Artist Interview:
Sam Payne

I had the pleasure of meeting Sam Payne for the first time three years ago at the 2003 LDS Music Festival. Everyone in charge of the fest had nothing but good things to say about him. His set was cool, but what was even cooler was listening to him at an after fest jam session. At the request of the fest’s manager, he played “Shazaam,” a song about a modest request that amounts to “don’t make me rich or poor. Make me a super-hero.” (You can hear the full version of the song on Sam’s latest CD release, “Coming Just to Go.”) The next time I heard Sam play live was at the same festival, two years later. He was the featured artist. In addition to his own tunes, he sang a version of “Falling Leaves” that knocked me out of my chair.

In addition to a prodigious talent as a singer/songwriter, Sam Payne is also remarkably accessible, and just an all around cool guy. He’s quite possible the most down to earth guy I’ve met in this business. The following interview will show you just what I mean.


RT: How long have you been creating/performing your own music?

SP: I wrote a couple of songs in high school and a couple of songs in college--for girls or friends or girlfriends mostly, and none of them very important (some downright embarrassing). Then, as an adult, my brother gave me a guitar as a gift and I wrote a song on it. The song was called "Sicklesong," and it was based on a Ray Bradbury short story about a farmer who realizes that he's really the grim reaper. In the song there are two guys, working side by side--one planting seeds and one cutting down stalks. I performed the song as part of a fireside talk. A guy in the audience heard the song and asked me if I wanted to be in a band with him (Korky Ollerton. He use to play drums for the band that became Social Distortion). He didn't know that he had just heard the only song in my repertoire. But I shrugged my shoulders, and we were a band. that was in 1997.

RT: What long range goals do you have for you music career?

SP: On a personal level, my musical goals aren't career goals at all. Music has for a long time been the medium through which I figure things out between God and me. That's all. As far as putting the music in front of an audience, the way I've always seen it, you do what God gives you to do. He's given me some to do, and I've been happy about it and felt blessed. But lately I'm feeling pretty keenly God's counsel to be anxiously engaged in a good cause, and not to require that he command in all things. So after a long time of gratefully receiving (and even relishing) handouts from the Lord, I'm starting to push a little myself. And when it comes down to it, I guess I really do have goals. For example, I feel like music is one among many of the things that the Lord has given to man for the building up of the kingdom of God. And I think that music (the many faces of pop music in particular) is being increasingly commandeered by the adversary in ways that are confusing listeners. I'd like to be active in alleviating the trials brought into the world by that trend. The problem is, that sort of crusader spirit too often makes for bad songs. I've been most useful, I think, when I concentrate more on "obtaining the word," by working hard to figure out the craft.

RT: I've seen you perform live on several occasions. For me, live performance is a kind of "litmus test" for musicians. If you can do it live, you can really do it. Man, you can really get a crowd rocking! Do you prefer working live, or would you rather stick to the studio? What do you see as the differences between performing live and recording in the studio?

SP: It's important to me to be competent in both environments--fluent in both languages. In some ways they're the same--in both environments, you're thinking about the audience and about the craft. But in the studio it's like you're bringing whatever mastery of the craft you have to the process of planning a gathering between you and an audience. The gathering that you've planned gets carried out when they hear the recordings, but of course most of the time you're not there. They can (and often do) tell you about what happened to them while they were there, and you're happy about it-- glad they enjoyed themselves. But it's nicer to come to the gathering yourself. That's what happens onstage.

I love performing live, and there's a lot of magic that happens in the studio as well. I'm very pleased with a lot of the work we've done on both fronts. The challenge is to carry to the stage the precision and sonic sensibility of the recordings, and to carry to the studio the spontaneity and connectedness of the stage shows. Working in the studio is like designing a race car--there's a lot to get right, but you can think about it one thing at a time. Working on stage is more like driving it--there's still a lot to get right, but it's all happening at once; a thousand different factors to analyze and respond to in real time as each moment passes. Being on stage is also ephemeral--it happens, and then it's gone. I've had the great pleasure of working with terrific players, engineers, and producers in both arenas, and I love both environments for different reasons.

RT: Your Dad (Marvin Payne) has been doing music for several years, in addition to being a top notch actor. What kind of influence do you think he's been on your musical career?

SP: Dad has never been very vocal in his encouragement of any of the artistic pursuits of his children. He loves us, and he loves music, but I think he also understands what it costs to have interests like these, and doesn't want to doom us to lives as starving artists on account of his encouragement. Looking back though, I can see his encouragement in the form of what we got for Christmases and birthdays. A baritone Ukulele one year, a plastic recorder the next, and before any of that (for my brother's sixth birthday), two plywood cut-outs shaped like Les Pauls. We colored them with crayons. Mine had a long skeleton stretched out over the face of it.

Today, I always go to my dad with questions about how to navigate the forest of writing, performing, and selling music. And while his music has had an impact, it's his faith that has really influenced me. He's a true lily-of-the-field, consecrating his gifts for the building up of the kingdom with or without a paycheck, and content to wait upon the Lord, who will array him how he will array him. What have the dividends been? Most of Dad's clothes are from DI [Deseret Industries, a local church-run thrift store – ed.], but I never, ever play anywhere (no mater how far-flung the gig) without someone coming up at the end of the show, choked up with the story of how my father visited his or her apartment selling albums door-to- door when they were in college, and of how the visit changed him or her. At one recent show, a nice lady told me that a Marvin Payne concert had once inspired her to lose 200 pounds and open a photography business. What song of mine ever did that?

RT: Trying to pin down a style or genre to put your music in has been kind of tough for me. One minute it seems like singer/songwriter easy listening, but it's got as many jazz influences as it does anything else. Someone told me that it's called "Americana," but that doesn't seem descriptive enough. How would you describe what you do?

SP: I don't know if there's a two or three-word description for what I do. Or maybe I'm just the wrong guy to ask. I hope there's some sort of congruency in what's going on. I like for people to be able to say, "that sounds like a Sam Payne song." But at the same time, I don't mind a bit if the roots of the tunes go in all different directions. I grew up in a home full of folk singers. I studied jazz in college. The musicians I play with all like to play old funk tunes. I hope that's all apparent in the music. The trick, I guess, is to be conversant enough in enough musical traditions that when you want to say something, you can say it. That's all. There are pragmatic standpoints (marketing standpoints, maybe) from which style and genre are useful in locking into an audience and holding its attention. But artistically, style and genre are just facilitators for saying what you want to say in the way it ought to be said.

RT: How does the music creation process work for you?

SP: Every song is a different deal. For a long time it seemed like I always had a couple of musical figures in my head, and when something came along that needed to be written about, I'd hammer the lyrics out and squash them into one or another of those figures. These days it's more like the music and lyrics creep up on each other like they're courting--the lyrics make a move toward making sense with the music, and then the music takes a step toward making sense with the lyrics, and then there's a moment when they both give up and embrace each other. The song writes itself after that.

I heard Joe Bennion the potter talk about how making pottery was a sort of compromise between the artist and the pot--the pot wants to be something and the potter wants the pot to be something and the result is an agreement between the two. I always thought that was just poetry. But songwriting is a lot like that. You know what you want, but the song often wants to pull in a different direction. Ultimately, the finished song is an agreement between you--a song that's something other than what either of you had planned.

RT: You latest album is "Coming Just to Go." What went into the creation of that project?

SP: "Railroad Blessing" was the project on which we discovered what we sound like. "Coming Just to Go" is the project on which we tinkered with everything we discovered on "Railroad Blessing." "Coming Just to Go" is a much more collaborative project--several of the tunes were co-writes, for example (I love that--both the process and the outcome). In some sense we ramped up everything about what we were doing with "Blessing." The production is all more intricate, more complex. The images in the songs are more sophisticated, I think. The poetry is often better. At the same time, for all its fireworks, there's a storytelling quality on "Blessing" that escapes "Coming Just to Go." We're very happy with both projects for different reasons.

On "Railroad Blessing" we used Ryan Shupe in some long-distance sessions for some fiddle work. The concept of working long-distance like that (sending the files to other studios, and having artists lay tracks and send them back) worked well enough that we tried more of it on "Coming Just to Go." Shupe was back, for which we were very grateful, but also the terrific cellist Steve Nelson on "Holy," and Cherie Call on "Sunflower" (which turned out to be one of my favorite recordings ever).

RT: There's a lot of storytelling in your music. Even when you don't seem to be telling a specific narrative, the lyrics suggest some pretty concrete (and very poetic) images to me. What do you attribute this "music as storytelling" influence to?

SP: I don't know where the storytelling influence comes from in general, but it has guided all of my professional and avocational pursuits. I'm a writer by trade, on the heels of an undergraduate degree in English and a masters degree in education. I guess I've always thought that stories are the fundamental units of communication and education. Jesus seemed to think so too.

RT: One of the most obvious example of "storytelling music" in your latest album is "Cloudy Dan." Where did the ideas for that song come from?

SP: As far as "Cloudy Dan" goes, I heard a song called "Chief" from Patty Griffin's (amazing) album "1,000 Kisses" (no kidding, one of the great albums). The song was about a crazy Indian who walked up and down the streets of his small town carrying a rifle. It knocked my socks off, and it made me begin to imagine what the stories were behind the two or three people in every town that have been written off as nuts. My wife is an ultralight pilot, and airplane images are pretty easy to come by around my place. In the song, I imagined that this old crazy guy used to fly airplanes with his son--that a generation ago people called him "Cloudy Dan" because he was always up in the sky. A generation later, the kids in town, not knowing about the airplanes, still call him Cloudy Dan, but they think it's just because his head's all clouded up--because he's crazy. The song tells the story of how he might have gotten that way.

RT: What kinds of projects would you like to undertake, but for whatever reason you've not tackled yet?

SP: Getting my garden in shape. Also, for the last few years I've wanted to write a book that my kids would like to read. I imagined writing a few pages a day, and reading them over bowls of cereal in the morning. I've gotten as far as the first three or four words. The story was going to be about a kid who has an anonymous pen pal that winds up being the President of the United States. Also the kid has a grandpa who mumbles a lot. The family takes the mumbling for loose marbles in the attic, but the truth is that grandpa knows about buried Spanish gold. Maybe that's why I've only gotten as far as three or four words.

RT: I was told by a mutual friend that you were approached by Deseret Book with a contract at one time, but you turned them down; is that right? What went in to that decision?

SP: That's not exactly the case. In the beginning, when we were just starting to lay tracks for the album that became "Railroad Blessing," I called Jeff Simpson, the head of Excel Entertainment, with some general questions about the business end of what we were doing. He invited me to send him a disc when we had one finished. That generous invitation led to a distribution contract with Excel that rolled into a contract with Deseret Book when the companies merged. I was very thankful (and remain so) for the help I got from both Excel and Deseret Book, especially when we ("we" meaning the members of the Sam Payne Project) were so naive about the business of promoting albums. We got a lot of great support from the Excel/DB guys, and a lot of encouragement from Jeff in particular. They opened a door for us that I think might not have opened for us otherwise.

Recently though, I got a call from Earl Madsen of Sounds of Zion. The folks at Sounds of Zion had taken quite a personal interest in my catalog, and even without a label relationship had provided me with some cool live performance and studio opportunities. They had some ideas that I liked about marketing the recordings. My albums are now being handled by Sounds of Zion, but Deseret Book is a great label, and anyone who has a distribution or management deal with them should feel fortunate indeed.

RT: Thanks for clearing that up. Can you give us a preview of any of your current projects?

SP: I've got some things on the shelf waiting for the next step--a live album, a song-cycle about crossings to the west, and an album of inspirational music. As a part of my day job, I'm working on a series of historical novels for elementary school students. I'm enjoying (very much) the work that I do on the radio in Southern Utah. Those projects are all great fun, and all fall under the "what God has given me to do" umbrella. Who knows where any of those will go.
You can hear, and purchase, Sam’s music at his website, or at CD Baby.