Australian Blues fans are counting down the days until the return of the wonderful Samantha Fish. For those who caught her last year, May can’t come quick enough, with Samantha performing some of the best live shows across Australia in 2023. This time we get double the trouble, with Jesse Dayton joining Fish to celebrate their Grammy nominated album ‘Death Wish Blues’.
Playing a series of shows across the country, the pair kick off in Sydney before playing two gigs at Blues at Broadbeach. Appearances in St Kilda, Fremantle & Adelaide follow, before a return to Victoria to close the tour out in Melbourne. We caught up with Samantha to discuss the Grammys, writing ‘Death Wish Blues’ with Jesse Dayton and what music she has been listening to of late…
Sean: Good morning. How are you, Samantha?
SF: I’m good. Good morning to you. How are you?
Sean: I’m good, thank you. It’s Sean from The Rockpit over in Perth.
SF: Happy to be talking to you Sean. Thank you for your time.
Sean: I’ve been chasing for an interview with you for so long. I’m so glad that we’ve finally managed to catch up.
SF: Oh, thanks, man. I appreciate it. Well, I’m looking forward to the tour back to Australia.
Sean: I managed to catch you last year when you came over to Fremantle for your solo show, and it was absolutely unbelievable. I was blown away. It was probably one of my live shows of the year. What an incredible night.
SF: Thank you so much. That’s awesome. It was such a fun tour to do.
Sean: Well, of course, this time you’re coming with Jesse (Dayton), which is really exciting. We did cover one of our shows with one of our reviewers in the UK, and just reading his review excited us even more about these shows. What do you love about coming to Australia? Because it’s somewhere you’ve been to a few times now.
SF: This is going to be my third time. And I get this quite often in the last couple of years. I’m a really, I’m very lucky. I feel that because I know a lot of people don’t or haven’t had the opportunity to get to tour Australia. And I just feel so grateful for the opportunity to get to come down and do several shows and a string of dates. It’s really a great opportunity. And the Australian audiences, they love rock and roll. They love the blues, but I can tell they really love rock and roll. I saw so many people headbanging last time we were here. [laughs] I think the show that we’re bringing with Jesse is going to be perfect for them. And of course, it was such a pleasure to play for everyone.
Sean: ‘Death Wish Blues’ was such a fantastic album that you both did. And of course, picking up a Grammy nomination must have been such an absolute honour for you guys. It’s just a shame you didn’t quite get it over the line, which I think it deserved.
SF: Look, it was bittersweet because, I mean, we were so excited and couldn’t believe we were both really shocked, honestly, that it even got nominated for a Grammy. That kind of blew us both away. And so, you know, we went and we dressed up and we did the whole thing and we didn’t take the win, but, you know, and it’s okay, though, because it was such a wonderful group of musicians to be recognized within. And I don’t know. I mean, it’s such a high honour and, you know now we’re in the pool. So hopefully we’ll get to go back again with another record. We’ll see. I don’t know. We have set our bar really high. So now we have to just keep topping it.
Sean: Just from the photos I saw from the UK shows last year that we covered, you guys just seem to have so much fun up there. You and Jesse, it just seems a natural chemistry. It just seems a perfect fit musically.
SF: I think so. I mean, he’s definitely such a strong performer and, you know, he is a big presence on stage. You know, he’s charismatic. He’s got a lot of energy. He wheels that guitar so powerfully and he’s got such a unique voice with it. And then his singing voice, you know, he’s a storyteller. He’s got such a great texture and depth to his voice. And so the two of us together, we’re kind of like, we’re very different, but I feel like it’s very complimentary what we’re doing. And we both have a lot of respect for the music and for each other. So we found a way to be supportive and find a balance. So everybody who’s a fan of us individually can walk away as fans of us together. And that’s been the goal, to create a show that’s just undeniably good, you know, and that’s what I’m going to do my best to bring to you guys.
Sean: What challenge’s did you have to face when writing that album because you’re both very busy in your own rights and with your own projects and material, but to get together and produce an album of that quality must’ve have been challenging.
SF: Well, yeah, the first challenge being that we were never really in the room together ever because other than of course, recording, we met up with each other in May of 2022, and we had sat down in a writer’s room for three days to write these songs and I think there was just like a little hesitation of, I don’t know, what if I say something and he shoots it down, you know? I think we both had this hesitation, so we just kind of spent the three days getting to know each other and talking about what music we like, and just kind of talking about what we think the album could and should be. And my manager called and was like, “Hey, you guys are going into the studio to do a couple songs, just to see what you sound like, but I want to hear the new songs you guys wrote” and we’re like, “we didn’t do anything.” And he was so mad at us. Like, “Are you kidding me? Three days and nothing?” But after that demo session, I think something just kind of opened up between us where we were like, all right, we’re going to do this. Let’s just be completely open and unafraid to be vulnerable, you know? So we just started sending ideas back and forth and we just started chipping away at writing these songs. We did a lot of it like this over zoom and over the phone, sending ideas back and forth every free minute we had, I was on the phone with Jesse. We would be in a hotel – I was in one hotel room and he was in another hotel room somewhere. And then we got in the studio and all the loose ends just came together.
Sean: Isn’t it wonderful when that chemistry just gels and suddenly that ‘something’ you’ve worked on together, ends up getting a nomination for a Grammy, locked in history forever.
SF: I think it gelled because we just really needed it to, you know, and that when we looked at it, we knew we were going to do this. We have this many months to make it happen. We have to make it happen. We both, both he and I, have that kind of like mentality of, you know, we’re not really afraid to try different things. I think I’ve been talking a lot about how ‘no’ wasn’t really much of a word in our vocabulary when we went in the studio together. You know, we were both really open to just trying stuff and I think that led us down so many beautiful paths that maybe we wouldn’t have taken on our own. So it’s pretty cool.
Sean: Well, I was just looking through the tour dates – I don’t want to push you too much, but maybe between the 18th to the 21st, there’s some empty days there [laughs] I’m sure there’s a three day window where you two can get together again as song writers.
SF: Maybe we could actually write some songs or maybe just have a few days off and enjoy Australia [laughs].
Sean: I think that’s a much better idea. It’s nice to see gaps in dates. So many artists come here and literally race around without time to take their foot off the gas.
SF: We’ve been working so hard. If we have a little window of time, it’s going to be really, really cool just to go and experience a new place. And I know he’s been in Australia before and I have too, but I mean, I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface of the place and I’d love to experience something kind of local.
Sean: I had the pleasure of chatting to Ana Popović recently, and I see you are both appearing at Blues at Broadbeach this year. I mentioned to her how wonderful it is to see so many female artists on a festival bill, in a genre that has been so male dominated over the years. Such a strong line-up.
SF: Oh yeah. I mean, I think the world has just opened up. I mean, like again, I was at the Grammys and pretty much 95% of the Grammys, at least the portion that the public could watch, it was like women. It was like women led songs or female fronted groups. And I think it’s cool because we’re finally starting to see some equal representation. It wasn’t just even a few years ago, you know, we wouldn’t get a festival because they already had their female performer. Apparently there used to be a quota, you know, and it was like one was enough. But now I think that people are kind of dropping that stigma about women and what they think the public wants to see. I think the public has made it very obvious that they want the female perspective in music as well. So it’s great to see that kind of equal representation on a festival line-up.
Sean: I just wanted to ask you briefly about, Rounder, your label, because your last three releases have been through Rounder. Do they give you a lot of freedom? I get to talk to a lot of artists about their labels and how they work together. Obviously with ‘Faster’ and ‘Kill or Be Kind’, did they give you a lot of freedom to record what you felt was right?
SF: I think so. I mean, they’ve held like a big part in just making sure everything is set up, you know, but then like what happens after, it’s kind of like, it’s on us, the artists, the producer, but going in we talk about, especially early on when I first signed the deal, there was a lot of sending the songs to the label and really beforehand, just kind of getting their two cents, you know. We have an A&R person and just kind of feeling out like, “Are you guys liking the direction of this?” But I will say they’ve been a very encouraging and artist friendly label, as far as like, you know, again, “no”, hasn’t been a massive word in their vocabulary either. I think if they had strong feelings about something they would tell me, but for the most part, I feel pretty artistically free to do what I need to do.
Sean: You sometimes hear these horror stories, especially these younger artists, so it’s great to hear that even they get a lot of freedom because you get fears that they get pressured into recording what the label wants because they’re already looking at the dollars at the end, rather than putting their faith in the artists. So it’s nice when artists get that freedom.
SF: Well, I think we live in a weird world now where a lot of the people talk about TikTok and TikTok artists a lot. That’s like a lot of the new signings, you know, it’s like A&R used to develop an artist and all of that. Now it’s like the artists kind of come with a fan base and then they just kind of take it from there. So for me, it’s been an interesting challenge coming to terms with what people expect from me. And then being able to also push my own artistic boundaries and go outside of what I’m comfortable with doing but it is a weird time to be an artist in 2024, you know, who knows what’s going to happen? I have no idea.
Sean: Well, taking you right back, if I may, while we’ve still got time, I read that you started out playing drums.
SF: I did. Yeah.
Sean: And then moved to the guitar. What were the earlier influences you were hearing? Was it around the house or at school when the young budding musician began to emerge?
SF: Well, I liked classic rock a lot because that’s just what my parents listened to. So the radio was always a factor, and when I started getting interested in music and playing the drums, I think rock was a big influence for me because the drums were attractive and they’re always attractive to kids because it’s the most physical animated looking instrument on stage. I mean, it looks like fun, you know, and then you realize there’s a lot of math involved and that separates the drummers from the kids having fun. So I stuck with it for a couple of years… I mean, I still play, but I just kind of gravitated towards the guitar. I think I shied away from it initially because it was like everybody around me was playing guitar and I wanted to be different. So I was like, I’m going to be the drummer of the family. I ended up playing guitar too but I listened to a lot of rock and roll, again, the radio station who, where were they playing guitar solos, it was like alternative rock or classic rock. You didn’t hear too much of it, like on the pop stations at that time. I started being drawn to Blues because it’s kind of two-pronged being a classic rock fan. All of my heroes, once I started doing research, we’re really into Blues and I started finding all these great players and legends. And then also growing up in Kansas City, when I wanted to go out and actually cut my teeth and play with other musicians, I soon found out it’s a Jazz and a Blues town, you know, there’s a long history of it. And if I wanted to play on a stage, I had to learn some of the standards. So that kind of helped shape me that way.
Sean: And of course everyone can pick up on that in your live solo show. There is a real dirty Rock and Blues vibe to your sound, especially when you put your foot down and crank things up – that rock n roll edge runs through everyone’ veins.
SF: I’m kind of all over the map with the music that I listened to and what I like and you know, the things that have kind of trickled into my solo work or my original material. It’s kind of from all over so I just try to play what the song calls for and put on a good show. It certainly appeals to me and pray to God, it appeals to somebody else, you know?
Sean: Well, it certainly appeals to us down here in Australia, and we can’t wait to have you back here in May. I just want to wrap up with a couple of general questions if I may Samantha.
SF: Of course.
Sean: If you could invite three musicians, past or present, to join you for a bit of dinner one evening, who would you have sat with at the table?
SF: Keith Richards, Tom Petty and R.L. Burnside. Now, that’d be a real rock band [laughs].
Sean: What was the last album you listened to?
SF: Oh God, you’ve put me on the spot. Let me think about this one. I think the last full album I listened to was ‘Hackney Diamonds’ by The Rolling Stones. Oh, you know what else I listened to just after the Grammys? I listened to Jon Batiste’s new record too. That was great and I also listened to Lana Del Rey’s new album and that was great too – John Batiste was on it too. After the Grammys I was saying to myself that I should probably listen to some of these records. I’d already heard Lana’s but I listened to it again. She’s awesome but the Stones ‘Hackney Diamonds’, that was not a Grammy inspired listen but i listened to that one from top to bottom – it’s great.
Sean: A nice easy one to end with. If you could be credited with writing any song, what song would you choose?
SF: I’ve been asked this before and I always try to skip it [laughs]. This is totally from a selfish financial standpoint but a song like Etta James’ ‘I’d Rather Go Blind’ – it’s a wonderful song. I like Chris Stapleton, and when he recorded ‘Tennessee Whiskey’, I believe they used the music to ‘I’d Rather Go Blind’ or they reinterpreted and recreated it so now you have this new song born out of an old song. I’m sure she got a royalty in there somewhere, so I would want to create something that feels unique and timeless enough to want to be recreated over and over and over again throughout generations of musicians. I think that would be special and I know that’s not specific, I’m just using an example with her words but you know if I could do something like that, that inspires something new then that would be pretty cool.
Sean: What a wonderful answer to finish with Samantha. Thank you so much for your time. I can’t wait to come and see you at Fremantle on 22nd of May the 22nd and to finally get to see Jesse because I missed him last time he was in Australia.
SF: Thank you for your support Sean. It is greatly appreciated, it really is.
Sean: Safe travels.
