HE’S READY TO LAUGH, at himself as much as anything, exceedingly amiable and charming, and is curious about any stranger with a story to tell, even before he makes it here for Woodford Folk Festival at the end of the year. But there’s no point pissing about with something throwaway when you’ve got Sam Lee around.
For a start, just listing who he is and what he’s done/doing sobers you up pretty quickly. A Mercury Prize-nominated folk singer, whose fourth album was released mid-year, and folklorist whose speciality has become songs from Britain’s Traveller communities – most of them previously unheard outside those tightknit communities – he is an author (The Nightingale: a history of the bird in popular culture), broadcaster, soundtrack composer, collector of birdsong (including performing in the woods with nightingales) and, perhaps most of all, a conservationist and climate activist.
But not an activist confined to song and maybe the occasional protest (his involvement with Extinction Rebellion is hardly casual) as a childhood immersed in wilderness groups and a passion for rambling in a country whose unfenced land is fast disappearing (what he calls “the invisibling of the barbed wire fence”) has made him a proselytiser for more sustainable, more connected, more natural, way of living.
Which is noble and admirable, but it’s 2024 so can we be reconnected to a different, natural version of ourselves and world or is he whistling into the void trying to get us there?
“Hmm,” Lee says, and pauses. “Can we do it? We have a choice. If there are enough people in that void listening you suddenly realise that the void isn’t that big and it’s a temporal thing and slowly by slowly we’ve got to out whistle the other noise actually.
“I work on this principle that to make change and overcome the opposition you have to throw a better party. You have to do something more beautiful and more attractive, more irresistible. I think I’m constantly amazed that when I do, that when I lead people into that place of nature connection – be it that sort of record or be that through the lived, the in-person experience – the transformatory aspect of it proves to me that the void is a place people are trying to get out of.”
But how are we – the suburban and urban people who are not Sam Lee with his direct daily and constant connection to the natural world – to do it if we can’t sing with the nightingales and are tempted to give up? Or if the rivers we want to swim in are polluted with sewage? When those barriers are staring us in the face and making effort seem pointless? When the void looks insurmountable and inescapable?
“How do we confront that? Joyful activism, firstly,” he says, yes, joyfully. “Part of being an artist is about creating illusions and creating fantasies that paint a picture of a world that we would like to be in. I do that in my music and also in the real-time action work I do, such as the right to roam movement – an organisation I am a co-founder of.
“There are all these obstacles but actually, collectivism, community building and creating experiences and finding the means to do it is a constant. And I found in the UK there is an incredible upswelling of diggers, of land workers, of protesters, who are going out having wonderful times in nature that they’d never be able to do on their own but have got something to fight for, something to protect, and that’s created a new sense of collectivism that is very sexy.”
Collectivism, a broader community, a connection with natural and social traditions, these are all elements that are intrinsic to his non-music work and thinking, but they are also intrinsic to the sound and style of music he plays. That is folk music in every way: trying to connect the past, trying to bring traditions that once connected people to each other or helped define them, into modern sonic and social contexts. Is this a coincidence of passions or did one feed the other in him?
“In my 20s, when I really discovered folk music, I was a music fiend: a vinyl-collector DJ who never made music, never was a singer or creator, but was hungry for it, lived for it and when I found folk music, within those songs it was like here is a musical manifestation of everything I’ve seen in the ecological systems of reciprocity and dependability and diversity and harmony and dissonance,” Lee says. “Everything about it was like, here is a human expression that is in the form of a natural system: problematic but also full of grit and vulgarity and profanity as well.
“I loved this, and it was a little bit like finding a wild valley that no one had been in and it was overgrown, unattended – folk music was a bit like that in the early 2000s, and I felt like the lucky first person through the rusty gate.”
Is it because he came late to folk music, or is it because he didn’t initially think of himself as a folk musician, that it is only very recently that he has taken to writing, beginning with writing new lyrics to older tunes, which is a folk tradition after all, and more recently completely new songs?
“Yes, confidence perhaps. But also interest,” he says. “There I was suddenly given the keys to the museum, and I was in many ways one of the luckiest people because I was mentored by a Scottish traveller, who was really the last of his tribe in that respect, and my song collecting meant that I spent 15 years in the company of the last tradition bearers. I’ve been handed this incredible trove. I got a lifetime’s work to do just to sift through what every song is and what it means, and giving it its sense of respect and honour.
“So I can’t believe that I only made two albums that were like pure folk albums, really. Because I could have made 15 albums if I was a fast worker, and there are so many songs I haven’t recorded. But they are inside me and I carry them, my spell books.”
So when does Sam Lee the writer come into that, maybe adding to the spell book?
“I think it’s come from someone who has had to take some time to believe in himself, that I have something to say. I felt I had a duty to prove that these songs, these old songs, were beautiful and worthy of being listened to, and me and a lot of my contemporaries have worked very hard to reimagine what these old songs in their true forms sound like today with a range of new instrumentation.
“And then I think it was a case of me wanting to be a little bit more personal and speak as an artist and less as an artistan.”
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