Ahead of his UK tour supported by Ruthie Collins, we interview Sam Outlaw about his latest release – a cover of the Enya track ‘Wild Child’ with Molly Parden, his UK tour, surprising his fans with his sonic evolution and more.
Hi, how are you?
I’m doing good. How are you?
Not too bad, how excited are you to get back to the UK and play this fresh batch of songs?
That’s the question, it’s been so long. I’m both very excited – as a performer nothing’s weirder than having that privilege taken away to get to perform for people – and a little bit nervous because I haven’t traveled internationally in two and a half years, but I’m way more excited than I am nervous, I think, it’s a good nervous.
I’m excited for you. Obviously, you’ve just released your cover of the Enya track ‘Wild Child’ with Molly Parden, which I really wanted to talk about, because I’ve never heard someone in the genre cover an Enya track. So, why that song and how did the partnership with Molly come about?
First of all, you’re the only person so far that’s asked me about the Enya cover, so thank you. I’m obsessed with Enya. I mean, I said when I posted the track that she is my favorite artists across any medium – movies, TV books, everything – I just consider her contribution to music to be so distinctly beautiful. I’ve been a fan for a very long time and she is a guiding light to me in terms of my creative output – one time someone asked her about her music being grouped into this new age music genre and what do you think your genre is? She said ‘my genre is Enya.’ I think about that – this new album I just made called Popular Mechanics, it really shows a different side of me, folks that are used to the the records I made and the EPs I put out, they’ve got to really see me being in love with country music, but I don’t think they got to see all the other influences that I’m obsessed with, like 80s pop, and 90s Brit rock and hip hop. I think that has always just been on my mind. So, we were going to the studio one day with my producer, we had wanted to do three songs, but we only had two songs that we were ready to do, so he says, ‘Why don’t you do a cover?’ In my head, right as he said that, I’m thinking I should cover an Enya song. We started digging around and were pretty sure we could tackle ‘Wild Child.’ I’d make every song a duet if I could, I love what a female vocalist brings to a song in terms of that beautiful balance with my tenor or baritone. Molly is one of my dearest friends. Sometimes my wife and I say she’s the fifth member of our family, just because we’re so close with her – she’s over at the house all the time. You hear her voice on the track, it’s just incredible, her voice is just a force of nature. For me, I think it was just so many wins at once, I got to cover an Enya song, I got to make a song with one of my dearest friends whose music I love. I got to do what I think is probably something, in my own estimation, that no one else is doing.
That’s what I loved most about it – this new record has completely changed the game for you in terms of blurring those genre lines and you’re continuing that here, experimenting and trying different things and reinventing this track.
We advanced it, I mean we’ve got synthesiser going, we’ve got synth bass, we’ve got a lot of strange BGV work and then we put in a pedal steel. I just like sending out mixed messages that’s why I’ll do photos with a Steston and other photos where I’m in full lipstick and makeup. I just like messing with people. Why be boring if you have a choice?
It makes it a bit more exciting for your fans if you keep changing the goal posts…
I made the first record Angeleno, I could barely sing into a microphone and yet people still love that record. I remember when I went to make my second record, the label saying, ‘so is it going to be Angeleno Part Two?’ In other words, they wanted me to do that, I think, I was just like, good God, I sure hope not, how boring. That to me is the excitement of creativity, do something that is different every time if you can. After doing Popular Mechanics, my new album after making the entire cover, I’m about to also release a bunch of bonus tracks or singles, I don’t know what you want to call it. Everyone’s different. Everyone’s a little weird. Then I’ll probably make another country record, but either way, I just want to keep myself having fun.
Obviously you worked on Popular Mechanics for about four and a half years, can you talk about the evolution from the first songs, to what it ended up being four and a half years later? How did the process evolve and how did it change?
The quickest way to answer that is I started making the record, before I really had a vision for the record. With my other records, I didn’t have everything figured out my head, but I kind of had a vision. I think I almost always had an album title that would emerge very soon, I started making this new album tracking with a band in Southern California in 2018 and when the dust settled with the recordings, I thought we had some really good stuff. I also could see how I was kind of keeping one foot in Angeleno and then one foot in what I really wanted to do, which was basically a full blast pop record. I think when the dust settled I was like, ‘Okay, I think we can take these three songs’ and those will work in the new aesthetic. I think we ended up recording one or two, and then we end up adding a bunch more. I took those songs, I had my producer, Cheyenne Medders, who’s a Nashville based multi instrumentalist. He’s just a genius. He’s gonna be in my band for the tour. He’s just annoyingly talented, he can play everything and he’s a great writer. For the first time ever I had co-writes on an album – he wrote the title track with me. Honestly, Cheyenne is the hero of this album, because I gave him this ridiculous laundry list of influences, vocals like Enya, keyboard stuff like this Bruce Hornsby record, ripping off this thing from Cyndi Lauper, Whiteny Houston. He would just start. I think even the album title ‘Popular Mechanics’ is really meant to be a reference and my way of reminding people that whoever your favourite artist is there’s the other person in the room that is engineering and helping make that dream a reality. However much you love art, as much as I do, don’t forget the engineer, because the engineer is, in many ways, the unsung hero.
How did you end up meeting Cheyenne and having him be a part of the project then?
The first time I met him, he was playing guitar for my friend Sarah Darling at the Grand Ole Opry, premiering this new duet that we’ve just recorded. I listened to some of her stuff on Spotify and asked who produced it. She said ‘Cheyenne Medders,’ and I said ‘Oh, well, I hope I get to meet her’. She’s like, ‘well, she’s a him, and you’ll get to meet him at the Grand Ole Opry, because he’s going to be in my band when we sing our song’. So, we’re in the greenroom and I hear someone talking about Enya and I flip, needless to say, we just hit it off. I explained my vision for the album, I jokingly kind of said, instead of doing an Americana record, I want to do an Arena-cana record, because I want to be something bigger and bolder. I don’t want to be a parody of an 80s thing or copying that stuff, I said I’m nervous because I just don’t have one of those soaring high tenor voices like Bryan Adams or Phil Collins. He sweetly and calmly said, ‘Well, hey man, I think that’s what’s gonna make it great is it’s gonna be you, it’s still your voice’. I think Cheyenne is a very sensitive artist. I think he’s the one person in the world that was able to take the job that I tasked him with.
Okay so there’s a new track coming Friday and then the tour in London on Thursday. I’m so excited for you and to get over to the UK. Thank you so much for taking the time to chat.
Thank you so much, thanks for having me tell the story.
