SAM LEE will release his fourth studio album, songdreaming’ on 15th March.
The news arrives with the announcement of a 17-date headline tour for 2024 – tickets are on sale now here.
songdreaming represents the latest stage in the development of Sam Lee’s music, from its roots in traditional folk song to a new way of imagining and performing these old songs, making them relevant for a modern audience.
Nature, and the natural world, remain Sam’s primary lyrical concern. He characterises the album as: “a mosaic of the emotions felt in my time outdoors, that artistically emerge in reflective moments when I’m permitted to recount and articulate the complexity of all I witness and thus feel responsible for”. In taking songs that are directly related to the nature of the British Isles, weaved into its very being, Sam is continuing to reinvent and contemporise a tradition of communion with the land through song.
What that means to the listener is a rich and evocative journey through the complex emotions created for Sam by his engagement with nature and his deep-felt affinity for it, drawing on sources as diverse as the sacred music of European and global mystic traditions, the work of neo-classical contemporary composers, and the simple effectiveness of a well delivered vocal melody. At the heart of songdreaming is a belief in the fundamental power of music to connect and inspire. For Sam, these reimagined and reworked songs are more than a history, they are a living, breathing connection to our very being:
“Those people who are and were singing the old songs here at home were also looking after the land. When we stop singing to the land, the land stops singing back.”
songdreaming is released by Cooking Vinyl on 15th March, 2024, on Vinyl Album, CD, and digital download. Album pre-order link – https://SLee.lnk.to/songdreamingPR.
Sam tours the UK through March and April before a hometown headline show in London in June. He performs at the Hebden Bridge Trades Club on 17th March, Crookes Social Club in Sheffield on 20th March and The Old Woollen in Leeds on 24th March 2024.