How beautiful can music be when it is authentic, from the heart and played and sung with inspiration? The new and now fourth album by young British singer-songwriter Sam Lee meets those criteria very convincingly. Add to that how impressive Sam’s voice sounds and you realise that you are dealing with an exceptionally beautiful album, let’s just say wonderful!

Sam has a warm dark voice that no matter what he sang is not only instantly recognisable; his voice also grabs your attention because of that sound and if you take his vocal lines and the emotion in them, you are practically sold already. And, mind you, you may have to get used to his voice first, it may sound overwhelming at first, but its beauty really reveals itself soon!

That’s already a great starting point for any album, but it’s certainly not the only thing that makes this album. Ten songs, mostly kept small in their build and, when they fan out in orchestration, the arrangements enhance the power of the music, it is not bombast for bombast’s sake, much more an underlining of what Sam wants to convey with his music. Tbe songs’ urgency is underlined when the orchestration takes over on songdreaming.

On this album, Sam once again collaborates with Bernard Butler as producer and with arranger and composer James Keay. The core of the album builds up from double bass, percussion and violin, but the diversity of instruments that completes the soundscape is warmingly eclectic. On the album, for instance, we hear the qānūn, an Arab zither with a peculiar trapezoidal sound box and between 72 and 78 strings. The range of the qānūn totals about three and a half octaves.
Another instrument appearing on the album with special origins is the Swedish Nyckelharpa, better known here as key harp or key harp. You can think of it as an instrument akin to the hurdy-gurdy although the Nyckelharpa is actually a bowed instrument and not a mechanical one. And there is more, piano, flutes, very fine guitar colouring, courtesy of Bernard Butler, field recordings and the first time recording of Trans Voices, a choir made up of transgender people on a sound carrier. It is all this that works songdreaming’s magic.

Listening to songdreaming gives you the idea of stepping into nature with firm breaths. The intense connection Sam has with nature is not only heard in his lyrics, it resonates, you feel it in his music. With each of the ten songs, it is not difficult to imagine a moment when you found yourself in the middle of nature, whether that was a place in a forest, surrounded by silence with only the sounds of the nightingale around you, the picture of a stream you followed on a walk, you feel that connection, you also feel how that connection with nature is ancient for humaniy.

Not a whim of climate geeks, not dissolute wanderers, a connection with nature that our most distant ancestors already experienced. Whether that is something Sam recognises? His music certainly breathes it, Forest School Camps, an organisation in the UK that had broken away from the scouting organisation strengthened his relationship with nature and led him to folk music which he researched, he developed a fascination with the nightingale and wrote a book about it, worrying about the possible extinction of that bird in the UK. So Sam is more of a singer-songwriter, he is also really committed to nature. He is a founder of Music Declares Emergency, a board member of Featured Artist Coalition, which is working to make the UK music industry emissions-free. And he is founder and chairman of The Nest Collective, which, among other things, gets people to embrace nature. If you want to know more about that, also listen to this podcast.

Ten songs that can actually immediately place themselves in the canon of contemporary folk. It is an album that demands you to take your time with it: you want to hear the subtle sounds of the double bass in Bushes And Briars, alongside Sam’s vocals and lyrics. You want to enjoy Meeting Is A Pleasant Place with the beautiful voices of Trans Voices, McCrimmon makes you want to be enchanted, you want to feel the essence of Leaves Of Life with it’s gorgeous intro. With all that, you also want to feel the music move you. Discover how this river of ten songs meanders through the album.

The songs that are each beautiful in their own right, the variety between the songs, the beautiful lyrics, the arrangements that really shinr, the beautiful instrumentation and then there is Sam Lee’s voice. songdreaming is a wonderful album that puts you in the middle of life, in the middle of nature, and at the same time makes you realise how fragile nature is. Do you dare to turn your attention to music from this volatile society and thus to nature? Then step into the world that this album by Sam Lee brings you: stunning, gorgeous and wonderful!