Sam Payne: Blog

Click here to buy "Father to Son," the new album:
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Audiences have been asking at the merch table for the album "with the stories on it." Recorded for an intimate studio audience, this is the album. It includes stripped-down, full band acoustic performances of the best of old and new Sam Payne originals, along with the stories that accompany the songs, just as I tell them live. The musicians on the album are my long-time band mates, along with special guests Peter Breinholt and Cherie Call. If you're among those who have been waiting for this album, the wait is over. If you're wondering where to start getting acquainted with My music, this is the place.

Here are a couple of moments from our American Fork Amphitheater show. Josh Payne on guitar, Ryan Tilby on bass, Nic Chamberlain on drums. Lovely summer evening.

I heard a radio interview once with an author who had written a book about deep-sea treasure divers—guys who pulled up artifacts from shipwrecks for a living. The author kept emphasizing the perilous adventure of his story by saying “remember, there are a thousand ways that the sea can kill you.” I heard that line maybe a dozen times over the course of the interview. I bought the book, and he says the same thing a number of times there. I hadn’t thought of it in a long time, until I heard another interview the other day, with an author who had written a book about cowboys working oil-rigs in Wyoming. She said a similar thing in her interview. “Wyoming has a hundred different ways to kill you,” she said. I suppose it’s true that fate could take a person in any number of ways—and does. More ways, even, than it’s easy to list. People pass on jumping out of airplanes, stung by poisonous bugs, crushed by giant bales of hay, rolling cars into canyon ravines, battling brain tumors, running out of gas in the winter wilderness, pulled into giant tornadoes, and more, and neither riches, nor fame, nor even clean living seem to insulate any of us with any kind of certainty. There are no guarantees. We’re pretty fragile, when it comes down to it. And with a thousand different ways to die, doesn’t it make sense to choose a fulfilling way, in the next few moments, to live? After all, there must be a million of those.

The choir concert was over, and just outside the auditorium doors sat a stack of unused choir programs. My dad, there to see his grandson sing, took one of the sheets, and on his way across the lobby, folded it into a paper airplane. It was the paper airplane of his generation—long, and sleek with narrow wings. He looked at me and launched it out across the lobby. It was a good enough flight—maybe forty feet. I walked back to the table and took a program of my own. It was time to show the old man up. Mine was the paper airplane of my generation—Clean lines, snub nose, wide wings. My flight covered about forty feet, and my plane skidded to a stop, right next to Dad’s. In the end, each of us has his own way of doing things—making paper airplanes or raising families or making a living in the world. And we’re often quick to argue the virtues of our own way over the other guy’s. But in the end, we tend to cross the finish line in about the same amount of time, having covered about the same distance. And maybe it’s enough to say that when we retrieved the planes from the floor, dad picked up not his own plane, but mine, and I his. I don’t know what he did with mine, but I went home and carefully unfolded his, and spent some thoughtful moments learning how to make it.

I turned on the Oscars for a minute last night, just in time to see "Falling Slowly" win the award for best song. I understand that "Enchanted" is terrific, and that "Falling Slowly"--through sheer airplay--may (sadly) be well on the way to becoming a cliche of itself, but man, Hansard and Irglova's performance was heartbreaking and unaffected, and Irglova's "fair play to those who dare to dream," may be the loveliest thing I've ever heard anyone say at that podium (Kudos to Jon Stewart for stopping the show long enough for her to come back and say it).

God bless musicians.

We had a wonderful season touring "The Gift" with my friends Ryan Shupe and Peter Breinholt. It made for a very merry Christmas. Thanks to all who came (there were plenty of you, and we're unspeakably grateful). Hope you had a terrific season, too. God Bless you, every one!

My little sister, Eliza, makes amazing songs and then (with the aid of a tiny little camera, a nifty hand-held monopod, and a friend) makes music videos of them. Her songs will--how you say--blow your mind!

As gigging musicians, my friends and I play a lot of weddings. It’s our bread and butter, actually—steadier work for musicians than just about any other kind of show. We’ve seen and done some interesting stuff down in the wedding trenches. One time, we played for a big wedding at the Art Museum downtown, held midway through the run of an exhibit of rare antique hats. As the evening progressed, and people began to loosen up and dance, we noticed these terrific hats cropping up on the heads of some members of the tuxedoed wedding party. Man, cool hats, we thought, I wonder where in town they found those. Then it occurred to us to look around the museum exhibit, and with a shock of horror notice an increasing number of empty hat display stands. On another evening, we played for a wedding party full of old folks and young folks, all hanging around to hear the music. One young man asked elderly aunt so-and-so to dance, and they cut a rug right there in front of us—that is, until the young man got carried away and deeply dipped his aged aunt and her wig fell off. The inadvertent trashing of museum exhibits and the doffing of hairpieces will become the legendary family-gathering stories of families all over the state, and we’re there to see many of them. We seldom say much about them—just keep playing music through thick and thin. We played a wedding not long ago in which they asked me to be what amounted to the sound guy during their ring ceremony, performed on the dance floor right in front of the band setup. The family and friends of the bride and groom formed a circle around them, and the bride and groom exchanged rings and vows. They were both laughing and crying tears of joy at the same time, and I found myself watching the circle of smiling onlookers. There, next to the bride and groom, was the bride’s sister and her husband, a few years older than the newlyweds, she with a baby girl on her hip and he holding the hand of a young boy. Next to them were the bride’s parents. Both of them were battle-weary from a long day, but they were holding hands, the patriarch and matriarch of this whole clan. Mom was smiling, and dad was somber and misty-eyed. Down the line was another sister of the bride’s, freshly engaged to the young man standing next to her, engaged, as we found out, only the day before. Their youthful faces were full of the bright anticipation of future days. There were others in the circle too, but I kept watching the family—and I don’t know how to explain this exactly except to say that they seemed for a moment to be one person—the younger sister, and the bride, and the older sister, and the mother—one person that I was allowed to see at different points on the path: freshly engaged, wearing the ring, holding the child, and looking back at her adult children. And at each place, the person believes that that place is all there is—each of them feeling so much, living such a rich moment, that that moment seems like the only moment. Right now, in this moment, I’m the father of a growing family. I have three sons in this moment. There is a guitar in this moment, and a radio microphone. In this moment, there’s a mortgage. There’s church work to be done. And this moment often seems like the only moment. I guess there’s something to be said for that. But in some other moment, I was in high school. I was stronger and faster in that moment, and more naïve. There was a moment when I held Kristie’s hand not as her husband of thirteen years, but as a kid mustering up the courage to ask her to marry me. There will sometime be a moment where I lift a baby grandchild in my arms. There is quite a different me in each of those places on the path, and if I were to get all those guys together, I wonder what we’d talk about. I wonder what we could tell each other—what dangers we could warn each other of; what beauties we could call each other’s attention to. And maybe most importantly, what responsibilities we have to one another. One thing’s for sure. I wouldn’t mind wearing, in any moment, the look passed around the circle by the family of the bride that evening—the look that melted away eventually into dancing, accompanied by the music of an enthusiastic and ever more pensive band.

Much of the time, of course, everything is a mess. Nothing turns out like you figured, and your best-laid plans all blow up in your face. But sometimes, just sometimes…well, take Jason Alex. Nine years old. Autistic. On the neighborhood basketball team. I watched a lot of games in which Jason Alex got pretty cleanly passed by as his teammates pounded back and forth, up and down the court. I watched some tears shed over it. Tough to watch. Felt too much like life.

But there was that one time. Kids all knotted up together, wrestling for the ball in one corner of the court—Jason Alex on the outside. Suddenly, the ball pops out of the huddle like a bar of soap; and right into the bewildered hands of Jason Alex. Behind him thunder two whole teams of nine-year-olds, rabid for the ball. He beats them to the basket by just a few steps—enough time to get a shot off, and it's bedlam on the sidelines. Jason Alex flings the ball in the air. Up it goes, and the teams freeze. On the sidelines, no one can breathe. Down comes the ball, in impossible slow-motion it seems, and…clunk, clunk, in. The sidelines go berserk. The ref's whistle falls out of his mouth. The nine-year-olds get busy again, passing the ball in and roaring down the court. Jason Alex himself turns toward the sidelines—toward his mom and dad. His hands are stretched out, and he's laughing, and big, happy tears are rolling down his cheeks. Yeah, a lot of the time nothing goes like it ought to. But sometimes…sometimes.

(Hey visitors! This interview is from a terrific music blog kept up by Spencer Williams in the Philadelphia area. I've discovered a lot of great acts on his site. There's a link to it on my "Links" page)


Sam Payne, a singer/songwriter, from Alpine, UT has a knack for words and music not to mention a ton of talent. When put together it becomes a musical journey worth taking. He has traveled across the U.S. performing his music that focuses in on his love for jazz and folk music. He has released "Railroad Blessing" and with the Sam Payne Project, "Coming Just to Go." In the next couple of weeks, we'll be checking out his CD's, but for now I had the chance to ask him a few questions about all sorts of random. As you are reading, check out his MySpace page where you can get to know his music a little bit better.

Interview:

Full given name:
Samuel Leland Payne. The "Leland" is the name of my late grandfather, who came up to central Utah from the Mexican colonies when Pancho Villa rode through. In the thirties, he found his way to California, and photographed cartoons for Walt Disney.

Hometown:
Alpine, Utah. My Dad escaped LA and came there in the early 1970s. People thought he was nuts, since there was no way on Earth a person could make a living in Utah as a folk singer. It cost him the relationship with his in-laws. But he sort of felt like the town musician was the community medicine man. LA was no community, and it was too bonkers to make good medicine. Also, he wanted to raise a family.

MAC or PC?
Mac mackity mac-mac. This is anecdotal for sure, but I broke down and bought a PC once (primarily for my kids). Junk-ola. Maybe I just got a lemon.

Favorite post-show meal:
I've put down a lot of cereal and milk in the wee hours. There's also a 7-eleven between the city and my house that makes a mean hot dog. Tragically, where I live the places for good eats are usually closed by the time the show's wrapped, and Denny's doesn't draw me like it used to.

Pre-show rituals:
I find a minute in a place by myself, and I pray. Also, if it's a multi-band show or a festival or something like that, I like to spend the time before our set out in the audience. I'm partly interested in seeing the other bands, but I'm much more interested in being out among the people who are going to hear us. I check them out, looking for a good sense of what brand of energy we're up against. If it were a play or something, I'd be dedicated to maintaining the illusion of character by staying backstage before curtain, but as a musician I'm just me. No illusion to maintain. I like to hang with the audience as much as I can.

Worst onstage mishap:
A couple of knocked-over mic stands. No big. My fiddle player occasionally reminds me that my fly is down, but it's usually before we go onstage. A couple of gigs ago, a pair of teenage girls asked if they could come up on stage and scat. I waved them up, but when I handed the mic over to one of them, she made a noise like Daryl Hannah makes in "Splash." I used to have a good relationship with that sound guy. I've now got a strict no-handing-the-mic-to-pubescent-would-be-scatters rule. At least when I'm playing through Joe Anderson's stuff.

Special skills:
I can suck a soda bottle onto my lips, and then slide it onto my cheek and up around my temple and into the center of my forehead without losing the suction, and then hang it there. Also, I worked at a Childrens Museum for a few years, and can make animal hats out of poster-board like no other.

Last book you read:
I'm always halfway through a dozen books. Thought Life of Pi was a kick. I keep coming back to My Name is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok. Chick Corea is quick to credit "Dianetics" in his liner notes. To each his own, I guess. My own is "Asher Lev." Any artist in any idiom oughtta own that book.

Favorite magazine:
I don't make much time to read magazines, but "National Geographic" keeps coming to my house, and my mom always has the latest "Utne Reader" in the bathroom.

Must-see TV show:
I watch a lot of DVD's, but I haven't had TV reception in my house for about a decade. Happiest decade of my life. iTunes is killin' me though. A guy at work got me hooked on "LOST." Wrong show to get hooked on--it's been pretty inane for a long time. But I'm hooked. What can you do? I'm also a closet "Office" downloader. And, of course, I've got a soft spot for "The Simpsons"--hands-down the most literate show on TV (says the guy who hasn't had TV in the last decade).

Last good movie you saw:
I liked the Will Ferrell film "Stranger than Fiction" a lot. I saw it in the middle of seeing a lot of Albert Brooks films on DVD ("Defending Your Life," "Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World," etc.), and it seemed somehow of a piece with those movies. Actually, the last good movie I saw was on DVD--an old one: "Lawrence of Arabia." The girl at the video rental place handed me a coupon. Truth is, I'm not very often in the mood to see the greatest movies ever made (usually I wind up watching "Waking Ned Devine" again), but since it was free, I rented "Lawrence" (which I had never seen) and also "Casablanca" (which I still haven't seen). I had already seen "Citizen Kane."

Favorite place you have lived:
That old Alpine house I grew up in. You never get your childhood house back. Ours was a little pioneer-era (1870s) stucco affair on a big yard, butted up against fields (and beyond that, mountains). My three brothers and I shared an attic bedroom. My mom sold that house a decade ago, and it was like losing a relative. We've since been back (my sis got married in the front yard), to find that the home's current owner has restored it with such care that it's like a resurrection. We only met that guy once before he bought the place, but a decade later he still refers to the bedrooms by our names.

First concert ever saw:
As a kid, seeing shows would have been an extravagance. I saw my first concert in college. Ellis Marsalis at Berkley. I went with my grandparents, and they wanted to leave halfway through. I was riveted, though. Jazz was still a novelty for me then.

If you could go back in time and catch any concert, what would it be?
Keith Jarret's Koln concert (I can't remember how to type an oumlat, or for that matter how to spell oumlat). I've gone back and forth on that album, and I'd like to see the performance in its cultural context. That's another album that seeped into my childhood on LP, played mostly by my folks in the living room when we were going to sleep upstairs.

Current band/musician (besides yourself) you have been recommending to your friends:
I've been telling people about Brandi Carlile lately. She's got this cracking-her-voice-by-out-singing her range trick that I think she plays once too often, and as a songwriter she's sort of a poor-man's Patty Griffin, but her voice at its best (which is almost all the time) is this grand, huge thing that I'm positively crazy for, and the way she puts songs together has deep roots--she seems to know where she's from in a way that I wish I did. Also she plays a guitar that sounds a lot like the Taylor 710 I just bought from a guy who had loved it through and through. I've listened to her self-titled disc over and over.

Most played song on your iPod:
Maybe "Long Ride Home" by Patty Griffin. That album ("1,000 Kisses") just kills me. Or maybe "Wartime Prayers" by Paul Simon, from "Surprise" (an album I read described as "achingly rational"). There's a local artist, a friend of mine, named Drew Williams, who wrote a tune called "Coming Home" about the passing of his grandfather, and recorded it with "The Tilby-Williams band." Gentle little thing. I listen to that a lot too.

Favorite song:
"Grapefruit Moon" by Tom Waits. It's on the "Closing Time" album, which was from that early, early period that Waits has distanced himself from. But it's a terrific song. Maybe it's the baggage--I used to catch my dad listening to that tune late at night on LP in our little place in Utah.

Best vacation spot:
My wife and I spent a couple of days on a 40-acre horse ranch outside of Portland with a terrific couple that had us out there for some house concerts. Spring was just coming on. Lovely beyond description. May they have us back a thousand times.

Worst job you ever had:
I made sandwiches at Subway for a couple of months in high school. There were all sorts of reasons to fire me (I was disorganized, I sometimes screwed up orders, I asked for a lot of days off), but when they did fire me they told me that it was because I whistled while I worked.

Favorite venue to play in:
There's a lovely little Amphitheater in American Fork, Utah. Shabby sound system, no backstage to speak of, big flat concrete stage, not kept up worth anything. It was, I think, the result of a depression-era work project. It's within shooting distance of a dozen or so nice new high schools with slick gear and engineered spaces. But the amphitheater is where the local communities have been gathering for years around town plays, founders-day celebrations and so forth. It was the place I first stepped on stage (as third-Von-Trapp-kid-from-the-left in the town production of "The Sound of Music"). I'll play there any time I'm asked.

It was 1897, the Jubilee year of the reign of Queen Victoria, and England’s great poets were expected to celebrate the frenzy of national flag-waving by putting pen to paper. That included Rudyard Kipling, the favorite poet son of his countrymen. Oddly, in an age of celebrating conquest and growth, Kipling’s contribution was a poem called “Recessional,” and it checked the unguarded celebration of the country with a warning. It’s a poem worth reading as we prepare to spend a day with family and friends celebrating the freedoms we enjoy. Here’s just some of Kipling’s poem, “Recessional”:



God of our fathers, known of old--
Lord of our far-flung battle line
Beneath whose awful hand we hold
Dominion over palm and pine--
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget - lest we forget!

The tumult and the shouting dies;
The captains and the kings depart:
Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice,
An humble and a contrite heart.
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget - lest we forget!

Far-called, our navies melt away;
On dune and headland sinks the fire:
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget - lest we forget!

If, drunk with sight of power, we loose
Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe--
Such boasting as the Gentiles use
Or lesser breeds without the law--
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget - lest we forget!

For heathen heart that puts her trust
In reeking tube and iron shard--
All valiant dust that builds on dust,
And guarding, calls not Thee to guard--
For frantic boast and foolish word,
Thy mercy on Thy people, Lord!


God has been good to us. May his mercies continue, and may we, on a day of celebration, pause for a moment to reflect, to ponder, to pray. After all, for all the muscle we seem to throw around, the truth is, we ain't nothin' without God, who lends us breath from moment to moment.

I drive to work every day up into a narrow, rocky canyon north of my desert town. The commute is nothing short of breathtaking—the massive cliffs, hulking and red, rise in great piles above the desert floor, etching a hard line against the impossible blue of the warm morning sky. Below the cliffs, the desert floor lies perforated by wide veins of dark lava. The pale sage and unruly creosote grow along my route too, the shaggy heads of those plants waving me by mile after mile. Once upon a time, it was a staggering view. But I’ve made the drive hundreds of times, and it has happened to me as it has probably happened to you with any stretch that you drive over and over. The grandeur of those desert vistas has blurred into periphery. My vision has narrowed on that drive to take in not much more than the top of my dashboard and the few hundred feet of road ahead of me. Sometimes a rainstorm will decorate the cliffs with cascades of water and grey, opaque mists enough to draw them back into breathtaking focus. But most days they fade out beyond my conscious attention, my head occupied with whatever small thing I might be thinking about down near the road. I imagine that if I could fly just a few hundred feet into the air and look down on myself, the cliffs and sage and lava beds and sky would crowd huge into my focus, and far away, nearly unnoticeable in the frame of my vision, would be my little grey truck, waddling up the thread-line of road into the canyon’s mouth, and myself, completely invisible beneath the roof of the truck, my tiny head full of those miniscule thoughts that seemed, from the ground, to be so grand. That would be a healthy view, I think, were it possible. My dad knew a guy once who visited the west on business, and among all his city business obligations, he had a limited amount of free time. Exactly enough free time, it turns out, to drive straight to the rim of the grand canyon, run to the edge, look over, and drive straight back to the airport. That might seem eccentric to some, but he said, even years later, that the view was such that he remained awestruck before a cosmos that allowed room for both him and such a canyon to co-exist for a moment in the same sphere. I’m compelled by that story, but in the back of my head I’m nagged by the story about the guy from New York who was baffled by the fact that his friend from the west had never been to the Grand Canyon, though he himself, being from New York, had never seen the statue of Liberty. His friend from the west had seen that. The tragedy of it all is that familiarity, whatever else it breeds, breeds indifference. That’s the train of thought I rode this week up and down that canyon. And the destination at which the train arrived was simply that I don’t need more and different adventures and views in my life. I simply need to lift my eyes from the road and allow them to focus. It’s a glorious world, and whatever tiny thread of road we roll down, we’re right in the middle of it all.

My drive home each day takes me through desert neighborhoods spaced from each other by wide patches of wild desert. Down below the sage of those spaces, I know there are all sorts of wildlife, though from the car I only occasionally see any. I imagine jackrabbits out there (these, of course, I see pretty often scampering across the road, probably on dares from their friends). I imagine rattlesnakes out there, and deer mice, and lizards of all descriptions. Desert stuff. So I’m taken by surprise the other day by the emergence from the sage on the North side of the road, of a lovely little grey-and-white house cat. All coy, she saunters out across the pavement, and coolly disappears under a fence on the road’s south side. Together with my car, I’m maybe a ton of rubber and steel barreling noisily in her direction, and for all that bluster she doesn’t give me so much as a glance. You know how cats are. But just as she’s disappearing into the desert, There’s movement back on the north edge of the road again. I realize, almost too late, that the little lady cat has a friend. A gentle mid-sized tom--black with white boots--scrambles onto the road. My heart leaps to my throat now, and my foot smashes down the brake pedal; I’m very nearly on top of him, and unlike his little female companion, this one turns in a flash of panic and looks me right in the face, his big green eyes wide and startled. And here it is--me, I’ve got not choice. The brake pedal is down, and my old gray rig is still lurching forward, its inertia rebelling against the stranglehold of the locked wheels. All that can be done is done, and over the next split second, the car will stop when it will stop. It’s all up to the cat. From where I sit, it looks like if he could just leap about nine inches to the north, he’d miss my right-hand tires by a hair’s breadth. The other way, he’ll have to cover something like five impossible feet, and then pull his tail in close. The world stops while we stare each other down like gunfighters waiting for a draw, and then the cat springs. His body bobs to the right, to the north, and I think he might have a chance. But then, with an awkward heave full of desperation and purpose, leaps hard to the left, to the South, right across my grille. I yelp. The car, in a cloud of dust, stops dead. There’s a quarter-second of silence, a quarter-second to grieve, when like a shot from a gun the black tomcat darts, unhurt, from just west of my left headlight and off across the pavement. Stupid daredevil cat, I think. And then I notice, just off the road to the South, the little gray and white she-cat waiting, her head turned back toward the whole scene. Together they pad off through the sage. Gone in an instant. Well. The things we do for love. I took the rest of the drive more cautiously, and over those few miles my mind raced over the long list of inconveniences and perils I’ve risked for the sake of love through the years--for the chance to remain close to my beloved. Too many of those perils have put me in danger for a love that might be merely a fleeting infatuation, a passing fancy. Those risks, even now, just make me feel silly for taking them. If I were the black tomcat, I imagine that the few minutes following our adventure on the road would be filled with the heady feeling of triumph over peril, followed by the sort of deep embarrassment that comes when one imperils one self merely for the sake of showing off for a love that’s just moving on anyway. I’ve been in his little white boots a time too often. Maybe you have too. I’ve learned, I think, that the love relationships that wind up most worth the risk are the ones in which we don’t have to do much dangerous showing off in the first place. The ones in my life that are most beloved know, I hope, that I would jump in front of a speeding grille for their sakes; but the truth is, they hardly ever make me do it.

The Christmas season began, I suppose, on Thanksgiving day—a big deal this year, held in my sister-in-law’s garage (the only room in our collective homes big enough to fit the whole gang of us). We borrowed a bunch of tables from the local church, and a bunch of fake trees and plastic chairs from the health food place where my brother-in-law works. 90 minutes to zero hour, and we’re setting out place cards printed with names of family members at the tables. The phone rings, and it’s another sister, reminding us that uncle so-and-so from her husband’s side of the family has fought with one of his grown-up-sons, and while they were both coming, they weren’t speaking to each other, and ought not to sit near each other in the garage. We shrug our shoulders and rearrange the name cards—fix it so that the two won’t have to even look in each other’s direction if they don’t want to. It requires some diplomatic acrobatics if you want to know, the moving of those name tags, because if uncle so-and-so sits here, then where is such-and-such a wife going to sit except over there by the door, and on and on? It’s a heroic effort, and as it turns out, we accomplish that mission. And the guests come, and somewhere in the arrivals arrives uncle so-and-so, and takes his seat. Twenty minutes later, maybe, through the door of the house comes the son, carrying in one hand a roasted turkey he thinks we might could use, and in the other hand a big pie he’s put together. The garage is alive with activity by now—fifty people moving around and making noise in a garage that only barely accommodates us, but it’s not so busy that I don’t notice the son walk nervously to the garage door, and not so noisy that I don’t see uncle so-and-so call out for the boy, raise his hand in the air, and gesture to the seat next to him. Without us noticing, Uncle so-and-so has stolen his son’s name tag, and palmed it, and now sets it down with great ceremony next to his own place at the table. His arms are open as he motions his son down off the garage steps and back into the circle of his love. I don’t know what the fighting between them had been about. I wasn’t there for that. But I am there for the moment when it comes uncle so-and-so’s turn to share out loud something that he’s thankful for, the moment when he looks his son dead in the face and says, “I’m thankful for my family.” We all see that, and with it, Christmas begins. If the holidays are good for anything, they’re good for that: the death and burial of grudges, the forgiveness of faults, the shrugging off of the weight of malice. Therein lies the holiness that we hunger for during this season. And while I have relatives and friends for whom Christmas began with the early-morning Black Friday Christmas sales, Christmas began for me with a father’s humility, and his son’s forgiveness, at dinnertime the day before, in my sister-in-law’s garage.

When my dad was a younger guy, when I was just a little kid and didn’t know who anybody was, really, my dad bought a guitar. This wasn’t a big deal, particularly. He had owned something like a couple of dozen guitars over the years. This one was an old Martin whose previous owner had been a folk singer I’d never heard of named Bob Dylan. I thought that Bob Dylan was maybe a neighbor from in town, or maybe from as far away as American Fork, the next town over. So it only made a little bit of sense when he cried real tears after that guitar was eaten by a baggage sorting machine in an airport somewhere between the west coast and the east coast. After all, couldn’t he just go over to Bob’s house and buy another guitar from him? Well, it may not surprise any of you to learn that the headstock of that guitar, attached to about six inches of neck, live to this day in the first left hand drawer of Dad’s desk. I’ve been thinking about that guitar over the last few days. I played a show in American Fork some time ago, and our good soundman, scampering obediently and enthusiastically around the stage, trying to get us plugged in and running, snagged his foot on the cord leading to my beautiful Breedlove SD-20. I was elsewhere on stage, but turned to see it as the audience gasped. The guitar hung precariously in the cradle of my guitar stand for a split second, and then, as I watched, it was launched spinning through the air. For the tiniest moment, it hung there, parallel to the ground, and then fell, like an airplane in a nightmare, skidding to a bone-jarring stop on the concrete stage. For a moment, the world froze. Then, somehow, we played the concert. After the show, I surveyed the damage. Two long cracks run like spiderwebs along the guitar’s shoulder. Mortal wounds, perhaps, though I’ve got the best men on it. That guitar was no Bob Dylan Martin, of course. It didn’t house memories of the concert for Bangladesh played by Dylan and George Harrison. But the Breedlove was the home of memories of playing the stage at Peach Days in Hurricane last year. It’s the guitar that shared the stage with Peter Breinholt in Ssandy, with Jericho Road at Tuacahn. It’s the guitar on which was written the last love song I wrote for Kris. And it’s the receptacle for memories of John Lee, who used to own it, and who used to sit behind the counter of the Guitar Gallery with a smile, and who might be reading this right now—he sometimes does. I really hope it pulls through, the Breedlove, and frankly I wonder why I hope so badly. After all, I exert a great deal of effort in not getting too attached to mere material things, material things like wood and mother-of-pearl and wire. And the guitar, of course, can be replaced. I think my grief had something to do with the fact that this guitar, like the very best material things that any of us own, is a receiver for tuning in the stories of events at which it was present; a chronicle of the relationships that I built while I was playing it. The fact that the guitar was, until recently, whole and well seemed a kind of homage to the people with whom I had associated while I was its owner. And now it’s on the ropes. I hope the old thing makes it—not so much because I need so much wire and wood in my life, but because I need John Lee, and Peter Breinholt, and the guys from Jericho Road, and the love songs written for my wife to stay with me. To live rich in the reflection on the face of the guitar as I lift it from its case. These things I need—my life is built on things like these. The guitar is simply a receptacle for all those symbols--They all come to the surface in the songs spun through that old guitar’s strings. It’s the best, really, that any of the best material things can do for us—serve as channels to those things that mean more than the things—more than wood and wire, and more than songs and stages-more, even, than the Bob Dylan Martin, even now in useless pieces, but guarded like the crown jewels in the memory-filled desk drawer of my father.

Skyler likes to tell me about his dreams over breakfast. He’s eleven, and reads a lot—sometimes late at night, and quite often the images of things he’s read about spill over into his dreams. The dreams are always spectacular, full of nonsense but also full of palpable peril, and I think he delights in the fantasy and adventure that run through his nighttime hours. I have weird dreams too, but I seldom remember anything about them for more than a day or so. A friend of mine dreamt the other night that I was violently killed while rehearsing for a play. I may remember that for a while. The last dream of my own that made it into my long-term memory might not seem memorable to anyone but me. I dreamt that I walked up to an old screen door and knocked. In my dream, the door was almost immediately answered--by my grandfather, who’s been dead now since the century turned. He was deceased in my dream too, but he wore a broad smile as he turned away from me and marched off through the little house whose screen door he had just answered, and he called over his shoulder for me to come on in. I followed him to what must have been the living room. On the couches that curved around the perimeter of the room sat my grandmother, who in real life preceded my grandfather in death by a couple of years. She looked as old as I ever remember her, but the deep lines of sorrow and illness that I remember were gone. I also remember she stood and walked across the room with great ease—something that was difficult for her in real life for the twenty years or so before her death. There were other people in the room too—uncles that I recognized, every one of them deceased and aware of it, all sitting on the sofas. The conversation that I had interrupted with my arrival now continued. They were reminiscing nostalgically about shared experiences—smiling and chuckling and sharing the look that people share when they’ve all been through the same similar thing. And much like you and I might talk about a long-ago football game or Junior Prom, they were talking about their shared experience of passing from this life, through death, and into that undiscovered country that hamlet describes, that country from which none return--the shared experience of their own deaths. There was no ceremony or ritual to the conversation, and it didn’t seem that they’d gathered with that in mind; Friendly talk around glasses of lemonade on the coffee table had simply drifted in that direction by the time I had come in, in the same way that married couples at a dinner party might begin to share pleasant and funny and memorable details of their weddings and receptions, or of their first high school sweethearts. That’s pretty much it. That was the dream. And I don’t know how much breakfast-table story value the dream has, but I’ve been thinking about it for years. You see I saw this end of each one of those passings—the winding-down of those lives--the slowing to a stop of those bodies. On this end, there were long years of great pain, moments of genuine emergency, and the dull, persistent sorrow of loss that continues even now. But if those old loved one can reminisce, in some heavenly living room, in genial and mellow tones about their passage through that most definitive of calamities, what does that say about my passage through the calamity of writing the term paper that’s giving me fits, or of wrangling together cash sufficient for a mortgage payment, or of mucking out the chicken coop? May God grant me steadiness enough, in the face of life’s horrors, to be welcomed back into that living room sometime, to lift a cold glass of lemonade from the coffee table and to reminisce in genial and mellow tones, among those whose faces are filled with gentle knowing, about the things I find most fearful here.

Artist Interview:
Sam Payne

I had the pleasure of meeting Sam Payne for the first time three years ago at the 2003 LDS Music Festival. Everyone in charge of the fest had nothing but good things to say about him. His set was cool, but what was even cooler was listening to him at an after fest jam session. At the request of the fest’s manager, he played “Shazaam,” a song about a modest request that amounts to “don’t make me rich or poor. Make me a super-hero.” (You can hear the full version of the song on Sam’s latest CD release, “Coming Just to Go.”) The next time I heard Sam play live was at the same festival, two years later. He was the featured artist. In addition to his own tunes, he sang a version of “Falling Leaves” that knocked me out of my chair.

In addition to a prodigious talent as a singer/songwriter, Sam Payne is also remarkably accessible, and just an all around cool guy. He’s quite possible the most down to earth guy I’ve met in this business. The following interview will show you just what I mean.


RT: How long have you been creating/performing your own music?

SP: I wrote a couple of songs in high school and a couple of songs in college--for girls or friends or girlfriends mostly, and none of them very important (some downright embarrassing). Then, as an adult, my brother gave me a guitar as a gift and I wrote a song on it. The song was called "Sicklesong," and it was based on a Ray Bradbury short story about a farmer who realizes that he's really the grim reaper. In the song there are two guys, working side by side--one planting seeds and one cutting down stalks. I performed the song as part of a fireside talk. A guy in the audience heard the song and asked me if I wanted to be in a band with him (Korky Ollerton. He use to play drums for the band that became Social Distortion). He didn't know that he had just heard the only song in my repertoire. But I shrugged my shoulders, and we were a band. that was in 1997.

RT: What long range goals do you have for you music career?

SP: On a personal level, my musical goals aren't career goals at all. Music has for a long time been the medium through which I figure things out between God and me. That's all. As far as putting the music in front of an audience, the way I've always seen it, you do what God gives you to do. He's given me some to do, and I've been happy about it and felt blessed. But lately I'm feeling pretty keenly God's counsel to be anxiously engaged in a good cause, and not to require that he command in all things. So after a long time of gratefully receiving (and even relishing) handouts from the Lord, I'm starting to push a little myself. And when it comes down to it, I guess I really do have goals. For example, I feel like music is one among many of the things that the Lord has given to man for the building up of the kingdom of God. And I think that music (the many faces of pop music in particular) is being increasingly commandeered by the adversary in ways that are confusing listeners. I'd like to be active in alleviating the trials brought into the world by that trend. The problem is, that sort of crusader spirit too often makes for bad songs. I've been most useful, I think, when I concentrate more on "obtaining the word," by working hard to figure out the craft.

RT: I've seen you perform live on several occasions. For me, live performance is a kind of "litmus test" for musicians. If you can do it live, you can really do it. Man, you can really get a crowd rocking! Do you prefer working live, or would you rather stick to the studio? What do you see as the differences between performing live and recording in the studio?

SP: It's important to me to be competent in both environments--fluent in both languages. In some ways they're the same--in both environments, you're thinking about the audience and about the craft. But in the studio it's like you're bringing whatever mastery of the craft you have to the process of planning a gathering between you and an audience. The gathering that you've planned gets carried out when they hear the recordings, but of course most of the time you're not there. They can (and often do) tell you about what happened to them while they were there, and you're happy about it-- glad they enjoyed themselves. But it's nicer to come to the gathering yourself. That's what happens onstage.

I love performing live, and there's a lot of magic that happens in the studio as well. I'm very pleased with a lot of the work we've done on both fronts. The challenge is to carry to the stage the precision and sonic sensibility of the recordings, and to carry to the studio the spontaneity and connectedness of the stage shows. Working in the studio is like designing a race car--there's a lot to get right, but you can think about it one thing at a time. Working on stage is more like driving it--there's still a lot to get right, but it's all happening at once; a thousand different factors to analyze and respond to in real time as each moment passes. Being on stage is also ephemeral--it happens, and then it's gone. I've had the great pleasure of working with terrific players, engineers, and producers in both arenas, and I love both environments for different reasons.

RT: Your Dad (Marvin Payne) has been doing music for several years, in addition to being a top notch actor. What kind of influence do you think he's been on your musical career?

SP: Dad has never been very vocal in his encouragement of any of the artistic pursuits of his children. He loves us, and he loves music, but I think he also understands what it costs to have interests like these, and doesn't want to doom us to lives as starving artists on account of his encouragement. Looking back though, I can see his encouragement in the form of what we got for Christmases and birthdays. A baritone Ukulele one year, a plastic recorder the next, and before any of that (for my brother's sixth birthday), two plywood cut-outs shaped like Les Pauls. We colored them with crayons. Mine had a long skeleton stretched out over the face of it.

Today, I always go to my dad with questions about how to navigate the forest of writing, performing, and selling music. And while his music has had an impact, it's his faith that has really influenced me. He's a true lily-of-the-field, consecrating his gifts for the building up of the kingdom with or without a paycheck, and content to wait upon the Lord, who will array him how he will array him. What have the dividends been? Most of Dad's clothes are from DI [Deseret Industries, a local church-run thrift store – ed.], but I never, ever play anywhere (no mater how far-flung the gig) without someone coming up at the end of the show, choked up with the story of how my father visited his or her apartment selling albums door-to- door when they were in college, and of how the visit changed him or her. At one recent show, a nice lady told me that a Marvin Payne concert had once inspired her to lose 200 pounds and open a photography business. What song of mine ever did that?

RT: Trying to pin down a style or genre to put your music in has been kind of tough for me. One minute it seems like singer/songwriter easy listening, but it's got as many jazz influences as it does anything else. Someone told me that it's called "Americana," but that doesn't seem descriptive enough. How would you describe what you do?

SP: I don't know if there's a two or three-word description for what I do. Or maybe I'm just the wrong guy to ask. I hope there's some sort of congruency in what's going on. I like for people to be able to say, "that sounds like a Sam Payne song." But at the same time, I don't mind a bit if the roots of the tunes go in all different directions. I grew up in a home full of folk singers. I studied jazz in college. The musicians I play with all like to play old funk tunes. I hope that's all apparent in the music. The trick, I guess, is to be conversant enough in enough musical traditions that when you want to say something, you can say it. That's all. There are pragmatic standpoints (marketing standpoints, maybe) from which style and genre are useful in locking into an audience and holding its attention. But artistically, style and genre are just facilitators for saying what you want to say in the way it ought to be said.

RT: How does the music creation process work for you?

SP: Every song is a different deal. For a long time it seemed like I always had a couple of musical figures in my head, and when something came along that needed to be written about, I'd hammer the lyrics out and squash them into one or another of those figures. These days it's more like the music and lyrics creep up on each other like they're courting--the lyrics make a move toward making sense with the music, and then the music takes a step toward making sense with the lyrics, and then there's a moment when they both give up and embrace each other. The song writes itself after that.

I heard Joe Bennion the potter talk about how making pottery was a sort of compromise between the artist and the pot--the pot wants to be something and the potter wants the pot to be something and the result is an agreement between the two. I always thought that was just poetry. But songwriting is a lot like that. You know what you want, but the song often wants to pull in a different direction. Ultimately, the finished song is an agreement between you--a song that's something other than what either of you had planned.

RT: You latest album is "Coming Just to Go." What went into the creation of that project?

SP: "Railroad Blessing" was the project on which we discovered what we sound like. "Coming Just to Go" is the project on which we tinkered with everything we discovered on "Railroad Blessing." "Coming Just to Go" is a much more collaborative project--several of the tunes were co-writes, for example (I love that--both the process and the outcome). In some sense we ramped up everything about what we were doing with "Blessing." The production is all more intricate, more complex. The images in the songs are more sophisticated, I think. The poetry is often better. At the same time, for all its fireworks, there's a storytelling quality on "Blessing" that escapes "Coming Just to Go." We're very happy with both projects for different reasons.

On "Railroad Blessing" we used Ryan Shupe in some long-distance sessions for some fiddle work. The concept of working long-distance like that (sending the files to other studios, and having artists lay tracks and send them back) worked well enough that we tried more of it on "Coming Just to Go." Shupe was back, for which we were very grateful, but also the terrific cellist Steve Nelson on "Holy," and Cherie Call on "Sunflower" (which turned out to be one of my favorite recordings ever).

RT: There's a lot of storytelling in your music. Even when you don't seem to be telling a specific narrative, the lyrics suggest some pretty concrete (and very poetic) images to me. What do you attribute this "music as storytelling" influence to?

SP: I don't know where the storytelling influence comes from in general, but it has guided all of my professional and avocational pursuits. I'm a writer by trade, on the heels of an undergraduate degree in English and a masters degree in education. I guess I've always thought that stories are the fundamental units of communication and education. Jesus seemed to think so too.

RT: One of the most obvious example of "storytelling music" in your latest album is "Cloudy Dan." Where did the ideas for that song come from?

SP: As far as "Cloudy Dan" goes, I heard a song called "Chief" from Patty Griffin's (amazing) album "1,000 Kisses" (no kidding, one of the great albums). The song was about a crazy Indian who walked up and down the streets of his small town carrying a rifle. It knocked my socks off, and it made me begin to imagine what the stories were behind the two or three people in every town that have been written off as nuts. My wife is an ultralight pilot, and airplane images are pretty easy to come by around my place. In the song, I imagined that this old crazy guy used to fly airplanes with his son--that a generation ago people called him "Cloudy Dan" because he was always up in the sky. A generation later, the kids in town, not knowing about the airplanes, still call him Cloudy Dan, but they think it's just because his head's all clouded up--because he's crazy. The song tells the story of how he might have gotten that way.

RT: What kinds of projects would you like to undertake, but for whatever reason you've not tackled yet?

SP: Getting my garden in shape. Also, for the last few years I've wanted to write a book that my kids would like to read. I imagined writing a few pages a day, and reading them over bowls of cereal in the morning. I've gotten as far as the first three or four words. The story was going to be about a kid who has an anonymous pen pal that winds up being the President of the United States. Also the kid has a grandpa who mumbles a lot. The family takes the mumbling for loose marbles in the attic, but the truth is that grandpa knows about buried Spanish gold. Maybe that's why I've only gotten as far as three or four words.

RT: I was told by a mutual friend that you were approached by Deseret Book with a contract at one time, but you turned them down; is that right? What went in to that decision?

SP: That's not exactly the case. In the beginning, when we were just starting to lay tracks for the album that became "Railroad Blessing," I called Jeff Simpson, the head of Excel Entertainment, with some general questions about the business end of what we were doing. He invited me to send him a disc when we had one finished. That generous invitation led to a distribution contract with Excel that rolled into a contract with Deseret Book when the companies merged. I was very thankful (and remain so) for the help I got from both Excel and Deseret Book, especially when we ("we" meaning the members of the Sam Payne Project) were so naive about the business of promoting albums. We got a lot of great support from the Excel/DB guys, and a lot of encouragement from Jeff in particular. They opened a door for us that I think might not have opened for us otherwise.

Recently though, I got a call from Earl Madsen of Sounds of Zion. The folks at Sounds of Zion had taken quite a personal interest in my catalog, and even without a label relationship had provided me with some cool live performance and studio opportunities. They had some ideas that I liked about marketing the recordings. My albums are now being handled by Sounds of Zion, but Deseret Book is a great label, and anyone who has a distribution or management deal with them should feel fortunate indeed.

RT: Thanks for clearing that up. Can you give us a preview of any of your current projects?

SP: I've got some things on the shelf waiting for the next step--a live album, a song-cycle about crossings to the west, and an album of inspirational music. As a part of my day job, I'm working on a series of historical novels for elementary school students. I'm enjoying (very much) the work that I do on the radio in Southern Utah. Those projects are all great fun, and all fall under the "what God has given me to do" umbrella. Who knows where any of those will go.

I like long drives, and this is a good state for it. I mean, I-15 I can take or leave, but if I’ve got time to head east as far as highway 89, and then north, that’s a show I’d pay money for. It’ll take me through the mighty reds and browns, the curves and angles of southern Utah, through the towns that remain attentive to the pre-I-15 Utah aesthetic, through the greening that begins along the rivers and then, as you go further north, spreads through the whole rest of the world. Amber waves of grain, spacious skies, purple mountain majesties—it’s all there, and further north you’ll even pass alabaster cities. And, of course, on my left hand and my right are the tracks of pilgrim feet, that saw beyond the years. I like long drives through all of that. Paths sometimes cross in interesting ways on long drives; windows open. I like long drives for that reason too. I went up to Logan myself the other day to play some music for the good students of Utah State University. Some of the guys in the band stayed up there in hotel rooms that night, but a couple of us had to get back for work in the morning, so we made the drive back from Logan between about ten in the evening and four in the morning. At that hour, there’s no reason to find beautiful scenery to drive through. You just pick the shortest distance between point a and point b and hope that the company is good. My company that night was my friend Denis Zwang, the horn player who only hours before had blown the roof off at Kent Hall before hundreds of USU students and their friends. The drive from Logan to St. George being as long as it is, our conversation was long, leisurely, and rich--like a good meal with a good friend. Denis Came to the United States from Holland when he was a kid, and his family found its way to the Avenues in Salt Lake City. When he grew up, he played at D.B. Cooper’s, the food and music place that I’d play at myself a couple of decades later. He rehearsed bands at Al Weight studios, in the same room that I’d rehearse in myself a couple of decades later. He played with Salt Lake sax player Jerry Floor, in whose home studio I’d cut a demo recording a couple of decades later. And there’s more. Denis, I found out, is a hiker, and he knows the names and locations of all the places above my home town that I used to hike when I was a kid. He knows the meadows named for old testament battlefields. He knows the way to exit East Hamengog in the best way to hook up with the long chute that exits onto the granite fields below grassy flat. He knows the view from just below Lone Peak down onto Bells Canyon. He even knows my old piano teacher, Jay Beck, who used to hike the steep five miles to Lake Hardy carrying a big hard-frame backpack full of scuba gear. Forgive me the digression to all those obscure Utah Valley hiking locations, but those images were keys to the locks behind which I store my richest childhood memories. Passwords that open doors to places in my memory where I usually only go alone. And now here was a friend that knew how to get there too. It’s tough for me to communicate exactly what that meant. I’m thankful for the long drive that took the lid off those old memories, and for the friend who, it seemed, had walked, years before me, all the paths that I would walk; the friend who knows precisely how difficult it is to traverse the boulder field above grassy flat, and precisely how refreshing it is to reach the lake above that field. Thank heaven for the friends who understand, I prayed in the wee hours when I got home safely at last. And as I did, it occurred to me that I was praying to just such a friend. What a delight, to enjoy the protection and care and company of a friend who comprehends all the secret places of my heart; who understands with incomprehensible completeness the challenge of my last step, as well as the promise of my next one. Thank heaven for that friend who with indescribable compassion understands anyway all of the things I find difficult to explain. It’s a long drive, after all, and while much of the trip is surrounded by beauty, there are also long stretches of treacherous night-driving to do; driving during which you just have to pick the shortest distance from point a to point b and hope the company’s good. I guess all I want to do is witness that the company is good. The best.

guested on a show in May by the West Coast Jazz Players, some of my best friends. Most of us used to play together in the Utah Jazz Quintet. We had a great time playing that night. It was the first time little Sammy had ever come to a show. He seemed to like it just fine.