Setting the tone with the sound of a ship and the rippling of water, Sam and the Sea opens their latest single, Evil Ghosts with intrigue, a pulsing and immersive beat, textures, intricate guitar and the lyrics, “Home, where you want to go, holdin’ onto something…”
As the song expands, we are taken on a conceptual journey with lyrical highlights including the cosmic “stars in perpetual motion”. We love Sam and the Sea’s soundscape and visual identity which sees the artist performing at one with the mighty sea.
Sam and the Sea, based in New York, is a singer, songwriter, record producer and visual artist who plays guitar, drums, bass, piano, percussions, and delivers dreamlike and atmospheric vocals.
They cite Elliott Smith as having a similar soundscape, which we agree, but it is clear that Sam and the Sea is creating a universe of their own.
In the video, the sea is the main character, “it is both home and destination”. Elaborating on the creation of the track, Sam and the Sea says, “Evil Ghosts has been hanging around for a few years, the song was written over the course of two or three weeks in 2015, and guitar parts that are still in the track were recorded around that time, with an unusual recording setup and the guitar fallen out of tune in a way that I could never replicate.”
They continue, “Those guitar parts lingered in the track and even though the recording of them was flawed the feeling couldn’t be improved, so they stayed. I came back to it last summer and did the vocals and some other parts and it felt like the track came together in an exciting way that captured the original vision of the song.”
Speaking on the intention of the song, Sam and the Sea says, “The song isn’t really about anything, but thinking about the stars and the endlessness of things and how our ends are unknown to us.”
We have added Evil Ghosts to our New Music Spotlight playlist and have been exploring Sam and the Sea‘s wider discography including The Light and Thinking Slow.