Sam Roberts Band - Great Estates of Niagara

Artist Biography
Sam Roberts Band
When Sam Roberts titled the first song on his first full-length album Hard Road, he wasn’t just
referring to the many trials and tribulations of the touring musician — because lord knows we
don’t need another song by a sad-sack singer-songwriter about feeling homesick while looking
out the van window. On Hard Road, Roberts was essentially laying out a map for his career,
acknowledging early on that the key to longevity and continued relevance is to never to take the
easy route, even if the impressive stats he’s racked up since writing that song — platinum
records, No. 1 chart rankings, multiple Juno Awards (all in Canada) — could seemingly afford him
that luxury. For Roberts’ fourth album, Collider, traveling the hard road meant uprooting himself
from his home and family in Montreal, and putting his trust in a stranger to lead the way.
Though the Sam Roberts Band may be named for its singer and primary songwriter, Roberts has
long relied on his inner circle — guitarist Dave Nugent, guitarist/keyboardist Eric Fares, bassist
James Hall and drummer Josh Trager — to translate his ideas into sound. And on Collider, that
circle expanded to include Chicago-based producer Brian Deck, a veteran of acclaimed indie-rock
bands Red Red Meat and Ugly Casanova, but also a seasoned studio savant who’s overseen
albums by everyone from Modest Mouse to Iron and Wine to Califone to Gomez. In other words,
someone who values classic pop songcraft and disorienting sonic experimentation in equal
measure.
“I wrote these songs in my basement,” Roberts explains, “but I really wanted to get out there and
experience a different place and see how that would work its way into the music. We also wanted
to work with a producer who was going to challenge our understanding of ourselves and the
music that we were making.
“I heard the Modest Mouse records that Brian made, which I thought were great. But then I
started listening to Califone, who are an offshoot of Red Red Meat — the band Brian himself was
in back in the ’90s — and there was just something that clicked there for me, especially his
treatment of rhythm and sounds. I just thought his would be an interesting way of reinterpreting
what it was that we were doing, without necessarily tampering with the essence.”
Initially, the Sam Roberts Band’s move to Chicago’s Bucktown neighborhood in the fall of 2010
didn’t feel all that dislocating; as Roberts notes, “it really reminded me of a Montreal
neighborhood. I felt really at home there — we basically developed a routine and visited the same
coffee shops and breakfast spots every day, to the point where they’d roll their eyes when we
walked through the front door.” But the nature of Collider began to change dramatically as
Roberts became more acquainted with the cast of eccentrics surrounding Deck’s Engine Music
Studios.
“I went to see Califone play at The Hideout, which is such an amazing venue tucked away in this
weird industrial corridor,” Roberts recalls. “This was at about the midpoint of making the record
and that, to me, was a defining moment — just seeing this band play, doing something that… I
can’t even find the appropriate adjectives to explain it. There were just waves of sound coming at
me as I was standing in the back of the club. I was sober as a judge, but I had to close my eyes
because it was just hard to hold onto. It was a really powerful music experience. From that point
on, making this record, there were no more short cuts, there was no more making the safe play —
we were like, ‘Let’s really try to do something here.’”
Before long, Roberts had Deck putting in phone calls to Califone percussionist Ben Massarella
and Antibalas woodwind wizard Stuart Bogie (who’s also lent his lungs to recordings by TV on the
Radio and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs). On Collider, Massarella and Bogie effectively become the sixth
and seventh members of the Sam Roberts Band — the duo make their presence immediately
known on the album’s colossal opening track “The Last Crusade,” which begins as a simmering
soul shuffle before gradually intensifying into a brass-blasted Afro-funk blowout.
“I’ve never really seen it happen this way before,” Roberts recounts with still-palpable awe. “Stuart
comes in, hears the music for the first time and, literally 45 seconds into ‘The Last Crusade,’ he’s
already coming up with something.
In less time than it takes most people to even start absorbing what’s happening, he’s already
coming up with a line and, as he’s doing that, he’s also writing the harmony line for it and some
weird counter-rhythm thing. That’s why he’s on so much of the record — we just wanted to see
where he would take almost anything.”
“And then Ben basically came with this tickle trunk from Mr. Dress Up and he opened it up and it’s
got all sorts of percussion instruments and bells that I had never seen before — this very bizarre
array of instruments. He has a very non-traditional way of approaching percussion. For us to
witness this kind of musicianship was so exciting. We were all just floored, really.”
But Bogie and Massarella’s role on this album amounts to more than just firing up the Sam
Roberts Band’s latent funkiness on tracks like “Let It In” and adding a Sticky Fingers swing to
“Sang Froid”; rather, the process of opening up the songs to accommodate their guest
contributions forced the band to refine and refocus their own playing. Collider is noticeably bereft
of the amped-riffs and scorching guitar solos that define the Sam Roberts Band’s powerhouse live
performances. Instead, the guitars are mostly a textural tool to emphasize the rhythm, a tactic that
ultimately shines a greater light on Roberts’ instantly familiar melodies and lyrical wisdom, and
yields some of his most affecting performances to date (see: the sad-eyed skiffle of “Twist the
Knife” and the end-of-relationship requiem “Longitude,” a dreamy duet with Land of Talk’s
Elizabeth Powell).
You’d think that, given Roberts’ considerable commercial success, he might start to feel
disconnected from the struggling, downtrodden characters that populate his songs — like the
frustrated wage slave documented on the tense, agitated rocker “Graveyard Shift.” But for
Roberts, his good fortune has only made him more conscious of how fragile our notions of
happiness really are.
“On this record, I tried to bring the songs back to my own personal fears; I wasn’t necessarily
trying to come up with songs that were going to speak for everybody. It doesn’t necessarily have
to follow my life to the letter — it’s more about thinking of what your life would be like if you had
just done this, or if you had just done that, and how this could’ve taken you to a darker place, or
that could’ve taken you to a better place. Nevertheless, you always find yourself walking the line.”
And that’s ultimately what Collider is about for Sam Roberts — musical exploration as a vehicle
for emotional introspection. Despite what the album’s opening track might tell you, this is not the
last crusade he’s on — but the point is that it should feel like it.
“There’s got to be some desperation to your writing,” Roberts concludes. “You’ve got to maintain
that feeling of survival — that you can lose your grip at any time. That’s where songs like these
come from — from the realization that you can never figure it out completely, that your grip can
never hold on forever. It’s always there, every time I sit down to write. That’s why the record is
called what it is: ideas collide, especially when you’re making music. But when you take things
that are seemingly different, you can smash them together and create something new.”