You can write string parts on the guitar, too. “For the string parts, I’d just sing them to Rosie Danvers, then she wrote them down, and we’d go into the studio and record it with a string section. I wanted it to sound like The Caves Of Altamira meets indie ! I wrote the horns on Long Way Off, a very Steely Dan-like horn section.
I sang it and a mate wrote the music out. “It became a part of my musical makeup, subconsciously, not that you hear any of the Steely Dan influence on my first record, but on the new one there’s a trumpet solo on Mantra, which I wrote. “And you do absorb that when you’re young,” Fender says. Sam’s dad was a huge Steely Dan fan, and that band’s harmonically complex blend of jazz and rock was often on in the car and the kitchen. His brother gave him a copy of Buckley’s classic 1994 album Grace, and Fender has clearly picked up some vocal tics from the late singer. He had some exemplary artists to learn from – Joni Mitchell, Adam Granduciel of The War On Drugs and Jeff Buckley. A lot of those more emotionally challenging parts of my childhood drove me to learn something, so I could have an outlet.”
I was quite angsty with the fact that my mam had moved away. As cringe as this sounds, it became my earliest form of therapy. “They completely sucked, but you’ve got to start somewhere. “When I started getting angsty and heartbroken about girls, that was when the real songs started,” he says. He wrote daft comedy songs at first (he was a Tenacious D fan), but these got him into the habit of sitting on the sofa with his guitar, putting chords together and singing. I’m always belting.”Īs a songwriter, he cut his teeth while playing with his teenage rock trio. I had to figure out ways of taking the keys down for live, so I tuned to C#.īut then I ended up loving the sound of the guitar in that key, so started writing songs in C# that were still at the top of my range! So I’m constantly having to work out ways of successfully playing my shows without killing my voice. “I have a tendency to write everything at the top my vocal range, because I feel like I need to prove myself. Fender often uses a guitar tuned to C# standard (C#/F#/B/E/G#/C#), something he says happened by accident. The title track from Seventeen Going Under and the anthemic, angry Paradigms are in C#, an unusual key for a guitar band. These chords are used on Spit Of You, too, shifted up two frets into E, the capo on the 2nd fret for those open strings.
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īut whereas most players would use their fourth finger for that B-string note, Fender uses his ring finger, leaving his pinky free to add extended notes elsewhere as needed. It’s an E minor shape with open strings, followed by a tasty Dadd9/11. He gives us an example of one such claw-like chord, used in Hypersonic Missiles tune Dead Boys. I got Slash’s autobiography when I was 12, and learned all his solos – I had this one blues lick that I used to just rip over the top of every song.” When his father saw he was both obsessed and talented, he got his some guitar lessons, and Fender took off: “I was flying by the time I was 13, learning all the hard-rock stuff like Led Zeppelin and Guns N’ Roses.
He learned the big hits by Nirvana, Green Day, Oasis. The Peavey spent a year untouched in the corner of the young lad’s room, but when he was 10 he finally got the bug. I think I got into music as a way to be close to them.” That’s one thing I’d say to a kid just starting out – get your guitar set up, so it’s not like you’re battling bits of cheese wire! My brother was a musician drums was his first instrument. “Dad’s a great rhythm guitarist, and he showed me some basic chords and set the guitar up nice. And it’s still a great guitar – I play it from time to time.
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“My parents got divorced, I got a TV off my mum and a guitar from my dad: a Peavey Strat copy with a Peavey practice amp. “It was a ‘divorce’ Christmas present,” Fender says now. It was his father, a guitar player himself, who bought Sam his very first guitar, back when he was eight.