"'Are We There Yet?' marks a definitive farewell to my childhood on both a personal and musical level for me. It's an EP that maps my recollection of a time gone by that I miss greatly and contemplate often. Written with both optimistic intention and wistful yearning, it is a body of work that sways in torrents of emotion that even I struggle to define or understand. On a musical level, it's been a part of my growth, but on a personal level, it's a much-needed bit of closure to a beloved time in my life that I need to leave behind in order to move forward. Are we there yet? I don't think so, not just yet, but I
think I'm more at peace with the journey now."
"This one is a little more direct than the others. No hidden meaning here. It’s a very literal and biographical throwback to my fairly hedonistic last few years of school. My friends and I seemed far more focused on smoking high grade than we did on getting high grades and it certainly showed in our A level results. Still, they were some of the best days of my life, and this is a regret free ode to them. Interestingly though, I was born in 1995, and certainly not taking my final exams that year. The opening line ‘flash back to ninety-five’ can therefore be seen as a rare example on the EP where I gave myself artistic license to not be entirely honest, but instead allow some ambiguity because I liked the way the line sounded."
Taken from Sam’s forthcoming EP ‘Are We There Yet?’, his latest collection is set to see him grow more as an artist and a human being throughout. “I create characters influenced by what I see around me,” he says. “A lot of the lyrics are touchstones of my childhood, and where I grew up... and the people that I grew up around.”
“This song was almost inevitable and a needed bit of closure to the ‘coming of age’ sentiment running throughout the EP. It starts with the realisation that a long distance relationship I’d had for 6 years wasn’t going to work out, but then beckons in the change that comes with that decision and the ramifications it will have on my life. Both exciting and daunting, this song really is, at its heart, an optimistic look to the future and all it might bring. Moving to London, falling in love again, and following my dreams in music are the real touchstones of this song rather than a mournful look back on what could have been. It can be summed up by a little clip of audio that I’d ripped from a video on my phone and placed deep within the song's emotive middle 8, where my girlfriend says “You’ll be fine Sammy, you’re in safe hands”.
Originally written for one of my friends as a tale of his struggles with addiction and depression, my friend and collaborator Odd Martin suggested that I write the song as if his life were my own and to therefore lyrically step into his shoes, prefacing every sentence with ‘I’. Suddenly the song blossomed into an amalgamation of both our lives and experiences. Having grown up in the same town, gone to the same school, and shared lots of the same friends, my friend and I had been cut from a very similar cloth, and yet grown apart in our twenties. I likened his tale to one of my favourite novels; ‘Peter Pan’, and also my own fear of leaving childhood behind. Naming the song and constructing it’s metaphor around the aforementioned “boy that never grew up” therefore seemed like the perfect antidote.
Sam Johnson is a singer songwriter living in London, having grown up in Oswestry near the Welsh border.
He started writing songs at fourteen, shaped by what he calls “the inevitable loneliness and desire for companionship of being an only child”.
Sam's songs consist of a musically potent combination, that inhere a voice as big as George Ezra, and a sense of emotional resonance that has more in common with Justin Vernon of Bon Iver.
Throughout Johnson’s music there is a sense of reflection and sensitivity that belies his 24 years, as he has demonstrated on his 2019 project "THE EASTCOTE EP" and his 2020 spring release "World Gone Mad". Now Sam is back with his newest effort “The Kids Are Alright”.