by Mark Wilkerson
images by Laurie Z Divine Photography
Busk
/bəsk/ VERB
To entertain by dancing, singing, or reciting on the street or in a public place
This defines my view of Sammy Brue. He is a busker, in the most positive sense. He has the courage to step up onto a dirty sidewalk. To pull out his six string. To clear his poignantly plaintive tenor throat and go for it. Go for it to one person, or five, or five thousand. Sammy Brue goes for it. He puts it all out there. All the joy-angst-frustration-yearning that is life in the USA as we enter the 2020s.
After receiving an acoustic guitar from his father for Christmas, he quickly embraced the instrument and began learning the songs of Bob Dylan and Woody Guthrie. He wrote his first song, a finger-picked, auto-biographical tune titled “The Woody Guthrie Song” at the age of 11:
Young boy and his first guitar
Sammy Brue
Dreams of being a rock and roll star
Six strings and an empty bedroom
Is where his journey starts
So he plays
He plays the greats like Cash and Dylan
Dreams of making a record someday
Head full of home and a heart full of songs
Takes him down these lonesome highways
Like Hank Williams he rambled and he roamed
He lives his life like a Woody Guthrie song
Pause for just a second.
Did you read that?
Sammy Brue wrote that at age eleven.
After his débutante ball as a young teen, Sammy had several pretty cool options. Ultimately he signed with New West Records, the label whose catalog includes Kris Kristofferson, Steve Earle, Rodney Crowell and Jason Isbell.
“It had all the people that I look up to on it,” Brue says.
Okay then. What can one say after no less than Rolling Stone says “American Prodigy” and American Songwriter writes “Wunderkind”?
Well, one interviews Sammy at the ripe old age of 18 and inroduces you to perhaps the most genuine article since Woody Guthrie. This is mostly Sammy’s own words. As it should be.
Mark: I thought I should start with the abbreviated version of you. Where were you born? Where were you brought up? How did you come to be doing this?
Sammy: I was born in Beaverton, Oregon, 20 minutes from Portland. For the first 10 years of my life, it was a lot of just video games and hanging out. A lot of just family time. We lived with my grandma, so all of my family would roll through. We got to hang out with family a lot, which I’m very grateful for.
When I was about 10, we moved to Utah because my dad really felt like my mom’s sister was going through something that she really needed help with. So we moved to Ogden.
A couple years earlier, I had asked for a guitar for Christmas. But my dad gave me an electric. After I started playing it, I was like, “Well, I guess music just isn’t my thing.” I put it down, and thought, “No, I guess I just have to find something else.” Now, living in Ogden and starting fresh, well, this time I asked for an acoustic guitar.
We went to Guitar Center and got…Well, he let me play one, and he asked, “Is that something you would like?” I started strumming and thought, “This is nice. I could see myself doing this.” I taught myself a couple chords, and I couldn’t wait for this guitar to come in. When it came in on Christmas, it was all over. I wanted to start playing songs and writing my own stuff.
Once I started writing songs for myself, I was really like, “Ooh, lyrics are really fun.” You can put on this other personality or persona, even play a different character. I started writing about stuff that wasn’t really through my eyes. I loved observing, I loved looking at things and then writing about those things happening.
I started busking a lot, and I really wanted to be this musician. My parents were fully behind me. They still are to this day. I don’t know, up at Sundance I think is where it took off a bit. I got my first little boost, because I was busking illegally. If you get caught up there, it’s like five grand for a ticket.
Mark: Did busking build your confidence to play in front of people, and…
Sammy: A lot, for sure. But for me, it was just the hours. My dad always told me, “It takes 10,000 hours to master something,” so I was really like, “Let’s get some hours in.” It boosted me a lot. People started telling me to come play at their stuff, because they had seen me at Mojo’s, or 25th Street in Ogden, or at Sundance.
Marks: So, you’re busking at Sundance, where there’s a $5,000 ticket if you get caught, and you’re 12?
Sammy: Yeah.
Mark: You need to write an outlaw album.
Sammy: Right on! Things happened fast after that. I got a record deal and, as the song goes, we moved to Nashville. I so wanted it to be everything. But it wasn’t. Long story short, I just went up to my parents after six months and said, “I really want to move back to Ogden.”
I came to realize I could make any kind of music I wanted. I had put in the time. The practice. The performing. That’s when I started to write “Down with Desperation.” It’s a song about being desperate for something more, and kind of still…still being grounded, in a sense. I got this whole different attitude, and I was like, “All right, let’s make something different happen. I just need a change of some sorts.” So I completely changed.
I think that really translates a lot in this new album, The Crash Test Kid, that’s coming out in 2020. My earlier albums, Down with Desperation and I Am Nice, have taught me a lot. But this new album is just a whole different opportunity, a whole new Brue in a sense.
Mark: Tell me about the new album. Would you still call the music Americana?
Sammy: Yeah, yeah. I use ‘Americana’ very broadly as well so that accurately captures a lot of my work. But this new album I’d call it folk rock. It’s very acoustic-based. But you can dance to it, and you can go crazy to it. One time I played this new song called “Teenage Mayhem,” and people went “dance shit crazy.” That is what the new album is all about. Let’s all go dance shit crazy. Let’s have some fun. Let’s be real. Let’s love each other.
For the new album, I started writing with a co-writer for the first time. It was almost like a therapy session. I would just sit down and say, “Man, all this shit’s going on in my life.” He would be there with a notebook the whole time, he would ask these questions and just keep the train going, and we would go so deep into very persona, touchy subjects that I’d barely even tell people I know and hang out with.
His name is Iain Archer, and…he has basically put me through a whole year of college, just because of how long he’s done it. Just seeing him have a studio in his backyard recording the album, I’m just like, “This guy’s living such a cool life.” He’s listening to the music and going with the flow. I learned a lot from him during these writing processes.
By the second time I wrote with him, he said, “What do you say about writing a whole album together?” And I was like, “Boom, done. Let’s do it.” I got up the courage to take a chance on this. And I think it’s working. Will.i.am from the Black Eyed Peas has bought one of the two planned singles from the album, Teenage Mayhem, for a documentary about these activist kids in Parkland, Florida who went through the shooting. I got to meet the kids, and it makes the whole experience of writing the song, having it picked up and made part of the film pretty real.
I want to be a part of that unification of kids, of the youngest generation. To give people hope…I think you could call it artivism
Sammy Brue
Mark: I’m going to use the word “poignant”…because that’s how I think of your voice, there is a certain poignance, a nostalgic grittiness to it. That, to me, is one of the biggest things about you: I feel like when I see you onstage, I’m getting you. Full voice. Full presence.
Sammy: Thanks. I really appreciate it. Look, when I was younger, it was this two-person vibe in my life. I don’t really feel that way when I get up onstage anymore. Maybe it’s not quite together yet, these sides of me. But more and more they overlap. I have had times where it is just perfect. I am one person fully connected to the crowd. It’s like a peace-of-mind thing, I guess.
As an example, the other single from the new album is called “Crash Test Kid”. I played it live for the first time in this noisy restaurant. Not the wisest choice, what with all the eating, drinking, and talking. But here’s the thing: as soon as I started playing, the whole place shut the hell up. I had my eyes closed, but I could feel this humongous bubble of just “Wow, I really feel this. I really feel this.” It was people who were young, old, and all in-between, they all felt the lyrics. Now that was perfect.
I really want to use The Crash Test Kid as a big unification for people. Don’t get me wrong, it’s cool just being a musician, but then you see people like John Lennon. It makes me thing, “Don’t get all big headed, man, you’re just a fucking musician. John Lennon started a revolution.” Me and my management, we’re trying to get the Crash Test Kid and Teenage Mayhem in the hands of Greta Thunberg’s people.
Mark: Perfect.
Sammy: I want to be a part of that unification of kids, of the youngest generation. To give people hope and…I think you could call it artivism.
Mark: What’s the message that you really want to amplify in the world?
Sammy: I think it’s really just, we’re all taking hits. To me, “Crash Test Kid” is just my calloused version. The hits won’t stop coming. You just get stronger, and eventually the hits won’t mean anything to you. But at least try to make somebody’s day. I’d have to say, and just spreading that…I guess it’s kind of cheesy, but just spreading that love.
Mark: How do you define a person of distinction? You’ve mentioned Bob Dylan. You’ve mentioned John Lennon. Describe the person you would aspire to be?
Sammy: I’ve had deep feelings about that. I want to be the folk version of Bob Marley. For sure. But as to a person of distinction, here is my best answer. I saw this guy down on 25th Street, in Ogden. This dude just came up to me and started talking about love, and energy, and how we should spread it more. I guess he says it to everybody. He’s just a homeless guy who walks the streets talking about spreading love. That is a person of distinction.
After the interview, I invited Sammy along for pizza that evening. Two hours later I got a polite voicemail saying, “Hey, sorry, I can’t make it tonight. I just have to go busking.”
Sammy Brue is the real deal. Download his music. Go to his concerts. Or if you’re really lucky, catch him on an evening he “just has to go busking.” As John Fogerty says in his busking anthem, “Down on the Corner:”
You don’t need a penny,
just to hang around.
But if you’ve got a nickel won’t
you lay your money down
Over on the corner, there’s a happy noise
People come from all around
to watch the magic boy.
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