NI Music Prize Nominee Sam Wickens has recently released his new EP, ‘Watson.’ I caught up with the singer-songwriter to talk about the themes and topics that inspired this emotional EP, how he crafts his sound and the cinematic videos that have pushed him to the extremes in freezing cold weather.
‘Watson’ is a wholly immersing collection of tracks that display a timeline of the darkest and most vulnerable times in Wickens’ life. Within this EP, he describes in great detail his emotional state, his inner thoughts, and how he struggled to keep his head above water. I wondered if this honest delivery made him nervous for the release.
“No, I think I was more nervous when I was releasing the album, the fact that it was so raw to me, it was more of a personal thing for me to release. It wasn’t just like oh these are songs that I think sound amazing, it was just a part of me that I was releasing, so I wasn’t nervous about how people were going to take it. I think everyone, whether it’s music that you listen to normally or something that you would never listen to, when you hear something so raw, you just connect anyway and you respect it, so I wasn’t nervous”
It’s quite a gripping EP. Wickens captures so much anguish and torment through beautiful musicianship and production. Each song is almost like a piece of a puzzle that slots together to talk about his struggle with mental health. The vulnerability and rawness makes each song feel like it was written at the time of Wickens’ suffering. However, in retrospect Wickens realises the scale of what he went through.
“It was looking back in hindsight, that I saw, as you said there was a bit of like, puzzle or a pattern. One of the first thoughts I got when I was listening back after I think it must have been like eight months of writing and recording a lot of the songs, was like when people say the stages of grief, there’s different stages. I started seeing that, each song was like a different stage of… I called it my downfall, into the worst place that I had ever been. So, with some of the songs, it was the first time I had noticed something’s happening here I’m going somewhere, and then it gets into kind of questioning, you know with ‘Murky Waters’, it was that kind of angry, Why has all of this happened?. Why am I constantly being dealt these bad cards?, and then with ‘This War of Mine’ that was the acceptance stage. I’d accepted that I’m not going to get any better, this is going to be the rest of my life, however short, it was going to be at the time, you know, I’d accepted it. Then with ‘Strange’, that’s the afterwards, that kind of awakening of it all just went away. So when we were putting the tracks in order it was even clearer then to see that it was this pattern which was an amazing thing for me to see looking back because you get to see the different types of progress, you know the progress that I was getting more depressed, and it was very evident, looking back, but at the time everyday was the same.”
“ In a horrible way I became externally desensitized to a lot of things, as I said from having traumatic experiences. So, as a songwriter there’s a level of skill where you kind of switch off a little bit and you can analyze it, and I have learned skills in that through psychiatrists and a lot of counseling where you’re able to analyze a situation, especially if it’s inside your own head. But where ‘Murky Waters’ came from, it was just the lines you know I’ve been wading murky waters all alone, and I was so angry when I came up with that line. Because, as you said, the realization hit me, and I was just like, why has this always happened to me. I try my best to be a good person. I try to help anyone I can.Why is it such a struggle for me to just be me and I was just so angry, but when I was writing it, the anger became a bit more because, as you said, you know you’re looking into these things all of a sudden. 3 things that were on my mind that the song was about became 10 became 20. I was thinking about more of these things that had happened growing up and by the time I finished the song it was quite therapeutic because it was like okay some of them things I hadn’t thought of in a while and whenever you finish a song there’s a sense of closure with whatever you’re writing about. It feels like right, I’ve given that time of day, I’ve thought about it,I’ve really fleshed it out and that’s what I love about songwriting anyway.”
Wickens’ lyrics are expressive, well crafted, and poetic. This is especially the case with ‘Watson.’ However my personal favourite track on the EP is arguably ‘This War of Mine’. It is within this song I feel Wickens’ lyrics are at their most potent, evocative and poetic. He sings, “In time ill find some peace of mind. In time, I’ll lose this war of mine” – that line alone is striking. It gives a sense that here within this narrative or this part of the EP’s timeline, Wicken’s gives up or loses hope.
“ When I was first writing the song, I was just sitting playing on piano and how I write a lot of my songs I just kind of go and do an adlib, I’ll just sing whatever comes to my head and then change things up afterwards and stuff, but as I was singing it, I sang the lyric, I’ll lose This War of Mine. I got really emotional just sitting in my studio. I think it was the first time that I had admitted to no one else but myself, by myself that I don’t think this is something I’m going to be able to come through, you know for the first time. Everything else I’ve had an attitude of, I’ll get through it, I’ll fight through it, I’m not going to stop. But this was the first time where I had admitted to myself through music as well which is even closer to me than just me as a person that I wasn’t going to be able to win this time. That just struck me really deep.But also the fact that I was accepting of it, I was like, You know what, I’m going to get some peace of mind, no matter what, I’m either going to lose and none of these problems are going to be here anymore, or, it will leave, and it won’t be here anymore. But at the time of writing it was definitely, I’m going to lose this fight, I didn’t think I’d be around so it was quite tough when I first wrote that lyric.”
This pain is heartbreakingly powerful throughout the EP, but I wondered for Wickens’ family was it difficult for them to hear his pain through this remarkably honest EP.
“My mother always knew. We’ve always been very very close and we’ve always had a very open relationship. I would never hold anything back. So she’s been in the know through everything, especially from when I was a child, she had to be there at all the counseling or GP appointments and stuff so she had witnessed everything from medications to me being tranquilized and put to sleep and stuff. It wasn’t nice, but it was normal and that sounds really weird but because it happened for such a long period of time it was normal for me and my mum to go to a psychiatric hospital or me and my mom to go to my GP to get medication or, you know, go to a substance abuse clinic and all these things. It became quite normal but I wouldn’t let them really listen to the songs at an early stage. So by the time they hear it, it is pretty much with everyone else hearing it. So I think there’s a bit of a shock especially – they hear how I’m saying things from a very vulnerable place and that is me and my music. It’s always very vulnerable. My mom and my dad, they would hear from just a slightly different angle like whenever you are talking to someone you’re almost afraid to say something that could upset them so you sometimes dumb it down a bit, but with music,there’s no limit, you can say what you want. But I do know it was tough for them.”
Wickens’ music doesn’t conform to one genre; it seamlessly flows between electronic, blues, and country to rock. His writing isn’t a forced art. He allows it to flourish and grow organically, sometimes springing off a lyric or melody.
“ If I’m writing lyrics with no music, sometimes, it would be, as you said earlier, poetry. I would write it, and there’s no real musical element. There’s a bit of rhythm to the poetry, how you kind of move the words around and stuff. I see what kind of perks my ears, a little bit. Obviously, with me it’s not really that often a happy sounding song but, yeah with my style of writing I wouldn’t be the type of musician that’s writing every day to improve the skill. Whatever I do write, it’s going to be true, it’s going to be honest and it’s going to be from me, and sometimes that takes a long time. I know one of the lyrics in Murky Waters, “I’ll just drink if I drown” – I wrote that maybe four or five years ago just that one line. I had been sober for six years, and at one really down point, I was like you know what if I feel like I’m drowning in depression I’m just gonna drink. Luckily enough I’ve never done that but I was at a very bad place and I just wrote that lyric down, and, four or something years later, I was writing Murky Waters and remembered that line and was like this makes a lot of sense.”
Wickens once said that ‘Ravens and Crows’ from his ‘All I’ve Seen’ 2019 album was inspired by a bird that flew into his window and it gave him something to ruminate on. I wondered if escaping through his imagination is vital to his song writing.
“Yes, but I find that I need something to kind of startup. Unless it’s like daydreaming, about like what if I could fly, I can imagine that but for storylines and memories, with me and a lot of times my songs, they start off and the first little bit of inspiration is a memory that’s come into my head, and then, that just takes it on. But with Ravens and Crows and other songs that have been quite imagery based – My family always joke I’ve got an insane memory, when it comes to imagery stuff – I just can remember a lot of details. So one small picture- esque memory, I could just draw it in so much detail I could fill an entire song. But yeah, I seem to need that little burst of initial creativity, and then my brain just takes over.”
Another mesmerising quality to Wickens’ songs is his ability to create instrumental backdrops of cinematic quality filled with unique and exciting sounds that reveal themselves on each subsequent listen.
“ That’s the one part I absolutely love about production, the atmosphere and the textures and I think they just add the sense of day to day life, you know, whether it be a wind howling, or something clanging, that’s a big part of my production. It came from whenever I was doing therapy, there’s a form of therapy called EMDR. Whenever I was doing it he’d give me two little controllers and they would vibrate left and right in my hands, and then there would be a beep, left and right and it always made me relaxed. So I started bringing it into the songs and having things go on left and right, and then that kind of evolved into every time I would write a song I would put some kind of atmospheric sound or some kind of textural sound, and it would just distract me enough to allow myself to be creative. I’m just building on that, some sounds are random. In Murky Waters in the introduction of the song, there’s this kind of clicking it almost sounds like some kind of weird bird, but it was actually my drummer, that was taking photos on a camera, and I just heard it, I was like, Oh, we need to record that. In This War of Mine there’s someone hitting a hammer. There’s these weird sounds that I think add some kind of difference to the songs, they’re not all the way through, they’re not, on beat, it’s not even a melody it’s just the sound. But I love that, I love building them up and seeing what you can create with just bits of randomness.”
Wickens has a warm, soulful voice that oozes vulnerability and confidence all at once. There is something quite captivating within his vocals. However, Wickens admits he isn’t a confident singer at all.
“Oh no, I am still not. I never could sing. I would say one of the best things about me being very depressed, was I stopped caring what people thought about me singing and I’m so happy that I’ve managed to keep it up. But I’ve struggled with my confidence, a lot, and when I first started performing, I would never say a word. I would go up when I would perform and I would leave and I would go to the back door, I was a ghost. Then people started liking that, people started talking about the fact that Sam Wickens gets on stage. He doesn’t say anything. He just performs and he leaves and I started to feel quite comfortable in that. But I’ve never really had a lot of confidence, especially within my music, and I’ve seen a lot of people talk about imposter syndrome, where you feel like everything’s a fluke. I felt like that, you know, anytime my manager would say something about my voice and say like, this is quoting him, he would say like, ‘you’ve got one of the best voices about’. I’m like, are you listening to the same person I’m listening to? Because in my mind I think I sound like a drunk 80 year old person that smoked far too much for far too long. But I suppose just getting older, you start to just be okay with yourself. I think that I’m definitely going down that path now which is so much better because you’re able to enjoy it more, you’re not worrying as much.”
Wickens has released a cinematic video for ‘Strange 24’ and ‘Murky Waters’.Both striking in their own way with the running theme of pushing Wickens to his limits physically to create the tension, drama and imagery, recreating visually what Wickens’ mind was fighting through within the themes of these songs and throughout the EP.
“Strange was the first time me and the director Danny Mills had met each other. I’d seen his work on another artist, and there was something about it. Whenever you see a videographer’s work, it’s like you can see through their eyes a little bit, and how they see the world. As soon as I saw his video, it was a song called OMG by John Andrews, fantastic song, I love that song. I saw the video and I just felt like he [Danny Mills] could see darkness in things and if he can see darkness in day to day life, he could almost translate what I feel into video. So, we met up, and he just sat down and was like ‘Tell me your story’ and we just talked for about an hour or two. We were throwing all these concepts back and forth, about the video. I want to go to the extreme for videos. I think it’s a way of almost punishing myself for the music, you know, that kind of old thing. But I wanted it to be extreme. I think I said I want it to be a mixture of the introduction to American Horror Story, and the canal scene out of Willy Wonka. I want it to be that kind of unsettling. Then he texted me one day and he was like, Look, I have found this location that’s an abandoned asylum, it would be pretty cool to make the video almost like a prequel to the song – so the song is about it all just went away, well what went away Sam? so let’s go back there. Obviously, the psychiatric hospital I was in was nothing like the one in the video, but it was an amazing experience for ‘Strange’”
The asylum for ‘Strange 24’ is a harrowing setting I wondered was it as ominous as it looked
“One thing that really made me a bit on edge was there was graffiti on it. Some of the graffiti was very twisted, said some horrible things, and as soon as I read it, I was like, I don’t feel as easy here. I feel like the worst things that happened here happened after it had closed. It was long filming. We were filming from five in the morning and we were finishing about 12 at night. It was about three days, I think, and then obviously the outdoor scenes in the maze which was a task in itself. We had no way to communicate to each other. So, I’m in the middle of a maze and I need to find my way back to figure out what to do next. I had a spray bottle to keep myself wet for the video but a lot of it was just sweat because, you know, I would hear Danny shouting Sam come over I need to talk to you, and it would take me about 25 minutes jogging to get back to him, and that was constant. So it was pretty tough.”
“For Murky Waters, I got sick badly. I used to do crazy stuff growing up…I’ve set my face on fire and stuff for a video when I was a lot younger, and I got stabbed in the arm on camera and this is the first time my mom was like, I don’t think this is such a good idea I’m a bit worried. This was also the first time that I was actually a bit worried because where we were filming was just south of a place called Downpatrick, it was right at the sea edge, and the plan was for me to get into the ocean or into the sea, and I had never been to this location before, but when we got there the edges were just jagged rock face. It wasn’t like a beach. It was the coldest day of the year. It was lashing down. The bath we had, we were filling it up with water from the sea, so it was freezing, also I would need to stay in the same clothes all day. So I was getting a bit worried. We filmed a little bit, but the bath scene where I submerge myself was the first scene that we filmed. So as I went in, it felt like my lung capacity had just shrunk. I was trying to breathe and this waters…freezing cold and it’s freezing outside and it’s so windy… As soon as I went under the water the shock reaction of taking a breath and I took a big breath of water and jumped up coughing and almost threw up all this water at the side of the bath … I was very bad, my body went into a bit of shock and I couldn’t stop shaking. In a lot of the actual frames and scenes in Murky Waters, you can see me shaking and you can see that I’m very blank in the face. That wasn’t acting that was really true. There was a lot of time where I was tunnel vision throughout the day. Where I thought that I was about to pass out because all my clothes were just soaking wet and it was raining and it was windy. It was just constant freezing weather and then the next two days, I was really sick at home. I was really really badly sick. But it made for a great video. I’ve been given instructions from Danny – can you please write a song about sunshine and happiness so he can film in Ibiza or something. I said to him the next thing is gonna involve fire or something warm. One idea that I had for a video was macabre. I wanted to be lying beside myself. Basically, one version of me is alive and one’s dead, and wanted to just lie beside himself, but a few videographers down right were like ‘we’re not doing that, that’s a bit too much’ – this is one of the first questions I asked Danny just to see how he would react. He was like, ‘ definitely’, and I was like, yeah, we’re gonna work together. But I do love working with him and I can’t wait to see what’s next.”
Wickens’ Dublin show has been confirmed in The Workman’s Club for Saturday the 13th of November and Wickens is buzzing to play shows again
“It’s weird I’m just excited. Normally I’m really nervous. Sadly I only got to play one gig. Like, after I took a bit of a break and then I played one gig, that was, you know,a great great gig, it was for a mental health charity. I loved that. I was so scared. But after that, I was like, this is definitely for me, I want to do this again. Then the lockdown happened but I’m just excited. I’m not putting so much expectation on myself. I’m just allowing myself to be myself and enjoy it and Dublin is just amazing for music. The people that go to gigs in Dublin, they just want to listen to music and to be in it and I think after all of this people are gonna want that more than ever.”
I wondered what advice Wickens would give to someone who wants to start a career in music.
“Do it for the right reasons, do it because you want to do it. I see a lot of people, and they’re like 15, 16, and they’re trying to be what they think everyone wants them to be or what TV wants them to be or Simon Cowell and stuff like that. But I think the best thing to do is be yourself or else you’ll end up never happy. I remember listening to a podcast, years ago, and the guy in the podcast said that he was given advice when he was younger to ‘Be yourself’, and he never understood it until he was older and he was like, Oh, it’s not like be a better version of yourself, or be a more theatrical version of yourself, it’s just simply be yourself. I tried to make sure that I took that in a bit earlier than he did. I think that’s what inspired me to be a lot more open about myself because while I was struggling and stuff. I was still pretending. I was pretending I was okay. But I think, just be yourself. there’s always going to be people out there that like who you are and like what you do and there will always be a lot more people that can see through fakeness. I think authenticity gets people’s respect instantly, even if they don’t like your music, they’ll respect that you’re being authentic. I think that’s one of the best things about being a musician is just being yourself.”
I wondered what Sam Wickens has got planned for the coming months.
“I’m not too sure. I know I’ve got a few singles sitting there, but I do like to wait a wee bit between releases. It takes me a long time to debrief and move, mentally on to the next thing. I would like to work on a few more videos, whether it be for new singles that are in the pipeline, or something completely brand new, and just see what we can do live-wise. I do know that in the North, we’re late, they released the roadmap, but no dates and stuff so we’re still in the unknown, but I would definitely like to do something, I love small gigs so if there’s a possibility of a very small, intimate socially distant, whatever it may be, kind of a gig would be lovely especially coming into the summer, you know, nice, bright nights outside somewhere would be an absolute gift, so fingers crossed.”
Wickens is a passionate performer and exceptional instrumentalist; his heartfelt songs and deft musical prowess is something to be admired. Within his songs, there are immaculate moments of heightened emotion and striking, poetic lyrical depth that takes your breath away. With each release, Wickens creates a world of his own where the listener is immersed within his story as he depicts emotion like no other. Sam Wickens is a songwriter to treasure.
Stream ‘Watson’ below
Author : Danu
