photo: Iggy Barskov
Singer-songwriters often take many journeys before they arrive at a point where they feel they are ready to write and record their best material. These journeys can take place both in the physical and emotional worlds of a singer-songwriter. Boston singer-songwriter has been all over the national music scene map as well as all over a rough emotional terrain of great challenges to herself and her material.
Farrell was originally born and raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts before she and her family moved to Orange, Massachusetts. She eventually graduated from Bowdoin College in Maine before she moved to Los Angeles to become a rock star. After three years in Los Angeles, Farrell met Dave Matthew Band saxophone player LeRoi Moore who agreed to work with her as a mentor. Farrell moved to Charlottesville, Virginia where she could be closer to the DMB studio. She wasn’t working with Moore for long before he had his freak accident with an ATV and subsequently died from surgical complications.
Farrell then moved back to Boston in 2011 to figure out what she was going to do next. She also got the rights to release her Luminous album that Moor had produced for her, releasing it at The Burren in Somerville, Massachusetts the year she returned.
“That was my introduction the Cambridge-Boston music scene,” Farrell said. “I was new in town. I started going to the open mics all around. I ended up going to the open mic at the Lizard Lounge. That’s where I started meeting different people and playing different venues. That’s how I ended up slipping into getting some gigs.”
Farrell said that when she initially arrived, it was quite difficult to get a booking. She was sending out blind e-mails to venues. “In Boston, it’s really different,” she said. “People need to be connected somehow. People need to know who you are.”
Farrell w/ Dennis Brennen
Currently, Farrell is promoting her new single, “Lost Without Your Love,” which she wrote as a noir love song then recorded it as a duet with Boston’s notable singer Dennis Brennen. The tune had been tossing around in her Farrell’s mind for a long time. She wanted something with a familiar feeling, something with a classic noir feeling.
“Finally, the first line started coming to me,” she said. “As soon as I got the melody in my head, I knew I wanted to sing it with Dennis Brennen just because I absolutely adore his voice. I adore his music. When I first moved to Boston, the first place I went out one night, I went to Toad when the White Owls were playing. I had no idea who he was. He just sorted of blasted onto the stage, and he was singing in this beautiful, breathy blues. He had that style of music. This guy was so cool and kind of aloof. I just loved what he was doing. I said to myself at some point in life, I need to have a duet with him.”
After stalking Brennen for years, the two became friends, as Brennen realized she wasn’t stalking him in a scary way. Brennen heard her demo and became enthusiastic. “It felt like a really good song to release during a dark and cold month,” she said. “It feels like a winter time, night time thing. I went pedal to the metal to get that recorded and get Duke Levine involved. He’s my favorite guitar player. He also plays with Dennis at their Lizard Lounge residency. He’s able to make the connection there, and it was a perfect recording experience.”
September Sun album cover
As it’s been two years since Farrell had released her highly rated September Sun CD, her single and the two EPs she is currently working on is her way of saying “Hello. I’m still alive. I’m making music. Here’s a little taste of what I’m doing.” Farrell has just completed one EP which will be released late April. Still untitled, it’s a three song EP, leaning more toward pop, more produced. “I love how these songs came out,” Farrell said. “One of them has already been placed on a television show on the CW network. I can’t remember it, but there were aliens involved.”
After that EP is released next month, Farrell will continue with her work on the second EP, with production by Will Dailey, a disc likely to be released in early summer. “I’m working on a bunch of video content for everything as well,” she said. “That’s my current plans.”
Farrell’s mix of influences come from rock, pop, and jazz. Her first favorite musician was Van Morrison. Morrison with Bob Dylan was Farrell’s second concert experience. “I felt pretty spoiled by that,” she said. “I grew up listening to a lot of singer-songwriters from the 70s because my parents were listening to that. I think your tastes can be influenced by what are your parents listening to. Luckily, my parents were listening to really good stuff so I’m really grateful for that. They were listening to James Taylor. Joni Mitchell was always happening in my house. My mom is a really big R&B, Motown, soul fan as well. There was a lot of jazz being played. Ella Fitzgerald was a person I mainly heard the most growing up.:
“It was this really cool mix of like Van Morrison, like Caledonian soul meets actual soul music meets singer-songwriter. I think it really reflects what I lean toward musically,” she said.
Reviewers and critics have described Farrell as a singer-songwriter with a strong jazz leaning, as opposed to a folk leaning or a pop leaning that permeates the singer-songwriter genres. How did Farrell get that way? High school jazz band. Beginning as a flautist in middle school, she moved onto high school where she wanted to play in the jazz band, so she picked up the saxophone which she could play louder.
“I started playing a lot of jazz in high school, and I was super into it,” Farrell said. “It was the same time Ken Burns’ documentary on jazz came out. I had just discovered the saxophone, and blues, and jazz, and my whole world just totally opened and got so much cooler. I would borrow the box set because my teacher had the box set that went to that documentary. My parents were like ‘Oh my gosh. Our daughter is kind of strange.’ But, at that point I was obsessed. I just ate that up.”
At that time in her life, Farrell was too shy to sing in public. Yet, one of the first albums she owned as a teenager was a Billie Holiday record given to her at age 16. Farrell fell in love with Holiday’s weird, raspy delivery and she tried to learn all of the songs on the album. “It really just sort of got into my DNA at that point,” Farrell said. “I just love jazz. It just moves me in such a strong way. That’s were it generated.”
That also began a life long love of being a vocalist. When Farrell came back to Boston in 2011, she wanted to sing anything she could possibly get her hands on. She answered a Craig’s List ad for a singer in a jazz club called Z located on Elm Street in Manchester, New Hampshire. The gig was two to three times a week singing three sets a gig.
“Crazily, they hired me,” Farrell said. “I just said that I knew all of these songs, but I didn’t know any songs. I didn’t know from beginning to end the lyrics of anything. I got hired for the gig on a Monday and I had until Friday to learn three hours of music. That was my first gig where I was like ‘Yeah, I’m a jazz singer.’”
Farrell’s last full length album, 2016’s September Sun, is considered by many to be her finest accomplishment. The singer-songwriter envisioned the album as her emotional voyage through the fall season. Broke at the time and unfamiliar with pledge campaigns, Farrell relied on her home recording equipment. She and her boyfriend Chris DeSanty recorded, engineered, and produced each track in their living room.
“We would go track by track and invite friends over who I knew from Boston’s music scene. Ryan Fitzsimmons would come over, Matt Murphy, Laurence Scudder, Erik White, Danielle Miraglia. I’d be like ‘could you come over and do a thing?’ and they’d be like ‘sure.’ I’d have people in the coat closet, recording upright bass, and that’s really how we did it.
Farrell also had people sending her tracks from around the country and around the world. Her friend Mario Castro, who lives in New York City, recorded a saxophone line in his home then sent it via e-mail. Farrell’s friend Ro Rowan, who lives in Los Angeles, sent her a cello track. Farrell co-wrote one of the song’s with her long time friend Peter Durning who lives in Amsterdam. “Pete is a long time collaborator of mine,” she said. “We were co-writing a song between Boston and Amsterdam, and that made it onto the album.”
Listening closely to the tracks from September Sun, a listener can find vibrant jazz parts interspersed with Farrell’s singer-songwriter sensibilities. Her tune “Lover’s Prayer,” which she co-wrote with piano player Michael Valdez, has jazz spunk in its saxophone, piano, and vocals.
“He had this jazz riff he had for something else,” Farrell said. “I was at his house, and he was noodling around on piano and played that. I was like ‘What is that?’ He was like ‘It’s part of thing that I’m working on,’ and I’m like ‘Can I have this? Can I borrow that?’ At that point a lot of songs in the recording process, a lot of the songs were more chill-folk-ish-pop-jazz-ish. I wanted something that had more of an ache to it, for sure. To me, that’s the fall. It’s a beautiful, bittersweet, melancholy time.”
Farrell’s CD also features a striking tune titled “Circles” that moves with a sly flow in its piano groove. It came about when Farrell was listening to other tracks and wondered what kind of song she didn’t have yet. She was looking for something with “a little more groove, a little more slouch, a little more slink to it.” She tinkered with a chord progression and she had another fall theme running around in her head: how fall always returns.
“That one sort of snapped its way out,” she said. “Then, we decided later to add that really interesting, kind of Scottish highland outro which felt bizarre at the time, but I think it actually works really well, sort of like a chanty outro.”
As she goes through occasional bouts with sleeplessness, Farrell’s tune “Song For Somnus” uses snappy jazz to capture the feeling of not being able to nod off, “when I’m even more insane than I usually am.” A pulsating upright bass imitates the feeling in her head when she can’t catch any shut eye.
“It’s that goddamn walking bass line,” she quipped. “It was kind of a joke to start with. Then I was like ‘No, this is a really cool song.’ I just love the idea of having a jazz walking bass line. That was my expression of insomnia, add a little levity here and there. You can’t take yourself too seriously.””
Farrell’s beautifully mournful title track “September Sun” is something she wrote while sitting on her parent’s porch, feeling inspired by the way the light changes, the way the fall season heralds the end of something.
“I just love September so much. I think it’s such a beautiful weird month. I wanted to capture that fleeting feeling that you have and just the way the dappled light comes down. I was just trying to explore that,” she said. “Then when I came up with the chorus, I kind of came up with a Fleetwood Mac three part harmonies. I took a year break from this song and asked myself ‘Is this crazy sounding?’ I went back to it months later, and I was like ‘Wow! This is awesome!’ Then we rounded it out with some more production. I think what really tied it together was when we got Ryan Fitzsimmons in, and he was doing these guitar swells.”
September Sun also marks several changes Farrell has experienced since her 2006 Spiritus album, which was well-received by Relix Magazine and several other publications. Listening to that full length CD from a much earlier period in her career, one can easily perceive the alterations Farrell has made in her presentation. Her voice has greatly deepened and has gotten more character rich. She delivers with more confidence now. After that initial CD she worked with other singer-songwriters in Los Angeles where many people felt she was “too out there.”
“I went through a period where I felt like I needed to tone down my Samantha-ness because it was too not easily definable,” she said. “I moved away from that and moved back around towards where I started. I think the best stuff is when you’re just really trying to be yourself.”
Samantha Farrell will be adding live shows in the coming spring and summer months.
https://www.samanthafarrell.com/
