Sam Forrest is a musician and singer-songwriter from York, best known for his position as frontman of the popular alternative-rock band Nine Black Alps. Alongside this, Sam is involved in several other bands, including The Sorry Kisses, and Sewage Farm. He also produces music as a solo artist: his newest album, Caught Under a Spell, was released in January of this year.
The album title Caught Under a Spell is a lyric in one of the album’s songs, Everybody’s Gone Insane. Forrest tells me his reasoning for choosing this poignant line: “I think it’s just about the fact that everybody has their own mental challenges… and in a way we are all under our own spells of our own making.”
Forrest seems struck by the effects that the difficulties we face can have on connecting with others in our lives: “A lot of the themes in the album are about miscommunication, and the difficulties we have communicating with each other… because of our own spells that we find ourselves under.”
The last song in the album, Holy Mountain – a personal favourite of mine – stands out to me with its more stripped back feel, raw and emotional lyrics, and a beautiful acoustic guitar riff throughout the entire four minutes. Forrest elaborates further on the theme of mental struggles during his explanation of this track: “I think I was writing about a retreat that we.. well, that I personally go to in my head, my own holy mountain away from the world.”
I now ask Forrest about his process for writing Caught Under a Spell: “I was just recording at a friend’s garage space for about one evening a week… I originally wanted the whole album to be just bongos and classical guitar, but then my friend has a garage with a drum kit in it, so I thought ‘Okay I’m gonna try and play drums.’ I’m a really bad drummer so most of these evenings was me trying to play drums, and then I’d go back home and try and piece things together.
“…I think I wanted it to be honest in the fact that I’m not a drummer, I’m not really a great singer, and there’s things out of tune and out of time on there… I like the organicness of things being out of tune. I think too much music is in tune nowadays… I know for a fact that it [the album] is real”, he reflects.
Forrest moved to Manchester due to the music scene in York being rather limited at the time: “Everything felt a little traditional at that time, whereas in Manchester, there’s much more variation, much more punky kind of alternative things going on… I kind of wanted to find something a bit more aggressive or a bit more alternative.”
In 2003, Forrest formed the band Nine Black Alps in Manchester with three other musicians. After only a handful of gigs, they signed a record deal and became well-known within the music industry: “It was very, very surreal. It was all a complete accident, and we were very inexperienced… I’d slogged away in bands in York for years, and nobody gave a shit, and then I moved to Manchester, we played like, two gigs, and got a massive amount of industry interest.”
Forrest now elaborates on the effect that this quick success could have had on his mindset: “It’s hard not to believe that sort of… ‘Oh, I’m a genius now’, because everybody is saying ‘Oh you’re a genius’… I was writing exactly the same sort of songs as I was before, but suddenly the spotlight got shone on what I was doing.”
I now ask Forrest to tell me of his favourite accomplishment within his music career. His surprising response resonates: “I never listen back to what I’ve done. I listen to everything I do obsessively until it’s finished, and as soon as it’s finished, I never listen to it again, because otherwise I’d find something wrong with it. And yeah, no, I just, I can’t go back to it. It’s not enjoyable for me.”
Forrest emphasises that the feeling of reward comes from the creative process rather than the finished result: “I just like the process of doing it. I like making music… I don’t really like nostalgia… it’s too much of a time trap to go back. I’d rather just sort of focus on what I want to do now.”
It wasn’t long before Forrest returned to his North Yorkshire roots. I’m curious to see what he thinks of the York music scene now: “I moved back to York after about three years in Manchester because I missed the friendliness of the musicians.. in Manchester everything was very kind of cutthroat and competitive… in York I don’t think anybody gives a shit about that… people in York seem to like music for music.”
As for future releases, Forrest is working away at multiple projects: “One of my bands is called Sewage Farm, and we’ve got an album being mastered at the moment. I’ve also started out another band in Hull called Strange Pink, and we are mixing an EP at the moment, and I am currently writing my next album.”
He tells me he is in the process of deciding exactly what he wants to do with his next album: “It is really exciting. It’s the best part… I have full control. I kind of get less and less control the more I do.”
I ask Forrest whether he finds this extensive creative scope daunting: “I know my limitations, and that no matter how the complete freedom you get to write the music, I will always come back to writing the stuff that sounds like myself.”