Sam Lee: Conversing with Nature

Sam Lee is a folk singer, song collector, wilderness expert, eco activist and the country’s foremost nightingales duetter. His fourth album, Songdreaming, produced by Bernard Butler, takes a romantic stroll through nature’s majesty, reimagining ancient songs with a sense of foreboding about ecological collapse.

Where did your deep connection with nature begin?
As a kid growing up in central London in the ‘80s, Hampstead Heath was a sanctuary. I was a bit of an outsider kid, and very quickly realised that I got nature and nature got me – it became my defender.

What was the starting point for your latest album?
Some songs began as a commission for the film version of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Howard Fry and others came out of the Songdreaming retreats I ran, which were about singing devotional songs to nature. You realise that the conversational possibility is enormous. And we laugh because we think, well, what a stupid thing to do. But indigenous communities, for example, have a huge history of conversing with the natural world.

What happens when people sing together?
People go into a sort of altered, meditative state. It has a huge effect on the body, happiness, serotonin, all that sort of stuff, and it can also make you feel akin to nature. How has that idea connected on the road this year? We played a festival recently on the main stage, there were about 4,000 people, and I had lots of people coming up to me afterwards saying that they’ve never felt like that about music before. You can’t deny the power of these songs.

How necessary are the arts for affecting change? 
It’s so necessary that the arts world advocates for and celebrates nature. If the power of the human spirit of creativity was to be fully enhanced in finding ways to visualise and make people fall in love with a subject like nature, then we could be really pushing the boundaries and creating a movement that is utterly irresistible.

What’s the concept behind your Earth Unwrapped events? 
I’d like to give people a safe space in which to have glorious, enchanted moments in Kings Place so that they might try to go and achieve the real thing in nature, with a sense of permission and daring – you’ve got to dare yourself into doing a lot of nature stuff, like going out at night to listen to a nightingale.

How are your projects as part of Earth Unwrapped connected? 
They’re aimed at creating a repertoire of experiences that are sonically about tuning into the more sensuous parts of nature, particularly things like the whale song sound bath, which is deeply immersive and vibrational, and some of the talks that we’re doing. It’s really about trying to create a diverse range of experiences – from performances to an indoor/outdoor harvest feast – that touch on the connected aspects of how we and nature are entwined.

How are EarthPercent involved? 
They are one of, if not the most vital charity for music and environmental partnerships. They are fast becoming such an important way of diverting actual cash from the music industry into environmental projects, and giving back something to the land, the sea and the sky, essentially. It’s very visionary.

Do you see yourself as an artist or activist?
I don’t see a difference. I’m so passionate about what we have to lose. I’ve accepted that I’ve seen the death of the last of our great song carriers. But the idea of seeing the end of our cuckoos, our nightingales, our nightjars – it’s actually terrifying. So if I’m given a platform to speak, to fill the space and take people’s ears away from somewhere else, I can’t do that without there being some sort of invitation to rethink the madness that we’re in. Because, ultimately I’m a thrill-seeker. I want the party to go on for as long as possible.