Folk singer Sam Lee gives hope and inspires action with “Songdreaming”

Sam Lee’s musical career developed from his environmental activism, from the Mercury award-winning album, Old Wowto his ongoing conservation project Singing with Nightingales. The British folk star’s fourth album, LyricsReleased earlier this year, it is his most creative project to date, a manifesto for reconnecting with nature comprised of lush, haunting reinterpretations of the songs of Britain’s Traveller communities.

The title comes from the summer retreats that Lee leads, where people come together to connect with their land and ancestors through song: “Singing to the land happens all over the world in indigenous communities whose relationship with nature is still very intact,” says Lee. “It’s a ceremony, a devotion, a prayer.”

We spoke to Lee about Song dreams, how he sources material, queerness, connection to nature and much more.

Sam, your music is usually based on traditional folk songs, but these songs stray much further from the source material than you ever have before.

I had written a little original text about Old Wowbut this is an album where almost everything was written by me, some of it to the point where nothing of the original folk song is left. And that was a big risk because I’m quite shy when it comes to thinking of myself as a songwriter. I’m not an experienced Johnny Flynn or Anaïs Mitchell. It’s not because of my training, and I really don’t like writing because I failed English at school. I’ve always had a big feeling of inadequacy.

What made you decide to leave your comfort zone?

It actually came about in an unusual way – the songs were originally commissioned for a film, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry. It was an adaptation of a popular book about a man walking across Britain, a portrait of our connection with the land and the healing power of passage. I was already a huge fan of the director Hettie Macdonald – her first film, Nice thingwas groundbreaking for me when it came out in 1996 – so I was really excited to be involved in it.

We arranged and wrote a lot of songs to capture the mood of the film, and some of them were used, but there were all these, if I may say so, leftovers? Being a resourceful, waste-nothing, want-nothing kind of guy, I said, “Well, these all have something powerful in them.”

How did your writing process go?

I don’t have a particular method, but the way I work is a bit like the way I interact with nature. I’m a collector of sonic and lyrical possibilities and I see relationships in words in the same way that I see relationships within the ecosystem. You start to discover what Simon Armitage, Britain’s beloved Poet Laureate, would call the ‘neon’ moments, things that suddenly glow.



Can you give an example?

Absolutely. “McCrimmon,” the third song on the album, is a ballad I learned from my late mentor Stanley Robertson, who was a Scottish Traveller. In the original there is a lyric that goes “no more, no more,” but I understood it as “in awe, in awe.” Suddenly it became a whole song about the state of awe.

There’s another song, a love song between a beautiful maiden and a farm boy – I recalibrated it and reframed it so that it’s a more complicated relationship between species that are in a state of separation. The folk songs say it all. I’m like someone who takes a Shakespeare play and reinterprets it and maybe adapts some of the language, like West Side Story from Romeo and Juliet.

Which song was easiest for you?

“Green Mossy Banks,” which is actually about a pilgrimage, was so easy to write. It was like, “Oh my God, I’ve always wanted to write this song.” And they didn’t even use it in the movie!

What did you always want to express in this song?

The story of the film paints this wonderful portrait of free passage – there is not a single moment where there is any question of trespassing, permits or the idea of ​​private land. No barbed wire fences or angry landowners asking, “What do you think you’re doing here?” You could walk from Devon to the border of Scotland and never have any problems.

But there is no one in England who goes for a walk in the countryside without being affected by our punitive, archaic and totally unequal private property laws. That is why I was a founding member of the Right to Roam movement. For all its avoidance of politics, ‘Green Mossy Banks’ is a deeply political song. Social and environmental injustice are at the root of many of our international crises.



For example, is Britain not a particularly good place for walking compared to the US? The English have ancient rights of way that allow them to walk on private land. If you try it in the US, you might get shot…

Absolutely. But where did the US get its idea of ​​land rights? They were adopted as an expanded version of British law, at a time when in England, if you were caught poaching a rabbit or something like that, your hand was chopped off, you were hanged, or you were sent to Australia.

In the music video for “Green Mossy Banks” we see you surrounded by various fascinating English landscapes.

It’s a combination of many pilgrimages I’ve done with Chris Park, a druid, and Charlotte Pulver, an apothecary. At certain times of the year – the solstice, the equinox – we go on pilgrimages together to places like Stonehenge or the South Downs.

Are there any songs on the album that were inspired by specific places?

Meeting is a Pleasant Place is very much about the Dartmoor landscape, right down to the rock tor where we shot the video. The exact location shall remain undisclosed as it is one of the few rock tor that is set in a forest, unlike Dartmoor’s sheep-ravaged landscape of bare grassland. It is set deep in beech and oak woodland, which makes it particularly stunning.

And the song itself comes from a folk tune of the gypsies from Devon.

Yes, and it contains this rather mystical language that has become a kind of mantra for me. “Meeting is a Pleasant Place/ Between my love and I/ I’ll go down to Yonder’s Valley, it’s there I’ll sit and sing…” It’s bad English, but at the same time so powerful in its ambiguity. It could be a love song between two people, but in this gypsy corruption of the words, it suddenly speaks of something much bigger. So I wrote my three verses as a love song to the land.



The appearance of the Trans Voices choir in the chorus makes the song something epic and anthemic…

It’s English folk gospel, as I call it. ILĀ, who runs Trans Voices, is an old friend, and when the choir was formed I said I have loads of songs that I want to use to address the queerness of the country. Folk songs often tend towards the heteronormative, and I want to break that down.

In the liner notes you also talk about the queerness of nature, what do you mean by that?

When you look at relationships in nature, sexual or otherwise, you see a tremendous diversity of roles and identities. In the world of fungi, for example, there are hundreds and hundreds of genders working together in a community. We humans also need to start reorienting our behavior in nature. Much of our oppression and exploitation of nature is due to a male-dominated worldview, and that doesn’t work.

One of the species you have a special connection with is the nightingale. Not only do you sing with them every year in secret performances in the forest, but you recently wrote a book about the threatened extinction of this species.

Yes, and when I’m with them for seven weeks every spring, I get a sense of what it’s like to be in a relationship that’s falling apart. That heartbreak of saying goodbye and knowing there’s a time limit. That’s what inspired the opening track, “Bushes and Briars.” It was the first folk song Ralph Vaughan Williams ever recorded, and it’s a lament about a man and a woman parting ways. As someone who spends a lot of time in bushes and briars trying to maintain a relationship with a dying bird, that’s very familiar to me.

You have a professional background as an outdoor acoustic singer. How do you create the big, dense sounds found on your albums?

I write with James Keay, who plays piano in the band. We both want a rich sound, so that the often very repetitive lines and melodies can take the listener on journeys through different emotional states. It’s about painting as big a picture as possible.



In addition to strings, horns and pipes, they added a more pan-global feel with a Syrian kanun and a Swedish nykelharpa.

We wanted to create textures that conveyed both the ancient and the unusual. I had never used a kanun in an arrangement before, although I have used dulcimers, which belong to the same family, on almost every album before.

Maya Youssef, Britain’s best known kanun player, is involved in the only folk song you haven’t changed: “Black Dog and Sheep Crook”. The song is about a shepherd who is abandoned by his lover because he is “just” a shepherd.

I kept its truth and integrity – it just felt so wonderful to bring the tragedy and melancholy of the Qanun into this song.

On this album you so often lament our distance from nature and our devaluation of it. Yet the spirit and purpose of the music, as you describe it, is also to rebuild those connections. What are your current priorities in climate activism?

There’s a big campaign going on in the UK at the moment to get young people to vote and to get them to vote for nature. Hope for me is always about having a plan. And there are a lot of brilliant plans. It’s about overcoming apathy and resistance and making people realise what we have to lose.

I can’t say what I imagine the outcome will be, I think that would be dangerous, but I hope that the album offers as many opportunities to convey hope and beauty as there are moments of doom and tragedy.

Photo courtesy of the artist.