Sam Roberts

Sam Roberts Taking The Scenic Route To U.S. Success

19 May 2006 06:00:00 EDT

Canadian bandleader charts own path with self-released Chemical City.
By Alyssa Rashbaum

While Arcade Fire, the Stills and their Canadian neighbors were whisked to the States in 2004 in a whirlwind of Montreal hype, Sam Roberts and his band were contentedly taking the scenic southbound route.

"This is rock and roll. You have to blaze your own trail, and there's nothing gained from riding the coattails of a scene," Roberts said of his band's DIY ethic. "We've always been out on our own. That's the whole point. We want to make it on our own terms."

Idealistic, sure, but it's also the attitude that helped the Sam Roberts Band weather a disappointing label deal and emerge as pumped as ever to take a second charge at Stateside success.

While the 2003 debut We Were Born in a Flame earned the band a strong fanbase, three Juno Awards and a handful of MuchMusic Awards in Canada, the album had a slightly less obvious impact in the U.S. when it was released here in 2004.

"I remember we sold, like, 800 copies of the record in the first week," Roberts recalled of being on a major. "And I was like, 'Yes!' And they were like, 'No!' And I was like, 'Oh no, we have a problem.' I was like, 'How did we sell 800 copies? I haven't done any interviews.' It felt like it wasn't about growing something or developing a fanbase and growing. It was like, 'Make a big splash or don't do anything at all.' And that's not ever been my philosophy behind making music. That essentially put a huge damper on the first launch of the record."

The Sam Roberts Band eventually shifted to the smaller Lost Highway imprint, but when they weren't feeling much excitement from the label about their sophomore album, Chemical City, they decided to become independent musicians again, releasing the LP on their own Secret Brain record label.

"I thought, 'I'm not going to get involved with another record company again to go through the same song and dance and courtship rituals and smoke blown up your ass only to find out they don't believe strongly in you enough to see it through,' " Roberts said.

That the band's label was uneasy about how to market Chemical City is no surprise — the lush new album is a major departure from the fist-pumping rock anthems of Flame. It's a shift that can largely be attributed to the bandmembers' decision to ditch Montreal's icicles and biting winds for the warmer climes of Australia, where they set up shop in a Presbyterian church and wrote, recorded and generally became a commune in and of themselves for three months.

That togetherness gives Chemical City its cohesive feel, but it also gave Roberts and his group the guts to band together, recharge their engines and head back into the unforgiving U.S. music scene, label deal be damned.

"It's nice to be able to live two realities," Roberts said of the dichotomy of being huge stars in Canada and virtual unknowns in the U.S. "To have fans of one variety [in Canada] and then come down and we're the underdogs ... in the U.S., it really is a clean slate for us down there. We get to carve a future for ourselves."

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Sam Roberts

Sam Roberts: Can Canada's Newest Superstar Bring It South Of The Border?

30 Sep 2004 21:36:00 EDT

Singer/songwriter is starting at the bottom in the States.
By Alyssa Rashbaum

Sam Roberts didn't think the audience at his band's first big New York concert was energetic enough. So the Montreal-born singer gave them some Big Apple attitude.

"Put your f---in' hands in the air!" Roberts roared at the mellow Webster Hall crowd, which exchanged confused glances before abandoning their apathy and, well, rocking out.

Successfully commanding a New York crowd to get excited about a show by any band, let alone one they don't know, is no small feat. But having spent the last few years building an impressive following in Canada, the singer knows what he's doing.

Roberts won three 2004 Juno Awards (Canada's equivalent of a Grammy), including Artist of the Year and Album of the Year, and swept the 2004 MuchMusic Awards, taking home seven trophies. His hipster style, sweetly unkempt mane and steely gaze have graced the covers of many Canadian music magazines, and earned him the dubious distinction of being "Most Desirable Male" and "Best Dressed Montrealer" in the Montreal Mirror.

South of the border, however, it's a different story. On his first major U.S. tour, opening for Canadian rock icons the Tragically Hip, Roberts is going through the introduction process again, this time with the considerably more jaded American audience.

"You take a crowd who, at the beginning, has this sort of look on their face where they have no idea why they're listening to you," Roberts said, "and by the end, hopefully, you see this dawning of some sort of recognition that they're into what you have to say."

As Roberts surged through his set at Webster Hall, he worked hard to spark that reaction: Drenched in sweat, he leaped onto the monitors, ran and danced, keeping nonstop eye contact with the crowd. Finally, they seemed to absorb his energy and pressed towards the stage.

Roberts' major-label debut, We Were Born in a Flame (released in Canada last year and stateside in August), is a straight-up rock record loaded with pop hooks that are conspicuous without being saccharine. Intricate, often melancholy lyrics are propped up by upbeat bass lines, which suggests a conscious move on Roberts' part to make his introspection palatable to a mainstream audience.

To see them for the first time, you'd expect Roberts and his band (guitarists Eric Fares and Dave Nugent, bassist James Hall and drummer Corey Zadorozny) to be just another shaggy-haired, irreverent indie-rock band. But having emerged from a music community that has a tendency to pull bands into a cycle of playing the same venues for years without getting much of anywhere, Roberts has worked too hard to play the role of disenchanted indie-rocker.

"We play as hard as we can for whoever shows up for the gig," Roberts said, "and it seems to be working, because every time we come back there are more people in the crowd.

"When you're down here [in the U.S.], there's no choice," he continued. "You have to be up for it every night."

Sam Roberts/Tragically Hip tour dates, according to Roberts' publicist: