- 2021-10-08
-
MUSIC
-
-
Donate to support families affected by the crisis in Ukraine ➔ Sam Fender Releases New Album “Seventeen Going Under”: Streaming
British singer-songwriter Sam Fender released his sophomore album “Seventeen Going Under” on October 8, 2021.
It is his first album in two years.
The album comprises 11-track (deluxe edition 16-track), produced by Bramwell Bronte, Dean Thompson, Joe Atkinson and Thom Lewis.
Sam Fender said of the album, “This album is a coming of age story. It's about growing up. It's a celebration of life after hardship, and it's a celebration of surviving. This whole next album is really f***ing personal, but I think yous lots will get it because we're all on the same page.”
Throughout the record, he drew a dark yet optimistic backdrop of the English north-east.
Sonically, in addition to the guitar sound, the album features a penchant saxophone solos like Bruce Springsteen.
He wrote 60 songs for the album. He said, “I get it now that I've done it, but I had so many songs for a second album, I was like this would be fine. When in a dead load. I wrote, 60 songs for this album. And then finally, whittled it down. But then, if you ask me the same question in January, beginning of this year, when I was on the fourth of the level to score a lot more do you want to just like, maybe that was that was fine but yeah I think every album should be a challenge, you know, like, for me this time around it was like, I found it very enjoyable because the first record I was learning how to make records. And I've learned so many different sort of trips that are hard fought mostly for the second one, that one up here and the second one was a lot more confident about my arrangement of my ability to write arrangements for strings, and for brass. So this records got so much more instruments on sisters to Parana, it's a big astounding thing, because I had the competence to go in, in front of 10 people with cellos and violins, go like way I wanted to play this. Whereas when I was, you know, when I was doing hypersonic missiles, it was like. And I was, was only a couple of years beforehand, I was like my mom's on benefits and I was like, How the hell am I in this position.”
He continued, “Now I felt like when I walked in this time it's like right like this is my job, and this is how I want to do it and this is how I want to sound, and it just felt like a lot more sort of normal. To do this, you know, I mean, I think, which was quite freeing. I think there's a bunch of two rounds from shields, so it's quite free to go in and actually feel like we're allowed to do our job and not feel like we've got pasta syndrome all the time.”- Sam Fender explained track-by-track for the album via Apple Music.
“Seventeen Going Under”
“It's completely autobiographical. When I was 17, my mother was being hounded by the DWP [Department for Work and Pensions]. She had fibromyalgia and she was suffering from other ailments and mental health issues. But she got sent to court three times to prove that she wasn't fit to work. This is a woman who's worked for 40 years of her life as a nurse. She's not a liar and she's not a benefit cheat. She was a hard-working, fantastic, empathetic, incredible woman. And they dragged her through the mud and made her ill. I saw how the government was treating good, honest working-class people who have fallen on their back. They ripped apart every safety net for people in that position. I was old enough to understand what was going on, but I wasn't old enough to be able to do anything about it.”
“Getting Started”
“I had my outside life as a kid, and then I'd go back home and see my mother in turmoil. 'Getting Started' is about a conversation between us, me going like, 'This is shit, but I need to just be a kid, to go out and live my life. I've just turned 18. I want to go out to the pub, to see my mates.' I needed my escapism. These stories, they're mine, but that frustration with the DWP—how you're trapped as a person who's fallen on a hard time by your government—is a unanimous story for so many millions of people in this country.”
“Aye”
“On the first album, I talked about politics as if I knew what I was talking about, but I realised I don't. This record, I'm like, 'I don't know what I'm talking about, but I fucking hate those bastards over there who've got the hedge funds—whose taxes I'm paying, who come after my mum, who come after the disabled, who come after all of these people, plunging them into poverty and plunging kids out onto the streets. Yet they're getting away with that tax-dodging.'”
“Get You Down”
“It's about insecurities, how jealousy and feelings of emasculation and low self-worth can really, really destroy a relationship—and had done with my relationships. The worst thing about it was I could see the way I was acting, and I knew why, but I couldn't stop it. That's why I started doing therapy. I was coming back home after being started on by a bunch of lads but not doing anything about it because I was on my own. So I'd punch walls and stuff. I used to do that all the time in my early twenties. It's toxic behaviour. You can't do that. I'm on a path of self-discovery and trying to heal a lot of that.”
“Long Way Off”
“This is about political polarity and how the working classes feel, or how I felt, abandoned by a lot of the left wing. There's a sect of snooty liberalism in the media world that completely alienates working-class people. Blyth Valley [a constituency a few miles from North Shields] went Tory [in the 2019 general election]; it's been a Labour seat since its inception. That's not good, but we're in a dangerous, dangerous place, politically. It was the arrogance and incompetence of politicians thinking that they could sail through [Brexit]. They've fucked the country completely. There should be trials—for the lies, for the deception of a nation. My family members who voted for it voted for it because they thought that they were going to get money for the NHS. They'd seen their mothers pass away in the arms of people who worked for the NHS. They'd seen their family members on wards suffering. And they thought, 'I'm going to vote for that.'” -
“Spit of You”
“It's about my dad. It's about our inability to communicate about emotions because of the way we were raised. Our inability to have an argument without wanting to kill each other. It's toxic masculinity at its finest. But it's also about how much I love him, how I saw him as a son. My grandmother was a really small woman, and when she was dying, she looked like a child. He kissed her. I was reminded that I'm going to be that person one day—saying goodbye to him, potentially with another young kid behind me looking at me thinking the same thing.”
“Last to Make It Home”
“At the beginning, I'm talking to the Virgin Mary, a Mary pendant. I'm realising I need to get ahold of myself. In the second half, Mary becomes personified. She becomes just some girl on Instagram. It's that like desperate, horrible shit line of 'Hit the 'like'/In the hopes I'd coax you out of my derelict fantasy.' In the hopes that I'd be noticed. It's really an anthem for losers—because we've all been a loser once. I've been a loser hundreds of times.”
“The Leveller”
“This is about depression and rising out of it. It's a fighting song. But the leveller is the lockdown itself. It levelled everything.”
“Mantra”
“You find yourself in the company of sociopaths in this business. And you sometimes worry that maybe that means you are too. And I don't think I'm a sociopath. Got too much empathy for that one. I think I'm a vulnerable narcissist at worst. This song's about figuring out that you can't pay so much attention to these people who genuinely don't care about you and they're only there to bolster themselves. I've had low self-esteem for a long time. I've always tried to seek validation from people that aren't actually that nice.”
“Paradigms”
“It's a round-up of all of the things that I've thought about in the album. So it's a self-esteem rock song. People shouldn't live miserably, they shouldn't have to. I lost another friend to suicide last year. And I got all of my friends from home, some of them who knew him as well, to sing that last line, 'No one should feel like this.' It's a choir of people from Shields. I think it's a really powerful moment.”
“The Dying Light”
“This is a sequel to 'Dead Boys' [2018 track examining male suicide]. It's in the perspective of somebody who's actually thinking that they might take their own life. I wanted it to be the triumph over it—in the moment when you decide, 'No, I'm not going to do this, or I can't leave those behind.'” - source : Apple Music
