Sam Payne: News

Skyler likes to tell me about his dreams over breakfast. He’s eleven, and reads a lot—sometimes late at night, and quite often the images of things he’s read about spill over into his dreams. The dreams are always spectacular, full of nonsense but also full of palpable peril, and I think he delights in the fantasy and adventure that run through his nighttime hours. I have weird dreams too, but I seldom remember anything about them for more than a day or so. A friend of mine dreamt the other night that I was violently killed while rehearsing for a play. I may remember that for a while. The last dream of my own that made it into my long-term memory might not seem memorable to anyone but me. I dreamt that I walked up to an old screen door and knocked. In my dream, the door was almost immediately answered--by my grandfather, who’s been dead now since the century turned. He was deceased in my dream too, but he wore a broad smile as he turned away from me and marched off through the little house whose screen door he had just answered, and he called over his shoulder for me to come on in. I followed him to what must have been the living room. On the couches that curved around the perimeter of the room sat my grandmother, who in real life preceded my grandfather in death by a couple of years. She looked as old as I ever remember her, but the deep lines of sorrow and illness that I remember were gone. I also remember she stood and walked across the room with great ease—something that was difficult for her in real life for the twenty years or so before her death. There were other people in the room too—uncles that I recognized, every one of them deceased and aware of it, all sitting on the sofas. The conversation that I had interrupted with my arrival now continued. They were reminiscing nostalgically about shared experiences—smiling and chuckling and sharing the look that people share when they’ve all been through the same similar thing. And much like you and I might talk about a long-ago football game or Junior Prom, they were talking about their shared experience of passing from this life, through death, and into that undiscovered country that hamlet describes, that country from which none return--the shared experience of their own deaths. There was no ceremony or ritual to the conversation, and it didn’t seem that they’d gathered with that in mind; Friendly talk around glasses of lemonade on the coffee table had simply drifted in that direction by the time I had come in, in the same way that married couples at a dinner party might begin to share pleasant and funny and memorable details of their weddings and receptions, or of their first high school sweethearts. That’s pretty much it. That was the dream. And I don’t know how much breakfast-table story value the dream has, but I’ve been thinking about it for years. You see I saw this end of each one of those passings—the winding-down of those lives--the slowing to a stop of those bodies. On this end, there were long years of great pain, moments of genuine emergency, and the dull, persistent sorrow of loss that continues even now. But if those old loved one can reminisce, in some heavenly living room, in genial and mellow tones about their passage through that most definitive of calamities, what does that say about my passage through the calamity of writing the term paper that’s giving me fits, or of wrangling together cash sufficient for a mortgage payment, or of mucking out the chicken coop? May God grant me steadiness enough, in the face of life’s horrors, to be welcomed back into that living room sometime, to lift a cold glass of lemonade from the coffee table and to reminisce in genial and mellow tones, among those whose faces are filled with gentle knowing, about the things I find most fearful here.

Artist Interview:
Sam Payne

I had the pleasure of meeting Sam Payne for the first time three years ago at the 2003 LDS Music Festival. Everyone in charge of the fest had nothing but good things to say about him. His set was cool, but what was even cooler was listening to him at an after fest jam session. At the request of the fest’s manager, he played “Shazaam,” a song about a modest request that amounts to “don’t make me rich or poor. Make me a super-hero.” (You can hear the full version of the song on Sam’s latest CD release, “Coming Just to Go.”) The next time I heard Sam play live was at the same festival, two years later. He was the featured artist. In addition to his own tunes, he sang a version of “Falling Leaves” that knocked me out of my chair.

In addition to a prodigious talent as a singer/songwriter, Sam Payne is also remarkably accessible, and just an all around cool guy. He’s quite possible the most down to earth guy I’ve met in this business. The following interview will show you just what I mean.


RT: How long have you been creating/performing your own music?

SP: I wrote a couple of songs in high school and a couple of songs in college--for girls or friends or girlfriends mostly, and none of them very important (some downright embarrassing). Then, as an adult, my brother gave me a guitar as a gift and I wrote a song on it. The song was called "Sicklesong," and it was based on a Ray Bradbury short story about a farmer who realizes that he's really the grim reaper. In the song there are two guys, working side by side--one planting seeds and one cutting down stalks. I performed the song as part of a fireside talk. A guy in the audience heard the song and asked me if I wanted to be in a band with him (Korky Ollerton. He use to play drums for the band that became Social Distortion). He didn't know that he had just heard the only song in my repertoire. But I shrugged my shoulders, and we were a band. that was in 1997.

RT: What long range goals do you have for you music career?

SP: On a personal level, my musical goals aren't career goals at all. Music has for a long time been the medium through which I figure things out between God and me. That's all. As far as putting the music in front of an audience, the way I've always seen it, you do what God gives you to do. He's given me some to do, and I've been happy about it and felt blessed. But lately I'm feeling pretty keenly God's counsel to be anxiously engaged in a good cause, and not to require that he command in all things. So after a long time of gratefully receiving (and even relishing) handouts from the Lord, I'm starting to push a little myself. And when it comes down to it, I guess I really do have goals. For example, I feel like music is one among many of the things that the Lord has given to man for the building up of the kingdom of God. And I think that music (the many faces of pop music in particular) is being increasingly commandeered by the adversary in ways that are confusing listeners. I'd like to be active in alleviating the trials brought into the world by that trend. The problem is, that sort of crusader spirit too often makes for bad songs. I've been most useful, I think, when I concentrate more on "obtaining the word," by working hard to figure out the craft.

RT: I've seen you perform live on several occasions. For me, live performance is a kind of "litmus test" for musicians. If you can do it live, you can really do it. Man, you can really get a crowd rocking! Do you prefer working live, or would you rather stick to the studio? What do you see as the differences between performing live and recording in the studio?

SP: It's important to me to be competent in both environments--fluent in both languages. In some ways they're the same--in both environments, you're thinking about the audience and about the craft. But in the studio it's like you're bringing whatever mastery of the craft you have to the process of planning a gathering between you and an audience. The gathering that you've planned gets carried out when they hear the recordings, but of course most of the time you're not there. They can (and often do) tell you about what happened to them while they were there, and you're happy about it-- glad they enjoyed themselves. But it's nicer to come to the gathering yourself. That's what happens onstage.

I love performing live, and there's a lot of magic that happens in the studio as well. I'm very pleased with a lot of the work we've done on both fronts. The challenge is to carry to the stage the precision and sonic sensibility of the recordings, and to carry to the studio the spontaneity and connectedness of the stage shows. Working in the studio is like designing a race car--there's a lot to get right, but you can think about it one thing at a time. Working on stage is more like driving it--there's still a lot to get right, but it's all happening at once; a thousand different factors to analyze and respond to in real time as each moment passes. Being on stage is also ephemeral--it happens, and then it's gone. I've had the great pleasure of working with terrific players, engineers, and producers in both arenas, and I love both environments for different reasons.

RT: Your Dad (Marvin Payne) has been doing music for several years, in addition to being a top notch actor. What kind of influence do you think he's been on your musical career?

SP: Dad has never been very vocal in his encouragement of any of the artistic pursuits of his children. He loves us, and he loves music, but I think he also understands what it costs to have interests like these, and doesn't want to doom us to lives as starving artists on account of his encouragement. Looking back though, I can see his encouragement in the form of what we got for Christmases and birthdays. A baritone Ukulele one year, a plastic recorder the next, and before any of that (for my brother's sixth birthday), two plywood cut-outs shaped like Les Pauls. We colored them with crayons. Mine had a long skeleton stretched out over the face of it.

Today, I always go to my dad with questions about how to navigate the forest of writing, performing, and selling music. And while his music has had an impact, it's his faith that has really influenced me. He's a true lily-of-the-field, consecrating his gifts for the building up of the kingdom with or without a paycheck, and content to wait upon the Lord, who will array him how he will array him. What have the dividends been? Most of Dad's clothes are from DI [Deseret Industries, a local church-run thrift store – ed.], but I never, ever play anywhere (no mater how far-flung the gig) without someone coming up at the end of the show, choked up with the story of how my father visited his or her apartment selling albums door-to- door when they were in college, and of how the visit changed him or her. At one recent show, a nice lady told me that a Marvin Payne concert had once inspired her to lose 200 pounds and open a photography business. What song of mine ever did that?

RT: Trying to pin down a style or genre to put your music in has been kind of tough for me. One minute it seems like singer/songwriter easy listening, but it's got as many jazz influences as it does anything else. Someone told me that it's called "Americana," but that doesn't seem descriptive enough. How would you describe what you do?

SP: I don't know if there's a two or three-word description for what I do. Or maybe I'm just the wrong guy to ask. I hope there's some sort of congruency in what's going on. I like for people to be able to say, "that sounds like a Sam Payne song." But at the same time, I don't mind a bit if the roots of the tunes go in all different directions. I grew up in a home full of folk singers. I studied jazz in college. The musicians I play with all like to play old funk tunes. I hope that's all apparent in the music. The trick, I guess, is to be conversant enough in enough musical traditions that when you want to say something, you can say it. That's all. There are pragmatic standpoints (marketing standpoints, maybe) from which style and genre are useful in locking into an audience and holding its attention. But artistically, style and genre are just facilitators for saying what you want to say in the way it ought to be said.

RT: How does the music creation process work for you?

SP: Every song is a different deal. For a long time it seemed like I always had a couple of musical figures in my head, and when something came along that needed to be written about, I'd hammer the lyrics out and squash them into one or another of those figures. These days it's more like the music and lyrics creep up on each other like they're courting--the lyrics make a move toward making sense with the music, and then the music takes a step toward making sense with the lyrics, and then there's a moment when they both give up and embrace each other. The song writes itself after that.

I heard Joe Bennion the potter talk about how making pottery was a sort of compromise between the artist and the pot--the pot wants to be something and the potter wants the pot to be something and the result is an agreement between the two. I always thought that was just poetry. But songwriting is a lot like that. You know what you want, but the song often wants to pull in a different direction. Ultimately, the finished song is an agreement between you--a song that's something other than what either of you had planned.

RT: You latest album is "Coming Just to Go." What went into the creation of that project?

SP: "Railroad Blessing" was the project on which we discovered what we sound like. "Coming Just to Go" is the project on which we tinkered with everything we discovered on "Railroad Blessing." "Coming Just to Go" is a much more collaborative project--several of the tunes were co-writes, for example (I love that--both the process and the outcome). In some sense we ramped up everything about what we were doing with "Blessing." The production is all more intricate, more complex. The images in the songs are more sophisticated, I think. The poetry is often better. At the same time, for all its fireworks, there's a storytelling quality on "Blessing" that escapes "Coming Just to Go." We're very happy with both projects for different reasons.

On "Railroad Blessing" we used Ryan Shupe in some long-distance sessions for some fiddle work. The concept of working long-distance like that (sending the files to other studios, and having artists lay tracks and send them back) worked well enough that we tried more of it on "Coming Just to Go." Shupe was back, for which we were very grateful, but also the terrific cellist Steve Nelson on "Holy," and Cherie Call on "Sunflower" (which turned out to be one of my favorite recordings ever).

RT: There's a lot of storytelling in your music. Even when you don't seem to be telling a specific narrative, the lyrics suggest some pretty concrete (and very poetic) images to me. What do you attribute this "music as storytelling" influence to?

SP: I don't know where the storytelling influence comes from in general, but it has guided all of my professional and avocational pursuits. I'm a writer by trade, on the heels of an undergraduate degree in English and a masters degree in education. I guess I've always thought that stories are the fundamental units of communication and education. Jesus seemed to think so too.

RT: One of the most obvious example of "storytelling music" in your latest album is "Cloudy Dan." Where did the ideas for that song come from?

SP: As far as "Cloudy Dan" goes, I heard a song called "Chief" from Patty Griffin's (amazing) album "1,000 Kisses" (no kidding, one of the great albums). The song was about a crazy Indian who walked up and down the streets of his small town carrying a rifle. It knocked my socks off, and it made me begin to imagine what the stories were behind the two or three people in every town that have been written off as nuts. My wife is an ultralight pilot, and airplane images are pretty easy to come by around my place. In the song, I imagined that this old crazy guy used to fly airplanes with his son--that a generation ago people called him "Cloudy Dan" because he was always up in the sky. A generation later, the kids in town, not knowing about the airplanes, still call him Cloudy Dan, but they think it's just because his head's all clouded up--because he's crazy. The song tells the story of how he might have gotten that way.

RT: What kinds of projects would you like to undertake, but for whatever reason you've not tackled yet?

SP: Getting my garden in shape. Also, for the last few years I've wanted to write a book that my kids would like to read. I imagined writing a few pages a day, and reading them over bowls of cereal in the morning. I've gotten as far as the first three or four words. The story was going to be about a kid who has an anonymous pen pal that winds up being the President of the United States. Also the kid has a grandpa who mumbles a lot. The family takes the mumbling for loose marbles in the attic, but the truth is that grandpa knows about buried Spanish gold. Maybe that's why I've only gotten as far as three or four words.

RT: I was told by a mutual friend that you were approached by Deseret Book with a contract at one time, but you turned them down; is that right? What went in to that decision?

SP: That's not exactly the case. In the beginning, when we were just starting to lay tracks for the album that became "Railroad Blessing," I called Jeff Simpson, the head of Excel Entertainment, with some general questions about the business end of what we were doing. He invited me to send him a disc when we had one finished. That generous invitation led to a distribution contract with Excel that rolled into a contract with Deseret Book when the companies merged. I was very thankful (and remain so) for the help I got from both Excel and Deseret Book, especially when we ("we" meaning the members of the Sam Payne Project) were so naive about the business of promoting albums. We got a lot of great support from the Excel/DB guys, and a lot of encouragement from Jeff in particular. They opened a door for us that I think might not have opened for us otherwise.

Recently though, I got a call from Earl Madsen of Sounds of Zion. The folks at Sounds of Zion had taken quite a personal interest in my catalog, and even without a label relationship had provided me with some cool live performance and studio opportunities. They had some ideas that I liked about marketing the recordings. My albums are now being handled by Sounds of Zion, but Deseret Book is a great label, and anyone who has a distribution or management deal with them should feel fortunate indeed.

RT: Thanks for clearing that up. Can you give us a preview of any of your current projects?

SP: I've got some things on the shelf waiting for the next step--a live album, a song-cycle about crossings to the west, and an album of inspirational music. As a part of my day job, I'm working on a series of historical novels for elementary school students. I'm enjoying (very much) the work that I do on the radio in Southern Utah. Those projects are all great fun, and all fall under the "what God has given me to do" umbrella. Who knows where any of those will go.

I like long drives, and this is a good state for it. I mean, I-15 I can take or leave, but if I’ve got time to head east as far as highway 89, and then north, that’s a show I’d pay money for. It’ll take me through the mighty reds and browns, the curves and angles of southern Utah, through the towns that remain attentive to the pre-I-15 Utah aesthetic, through the greening that begins along the rivers and then, as you go further north, spreads through the whole rest of the world. Amber waves of grain, spacious skies, purple mountain majesties—it’s all there, and further north you’ll even pass alabaster cities. And, of course, on my left hand and my right are the tracks of pilgrim feet, that saw beyond the years. I like long drives through all of that. Paths sometimes cross in interesting ways on long drives; windows open. I like long drives for that reason too. I went up to Logan myself the other day to play some music for the good students of Utah State University. Some of the guys in the band stayed up there in hotel rooms that night, but a couple of us had to get back for work in the morning, so we made the drive back from Logan between about ten in the evening and four in the morning. At that hour, there’s no reason to find beautiful scenery to drive through. You just pick the shortest distance between point a and point b and hope that the company is good. My company that night was my friend Denis Zwang, the horn player who only hours before had blown the roof off at Kent Hall before hundreds of USU students and their friends. The drive from Logan to St. George being as long as it is, our conversation was long, leisurely, and rich--like a good meal with a good friend. Denis Came to the United States from Holland when he was a kid, and his family found its way to the Avenues in Salt Lake City. When he grew up, he played at D.B. Cooper’s, the food and music place that I’d play at myself a couple of decades later. He rehearsed bands at Al Weight studios, in the same room that I’d rehearse in myself a couple of decades later. He played with Salt Lake sax player Jerry Floor, in whose home studio I’d cut a demo recording a couple of decades later. And there’s more. Denis, I found out, is a hiker, and he knows the names and locations of all the places above my home town that I used to hike when I was a kid. He knows the meadows named for old testament battlefields. He knows the way to exit East Hamengog in the best way to hook up with the long chute that exits onto the granite fields below grassy flat. He knows the view from just below Lone Peak down onto Bells Canyon. He even knows my old piano teacher, Jay Beck, who used to hike the steep five miles to Lake Hardy carrying a big hard-frame backpack full of scuba gear. Forgive me the digression to all those obscure Utah Valley hiking locations, but those images were keys to the locks behind which I store my richest childhood memories. Passwords that open doors to places in my memory where I usually only go alone. And now here was a friend that knew how to get there too. It’s tough for me to communicate exactly what that meant. I’m thankful for the long drive that took the lid off those old memories, and for the friend who, it seemed, had walked, years before me, all the paths that I would walk; the friend who knows precisely how difficult it is to traverse the boulder field above grassy flat, and precisely how refreshing it is to reach the lake above that field. Thank heaven for the friends who understand, I prayed in the wee hours when I got home safely at last. And as I did, it occurred to me that I was praying to just such a friend. What a delight, to enjoy the protection and care and company of a friend who comprehends all the secret places of my heart; who understands with incomprehensible completeness the challenge of my last step, as well as the promise of my next one. Thank heaven for that friend who with indescribable compassion understands anyway all of the things I find difficult to explain. It’s a long drive, after all, and while much of the trip is surrounded by beauty, there are also long stretches of treacherous night-driving to do; driving during which you just have to pick the shortest distance from point a to point b and hope the company’s good. I guess all I want to do is witness that the company is good. The best.

guested on a show in May by the West Coast Jazz Players, some of my best friends. Most of us used to play together in the Utah Jazz Quintet. We had a great time playing that night. It was the first time little Sammy had ever come to a show. He seemed to like it just fine.

It's been a busy year since I last updated this page. Longer, even! Doing it now, I realize that the November show mentioned below was a year-and-a-half ago. That gig gave birth to "Freight Train," a song that now lives on the latest album, called "Coming Just to Go."

On November 12 we were invited to play an exhibit opening at the spanking new Eccles Fine Arts Center on the campus of Dixie State College. Dave Durfey, the excellent drummer from Cedar City, got us the gig and played drums for us. Dave's drums (along with Dave, of course) have gone as far away as war-torn Bosnia to make music. He had told people that he'd never played drums for us before (which was true), but somehow a lot of our audience interpreted that factoid to mean that none of us had ever played together before tonight. They were astonished, until we set them straight. Then they merely had a great time with a great band. There's a part of me that regretted setting them straight, remembering the line from Ghostbusters: "if someone asks you if you're a god, you say YES!" Fun night. The artists exhibited were Greggory Abbot (with whom I was not acquainted) and Matt Clark, the terrific metal sculptor whose wonderful work pops up all over town. Among the attenders of the reception were Cindy Trueblood and family, as well as Anne Shaw, our former neighbor. Good to see them We also saw too many friends and acquaintances to count, all just glancing in on their way to see the play"Jekyll and Hyde," in the theater across the hall.

A few months ago, I was asked to play Hurricane's harvest festival: Peach Days. It's the archetypal small town festival, with tents set up around the elementary school playing field, and displays of produce and local art in the gym. The show was just a few days ago, on September 3rd. Ryan was gracious enough to come with me. When we got there, the wind was whipping tent flaps and turning up the collars of fest-goers. We were there on a Friday. On Thursday it had been a full forty degrees warmer, and still. We wrapped up in fleece and blew on our hands and played to a stalwart audience that seemed to appreciate us as much as any audience ever. Ryan gave them an earful; huge helpings of acoustic guitar, mandolin, and banjo, and every note golden. After the Peach Days show, we retreated to the hills west of Kolob reservoir, where we met Kris, Brittany, and the boys for a wonderful cozy evening in the terrific mountain cabin owned by Brittany's family. Utterly perfect couple of days.

What a fool I must be to have grown up in Utah Conty all my young life, and never have found my way to Midway, just on the other side of Provo Canyon. Ed Stevens of the Timpanogos Singer Songwriters Alliance sets up a cool summer concert series at Midway's beautiful and historic Homestead Resort, and I played the series on August 28th. Midway is gorgeous, and there's a beautiful little bed-and-beakfast establishment on nearly every corner, it seems. Kris and I stayed at Bill and Suzi Stern's place, "The Invited Inn." If you're anywhere near there and are looking for a place to stay, we recommend the heck out of that place. Luxuriation to the max. The concert was a kick. I shared the stage with Nancy Hamblin, who sang fun and lovely acoustic folky tunes on guitar and mandolin. In the audience were some surprising and familiar faces, from Mr. and Mrs. Matt Hoffman (celebrating their first anniversary) to my one-time step-dad Paul Fisher, to Joey Dempster, who had come to deliver a halogen light and wound up staying for the rest of the show. Magical night in a magical place.

June 18th 2004 found the luminaries of the regional faith-based music world at Cottonwood High School, attending the 2004 Pearl Awards. The awards are given by the voting members of the Faith Centered Music Association (FCMA), and are more-or-less the analog of the Grammys for the artists and producers of LDS music, mostly in Northern Utah. We were tickled pink to be nominated in six categories this year, and even more delighted to be asked to play on the show, taped for broadcast on Utah's channel 4 on July 11. It was a two-day adventure for us, during which we met a lot of terrific artists and played our hearts out for a crowd that seemed to love it. Denis, Nic, Steve, and Ryan were so gracious to agree to come (the gig was a freebie). Skyler was my date for the evening, and he was great company. He hung out with us all day, during which he plowed through a couple of chapters of the fourth Harry Potter book during dress-rehearsal, hid Steve's cellphone during dinner, and lent me a great deal of perspective during the show itself. He also cheered his head off for us, as we waded through what turned out to be a whopper of an evening. A real trooper. I'm lucky to be his dad.