Folk artist Sam Amidon brought a bit of Americana flair to Big Ears this past weekend. It’s a sound Southerners know well: banjos being picked accompanied by a raspy voice. The 33-year-old sat down with The Daily Beacon to share more about his background and the Big Ears experience.
DB: You grew up in a musical household. How has that influenced you both as a musician and as an individual?
SA: It was great. I grew up around a wide variety of music. My parents were both folk musicians, but my dad gave me Miles Davis’s “Bitches Brew” when I was young and my mom loved the Talking Heads, so I had a lot to listen to.
DB: How has your Big Ears Festival experience been? Talk a bit about sharing the stage with the great Kronos Quartet.
SA: It’s been really good. I love being here and seeing a lot of my friends from different fields of music. Working with Kronos is a blast, and I’ve worked with them before, but it’s a bit different – you have to count along internally to make sure you don’t mess up a measure or anything. It takes a bit more concentration and focus than usual and you can’t space out.
DB: Discuss how you think you’ve progressed from your first album to your most recent, “Lily-O.”
SA: I know it sounds cliché, but these five albums represent a bit of a personal journey to me. Each new album was a stage where I was like “Well, I can do ‘this’ now.” Like on my first album, the guitar parts I kept were just the first ones where I got through without messing up too much instead of doing 30 takes and keeping the one with the deepest vibe.
DB: How do you see yourself in comparison to your contemporaries, both lyrical and instrumental?
SA: Well, I take traditional folk songs and rearrange the music. It’s not as much about comparing myself to others as it is respecting artists that either write their own songs or do traditional ones. I like artists from both realms.
DB: What’s the best place you’ve eaten at in Knoxville this weekend?
SA: There’s a shop that sells muffins across from Pete’s Coffee Shop, but I can’t remember the name. The muffins were really good, though!
