving. And I think that that song did does a really good job at that. And then I’m also, I had this song that’s coming out with the album, like the sort of like single on album day is called Conversations With No One. And that’s a song that’s really. It’s really nice when a song grows on you. Like I thought it was good at first. I thought it was a decent song and it’s just really grown on me. I really like playing it live. I like, yeah, I like the way that it ended up being mixed. Brandon Younis, who mixed the whole record, just did an incredible job with it. And it’s nice when a song truly like in the mixing process comes alive more than you, than you thought it was before. So right now that one’s just kind of top of mind for me as well.

What do you want people to understand about you after they’ve listened to the album?

Drysdale: I think like, I don’t know. I mean, like being as transparent as possible. I want people to think that like that this is an artist and that this is a songwriter with some depth and that there’s, there’s more to say here than just like stomp, clap folk music that there’s, there’s something else going on here. And I want people to hopefully hear my influences. I hope that, you know, people can see me as a real artist and like an artist or an artist carving out sort of his own lane on this record. And, and, that’s, that’s, I think, I mean, what I, what I was saying, I mean, again, like, I would like to be perceived as who I am, which is just like a real, a real person going through real things. And I hope that that that this album does that.

You have a show at Adelaide Hall in about two weeks. How are you feeling?

Drysdale: I’m feeling great. Luckily the boys, the band and I have had a bit of practice. We just played a festival date in Ottawa, and, it was one of the biggest crowds I’ve ever played for. So we’ve had a little bit of a bit of a good warm up and yeah, I don’t know. I mean, we, it’s the, it’s the day before the album comes out. So it’s going to be, it’s going to be interesting to have like a play release show. And a lot of people won’t know any of the material yet. So if people buy tickets, we’re going to send them the album early. So they can they can sing along. But yeah, I’m feeling good about it.

See Sam Drysdale LIVE in Toronto!

Head to AdmitONE to see artists like Sam Drysdale LIVE!