RECORDS LiVE

Tamara: Oh my God, is that Samson Oats? Come inside, come inside my home. I heard you brought some music for me.

Samson: Hello. I did. Should I give you all of these records? I’m going to give you one at a time.

Tamara: You’re going to give me one at a time? Okay, there’s going to be so much anticipation because I’m not going to know what the next one is. We got some Oats’ fans. We got some Oaties.

Samson: Some fans of breakfast.

Tamara: Oat heads.

Samson: Morning people?

Tamara: What is your favorite breakfast food?

Samson: I’d say oatmeal. But I put, like, parmesan in it and salt. Oh yeah.

Tamara: It’s Italian. Italian oatmeal.

Samson: I’m not even Italian.

Song Plays: Microwave – Neighbors

Tamara: Okay, so this is “Microwave” by Neighbors.

Samson: “Neighbors” by Microwave.

Tamara: “Neighbors” by Microwave. Really? Okay, “Neighbors” by Microwave.

Samson: That’s what it should be, yeah. See, Microwave’s big and “Neighbors” is small. But this is…

Tamara: He’s mansplaining reading to me. That’s crazy. Continue Samson, continue.

Samson: So, Microwave’s probably my favorite band ever. They were very formative when I was in college and had the lowest self-esteem of my life. Even though they’re probably, I think, like 10 years older than me, I feel like every time they come out with something, it’s always aligned with what I’m going through in my life. And this song, it’s so anthemic, but it’s just about being like a loser. The whole chorus is him talking about how he left his keys or his wallet in his car, and he’s hungry, but they didn’t drive to the restaurant because he’s high. And that was like my entire life when I was 18 and 19. It was forgetting things and being too high.

Tamara: I love that. So, I feel like a lot of people say that their middle school era is a formative time for them. Would you say college was a formative time for you in shaping the music you make and the person you are?

Samson: I would say so. When I was in middle school and high school, it was like what Cesar was saying. I was like, “Oh, I don’t want to be associated with that music.” That was me, but for anything new. All I listened to was weird 70s progressive rock from the ages of 12 to 16. So, I was just in a tunnel. I did not know anything. I didn’t know any pop music. People are still showing me stuff from the early 2000s to 2010s. I’m like, “I’ve never heard of this in my entire life.” They’re always surprised. But yeah, I would say ages 18 to 20, I caught up on my emo phase. I was a late bloomer.

Tamara: Would you say this band is emo or no?

Samson: Absolutely. They’re emo, but the singer is from the South. They’ve got, like, a twang.

Tamara: I love that. Yeah, emo if they could sing.

Samson: The songwriting, the lyricism, it’s super inspiring to me. It’s very personal, very sincere, a little self-deprecating, but…

Tamara: I think if I listen to your music, I would say you’re very self-deprecating in your music.

Samson: Maybe. You could say that.

Tamara: We could say that.

Samson: I should just give you all these records.

Tamara: Just give them to me because I feel like you’re messing up my pacing. Thank you so much.

Samson: I’m so sorry.

Song Plays: The Band Cope – i could fit all of you in there

Tamara: It’s okay, next song is going to be one not local to us, but local to somebody. Local enough. They played at Birdcage. True, yeah. So why did you pick this?

Samson: People in the music scene often talk about, “Oh my inspirations are this and that.” And, you know, I feel like I’m most inspired by my peers in the scene and people I get to meet by playing random shows or stumbling upon them on social media or a friend showing me them. This was kind of a combination of all that because our mutual friend Saraí of Porkboii fame put me and Cope on a show together at Birdcage. We were such fast friends. I love their music. It’s so insane to me that Cope’s not famous.

Tamara: Yeah, like insanely big. They should be.

Samson: Yeah, they really should be. But we just became friends so quick. I played a show later that year with them in San Diego. I slept on their bassist’s couch. I went to a studio session with them. I felt like such a fan boy. I made them laugh. That’s a top three moment of last year; making my favorite local band laugh.

Tamara: I love that. That’s so special. I think it’s nice to find a sense of self in our community. Finding some type of belonging and other people. Is this a band you’d want to work with in the future, collaborating on something? Or do you think the music maybe doesn’t blend as well?

Samson: I want to play more shows with them. I’d love to go on tour with Cope. I’d love to have their singer Ellie on a song, but I don’t know if it would meld super well. They seem to have their own thing going on. I’d love to do a Samson Oats song, but with the Cope band, where they’re playing and doing it their way. If they’re down, I’m down.

Tamara: They would be down for sure. So, you’re originally from Fresno. What was your introduction into the scene? How did you get into this? What was the first band you got to become friends with and meet?

Samson: It’s funny. I basically had no “in” to the scene. When I first started in the music scene, I was going to UCR where I met my friends Chris and Felice of Delfino fame, which is a band I’m in. We started a band when we were sophomores in college. There was no scene at UCR at the time. And if there was, we didn’t know about it. We knew one other band, and it was called Blue Season. And in that band was Noah, who’s my drummer for my solo projects. That’s a tiny world. That was my in, basically. And then we did all the dumb stuff that a small band does when they’re young. You play a pay-to-play show in LA and think you’re a rock star. And then you realize you’re down $200. Then you’re like, “What am I doing with my life?” And then the pandemic happened.

Tamara: Oh my God. So, were you creating any music during the pandemic at all?

Samson: That was kind of where Samson Oats came from. Delfino was working on songs, but we were mostly slowing down. So, I was just writing a lot of stuff that wasn’t really jiving with Delfino. I wrote like 20 or 25 terrible songs that were proto–Samson Oats. But yeah, I was writing a lot during the pandemic. It was like, “What else was there to do?”

Tamara: Have any of those songs come out? I know you’re saying not all of them are great, but…

Samson: No, they haven’t actually.

Tamara: None of them? When is the Samson Oats vault coming out?

Samson: When I die.

Tamara: When you die?

Samson: So how long? How old am? When will I be 27? Two years from now?

Tamara: Yeah, like someone’s going to kill you tonight.

Samson: We’ll put in some AI versus to complete the songs.

Tamara: I would love that. We get like, an AI John Lennon on your next release.

Song Plays: Earl Sweatshirt – Azucar

Tamara: Okay, so you chose an Earl Sweatshirt song. Was this high school, college? What Samson was listening to this?

Samson: I listen to this album all the time.

Tamara: To this day?

Samson: To this day. This is one of my favorite albums of all time. This is my favorite song on the album. I didn’t pick a lot of hip-hop records tonight to keep it fully diverse of everything I listen to, but on a day-to-day basis, I mostly listen to hip-hop. I don’t listen to a ton of indie music or stuff like that. I mean, I do, but I feel like Earl Sweatshirt is so curated in what he says. This entire album seems like it’s one liners and it’s a guy who’s just saying things just to rhyme, but each line is its own entire piece of emotion and music. It’s almost like a song in and of itself.

Tamara: Yeah. These songs are so short, Samson. That’s crazy.

Samson: The next one’s kind of long, I think.

Tamara: Okay, thank God. So, you noticed the lyrics in this music and it’s line by line. Each beat is a good lyric. Do you think you’ve written a song, at least for the most part, line by line?

Samson: Not yet. I feel like that’s my goal though. Maybe that’s a result of living in the social media age where it’s like every second has got to be engaging. It’s got to be clippable. You gotta be 15 seconds, gotta be eight seconds. But I think on a more art forward level, every moment should be worthwhile. That’s what I try to do. I think at some point I go like, “Eh, whatever, I’m just going to say something that rhymes.” But yeah.

Tamara: How do you build to that with your lyrics? When you’re doing a writing session, how do you build?

Samson: Most of my stuff, it’ll come to me like I’m feeling something. Like I’m about to crash out about something and I pick up the guitar. I’ll just start riffing. I’ll just start playing something. It’s almost like I’m remembering a song that somebody else wrote. And then it’s happened where it actually was a song that somebody else wrote. But from there, I’ll just try to get all the lyrics out in one sitting. I feel like it’s the most – like when you write the instrumental or whatever, you have the feelings right there. And if you wait and you sit on it, it gets diluted. You get too in your head about it.

Song Plays: Maná – Cuando los Ángeles Lloran

Tamara: What’s the fastest you’ve ever writen a song?

Samson: Like two hours?

Tamra: What song was it? I don’t know. It’s nothing that’s been released.

Samson: Probably. I don’t know.

Tamara: Samson, you should know these things. You should have prepared and remembered every single memory of your life for this one moment.

Samson: That’s a good point. Okay.

Tamara: So, this song is in Spanish?

Samson: It is in Spanish. I don’t even speak Spanish like that.

Tamara: Translate it. Just the song title.

Samson: Okay. Cuando los Ángeles Lloran. It means “when the angels cry,” I believe. But it’s about an environmental activist who passed away, Chico Mendes, and that’s kind of all I know about it if I’m being honest. It’s more of a sentimental song because when I first learned how to drive, this was the only CD in the car. And it had an impact on me. Maná is very close to me. My dad is from Mexico and he showed me more music than my mother, who’s a musician. But my dad doesn’t play anything, he’s tone deaf. He tries singing, it’s awful. But he’s just got this encyclopedic memory of all these different artists. When I was shunning pop and hip-hop, he was like, “You should check out Eminem, bro. It’s good.”

Tamara: That’s so cute. I love that. Oh, my goodness. I love Spanish music. I also cannot speak any type of Spanish.

Samson: Which is crazy because you’re Hispanic.

Tamara: I know I’m so Hispanic. Legally, canonically, I’m Hispanic. I’m not. I wish I was. But if you could make a song in any language, like one day you wake up and you’re fluent in another language, what language would you choose?

Samson: This is going to be kind of strange because I didn’t even include this band in the songs tonight, but it would be Japanese so I could cover a Toe song. But, yeah, there’s a lot of Japanese math rock and emo that I really like. Honestly, not even to cover it or to write a song in Japanese, I just want to understand what they’re saying.

Tamara: You’re like, “Oh my God, that’s actually so true.”

Samson: Or I’m like, “Wow, I actually disagree. I don’t like this anymore.”  Maybe they’re saying something awful, I don’t know.

Tamara: Do you find influence with your music in any type of Japanese math rock or anything?

Samson: I feel like more in the approach that they have… I should have brought a Toe record. That was the one that didn’t make the cut. They make a lot of music, and I would say Maná as well — Maná’s definitely more like pop rock. But math rock, and especially Toe in particular, have this thing going where a lot of their songs don’t even have lyrics, but you know what they’re feeling. To have something prior to writing lyrics, to be just about the vibe, but still to have such an accurate and pinpointed feeling, that’s what art is. It’s like connecting to people on a level beyond language.

Tamara: Do you think you connect with people on a level beyond language?

Samson: I hope so.

Tamara: I think you do. I hope so. Audience? Yeah.

Samson: That’s just them saying they don’t like my lyrics.

Tamara: No. Your lyrics are amazing. We actually love Samson Oats music. What do you think is the best song you’ve released or written so far?

Samson: Probably the one that just came out. “I Wonder What You Look Like When You Fall Asleep.” That’s the one that I think is the best, that’s out. I could go…

Tamara: I know. We could go into tangents on the songs that are not released.

Samson: And then I’ll be like, “Oh, you guys will never hear that.” But definitely that one. Another place where I write lyrics is at other people’s shows. I’ll watch something and something they say or a riff they play will just, all of a sudden, flood my brain with emotion. And I’m like, “I gotta put this somewhere.” And then I’m that guy at the show writing in his note app. Turning the brightness really far down so no one sees what I’m doing because I’m embarrassed. But that one was inspired by a moment at a show. And then it spiraled into this whole other thing. I was originally supposed to write a simple indie song that people can think “Oh yeah, that’s like an indie song. That makes sense.” And then it became this whole crazy thing. But story of my life.

Tamara: I know. I love the narratives that you create with your music, even if they’re not so true. The character that you play on social media. Let’s talk about that. For you in particular, how is marketing your songs on social media? Do you think there is a sense of self in what you do? Or do you think it’s like, “I’m gonna be absurdist and silly and hopefully people will listen?”

Samson: It’s kind of that.  It’s kind of a “chicken or the egg” situation because I am goofy. I am very scatterbrained and I am all over the place. I do try to be funny a lot. And that is part of who I am. But at the same time, it is for the music just to get the song in front of people. And this is funny because I just had this conversation with my dad because he called me on the phone and asked, “Why do you keep posting dumb videos, dude?” I was like, “It’s part of the process.” But I kind of see it as the dumb stuff and the simple like, “Oh, I’m this,” or the stuff that gets people mad and gets people engaging to push the song out to more people. And then the people that it sticks to go to the profile and then see the other stuff that I’m putting out. That’s like the music video that this shirt is from. And things of that nature. It’s almost like, you got to push it out. And then there’s this stuff for the people who are already here. You can post the thing you worked 40 hours, 100 hours on into nothingness forever and it doesn’t get anywhere. Or you could try to play the game.

Tamara: I think I’ve noticed with a lot of musicians are embarrassed to promote their music. Not necessarily in our community, but in the local sphere of bands. Or they think that someone’s just going to stumble upon their music sincerely, they don’t need to promote it. They don’t need to embarrass themselves. Do you think part of being an artist is embarrassing yourself and is putting yourself out there?

Samson: Well, before there was social media, the model was play a bunch of open mics and hop in a van and go on tour, and like, not have a job. That’s also kind of embarrassing. That’s so embarrassing. That’s like the posting on social media of the 90s, you know? Buying a van and not showering. I can post social media all day. At least I take a shower every day.

Tamara: Yeah, at least you’re employed. No disrespect guys. I’ve been unemployed before.

Song Plays: Sweet Trip – Your World is Eternally Complete

Tamara: So, you mentioned having songs that nobody will ever hear at some point in this interview. Are there songs that you create just because you need to get it out and you don’t have any intention of ever releasing them?

Samson: I would say yes. And then I end up getting it into my head that I need to drop them anyway. It’s usually stuff that I’m like, “This is going to be fire. I’m going to drop this.” And then I change my mind later and I come up with new stuff. It takes so long to take a song from like, a shitty demo to a fully produced song that you’ve got to be selective. You know?

Tamara: So maybe there are some demos out there that you’ll rework someday and release?

Samson: Maybe. Or like take my lyrics off and just give it to somebody else.

Tamara: Would you work as a producer for other people?

Samson: Absolutely. I feel like that’s kind of what Cesar was saying. The pipeline is to make weird music and then produce for other people. I’d love to do that. But at the same time, I’m not the best at being like a chameleon about it and producing anything kind of song. I can do what I do. So if people want to have a Samson Oats sounding song, by all means hire me.

Tamara: That’s amazing. I think you should produce music as Samson Oats for other people and then just be like, “Release this as Samson Oats, even though you’re not Samson Oats.” Just have doppelgangers everywhere.

Samson: That’d be funny. Something I do want to do going forward is to collaborate with more people. I do have a song out with the Spooky Marvin, but that’s one of several instrumentals that I made that didn’t have anybody it yet. I feel like the collaborative process is really important. I do collaborate quite a bit on the sonic level with Felice, who’s in Delfino and is my roommate. She mixes my music and there’s a lot of back and forth about the larger narrative and the larger idea of Samson Oats and just like music in general.

Tamara: That’s amazing. So you met Felice in college?

Samson: Yes. Actually, on the Facebook page that was for incoming freshman and we were in a giant group chat that was completely incomprehensible. She messaged me from it and was like “Hey, I saw you posted a cool song. Let me show you some music.” And funnily enough, I actually showed Felice Hiatus Kaiyote. And then she showed me math rock and it was then we became friends. She also showed me this band.

Tamara: That’s so cute. Okay. Who is this band?

Samson: This is Sweet Trip. They’re like an obscure-ish shoegaze, glitch pop, pop band. I believe they’re from the Bay. They’re now done and broken up. One of the members is a total dirt bag. But he got kicked out and taken off all the contracts. So now the only person who gets royalties is the person who’s not a dirt bag. So, you know, sometimes things end okay.

Tamara: I guess. Is that a two-member band?

Samson: Yeah, it’s like two. There were other people that came in and out. I don’t know a ton about it. It was before my time. I say this about all the songs, but this is my favorite song ever.

Tamara: So, the records that you brought, are these songs that you frequently return to? Like, are you constantly listening to these songs or are some of these like an occasional hit that you hear?

Samson: The Maná song is occasional, but I go through a revival of this album and the Earl Sweatshirt album and all the other ones at least once or twice a year, where it’s the only thing I listen to for a week. But yeah, I want this song to play at my funeral. It’s like an end credits song.

Tamara: It really is. It’ll be like the “thank you rolling credits” of Samson Oats.

Samson: Yeah, I want a special thanks at my funeral.

Tamara: Wow. This was a great experience. I loved all of this music. I know you have some new releases coming out. Did you want to plug anything today?

Samson: I do. I have a song coming out this Friday. I didn’t even mean to line that up. It’s called “Be Fine.” It’s featuring a cool fellow named Keshore. He’s a rapper. I have a music video coming out this Saturday for that produced by your host, Tamara. Yeah, very exciting. And then also on April 25^th, Delfino is releasing an album and we’re playing around the corner at the Fox Theater rooftop. So yeah.

Tamara: Yeah. Be there or face the curse. We’ll curse you. Okay. Thank you for being here today.

Samson: Thank you.