Sam Vance-Law & This Week's Statistics

When I started writing for this blog, the sequence of the stories was planned many weeks ahead. There was an inner logic to the order that they appeared. Since I’ve suffered a burn-out, a few months ago, I am much more relaxed concerning scheduling. I don’t decide on a story more than 3-4 days ahead. For instance, today’s story: a couple of days ago I was listening to Sam Vance-Law’s debut (and so far only) album and I said to myself, “Cool! This will be my next story. Still, taking into consideration that the last three stories involved a band from the 90s, a singer-songwriter from the 00s, and now a singer-songwriter from the current decade, it seems that, subconsciously, the choices were not as random as they originally seemed. Now, on with our story.

Sam Vance-Law was born in Edmonton, Canada to an academic mother and journalist father. Sam moved, at the age of five, to Oxford, England, where he soon joined the renowned New College Choir, juggling five services a week with violin lessons, having first begun playing the viola when he was four. “It’s hard to separate interest from inescapability,” he smiles, “but I learned there a love of music that, though it’s changed, hasn’t left me yet. Musically, it was – and remains – the foundation for everything. Regardless of what I do before I die, I’m pretty sure that’s going to remain the incontrovertible pillar of my musical life. My demeanour on stage is still pretty choirboy – ‘rock star’ was never really what I was aiming for – but I’m working on throwing a little ‘giving-a- fuck’ in there every now and again.”

After three years at one of the UK’s most distinguished boarding schools – “I honestly think any school would have been difficult for me at that age,” he says, “but I was figuring out my sexuality, which is sadly not a particularly fun thing to have to do” – the family returned to Canada when he was 16. It was here that, especially once he’d begun studying English Literature at university – which, he says, “meant that I could write a line, and also critique it once I’d written it” – he began, slowly, to broaden his horizons. “I met a bunch of people I didn’t really know were musicians,” he explains, mentioning the likes of Mac DeMarco, Sean Nicholas Savage, and Tops’ David Carrier. “I spent a lot of time with them and others, playing pool, biking around, working a bunch of different jobs, drinking coffees, drunkenly eating pizza at 3am and going to uni. That might sound laidback, but I was wholly dedicated and focussed on every one of those things.”

When he was 23, however, he returned to Europe, and – having first settled in Paris – he visited Berlin, a decision that would prove momentous. “Within 24 hours, I’d decided to move here,” he explains. “The city afforded me the space to figure out what the hell I wanted to do next. And it happened by accident. Someone said the word ‘homotopia’ seemingly at random in a conversation, and I and my friends thought it would be a great name for a record.” By this point, he’d been in the city three years, and though it took another few months, a trip to Ummanz, an island in the Baltic Sea, off the coast of Northern Germany, sparked his creativity. “The songs were mostly written over a period of four days in 20-minute bursts,” he says, “for no reason I can fathom.” Back in Berlin, he completed the arrangements, before scraping together the Euros to record the first three songs, then unhurriedly repeating the process until the album was done. “The record was really supposed to be for me,” he notes. “I really hadn’t intended this to be anything bigger than my own very enjoyable pet project. Then people started telling me they liked it.” Amongst them, conveniently, was producer Konstantin Gropper aka Get Well Soon, who ended up helping to co-produce the album.

“I’d been frustrated by a few things, particularly the queer/gay music I’d been hearing,” says Vance-Law about the motivation behind his remarkably forthright debut album, Homotopia. “It seemed to focus on two themes: victimhood and pride. Thematically and musically, that seemed relatively impoverished and the gay rights movement was moving quickly. Who cottages anymore? Who comes out in middle age? You can watch “Paris is Burning” and see a whole way of life that simply doesn’t exist anymore. I wanted to capture, through various narratives, some of the gay experience, as it is now, without judgment – so far as I was able – and, perhaps, controversially enough to engender interest in those narratives and ways of being.”

Not so long ago, it seemed that the world was closer than ever to acceptance of ‘non-conformist’ lifestyles. Many people spoke warmly of diversity, and even the most reactionary were, for the most part, mindful of the injustices of prejudice, even if they failed to act upon this. But, in just a short time, the freedoms we’re used to have become more vulnerable than at any point in recent memory, with bigotry and intolerance now seemingly legitimized as acceptable forms of discourse. Homotopia, consequently, is a timely album, one which offers a series of vital, vivid and revealingly candid snapshots of life for a gay man in the 21st Century. Fearless and frank, wise and witty, it finds 30-year-old Vance-Law spinning tales of love, lust, beatings, and babies against an ingeniously realized musical backdrop.

Though Homotopia’s ten songs are all delivered in the first person, Vance-Law is careful to point out that they’re “based on stories I’ve heard or read. None of the characters should necessarily be taken at his word, but part of the importance of the narratives are those truths of personal experience outside of any particular – and therefore normally contrived, and to the detriment of the other – objectivity.” The process, he says, was liberating, and that he never foresaw an audience allowed him to express himself with unusual autonomy. “The goal of writing it was to try, however poorly, to paint a portrait of gay life as it’s lived now and, musically, to see what would happen if I sat down and tried to write a pop song. It was also about, thematically, lyrically, melodically, having the absolute freedom to make any choice I wanted and then to see where it might lead.” It enabled him, furthermore, to tackle serious subjects without ever becoming overly earnest. “There were no strictures placed on what might or might not come over well or poorly,” he continues. “If a line came out that made me laugh, I was pleased and normally kept it. For me, it’s the humor that opens people up enough to let the knife slip in.”

When it comes to influences, Vance-Law casts his net wide. Musically, he admits, “I’m in a constant state of ignorance which is taking a while to alleviate.” He mentions Animal Collective and Caribou, who “taught me that what others might call ‘busy’ is often just lush and complex arrangement”, before admitting, “but I don’t sound like those projects. I also don’t sound like Shostakovich, Bach, Britten, the Beatles, Annie Lennox, Beyonce, Kendrick Lamar, Palestrina, or Bill Evans, though they all inspire me as well. I’m inspired, too, by those moments that other writers, musicians, and thinkers give me that shake the foundations of my world view and widen it a little. I love Virginia Woolf for her thoughts on creativity, James Baldwin for his unflinching demand for equality, Herman Melville’s ability to read the universal in the specific, Hamlet’s directions for good performance, and that’s only the beginning of an almost endless list. All of these moments add up to new ways of thinking about how and why I write, and how and why I perform.”

The album was released in 2018. Prettyboy was the lead single: it opens as a sunny indie number before moving into a slower piano-led section that represents the dysphoria of the song’s titular character, and the changes of tempo, meter, and instrumentation that take place in multiple tracks are very effective in illustrating the shifting tone of a story.

A similar technique is applied to the satirical Narcissus 2.0:

Some of these videos may be geo-blocked in certain parts of the world. If you can’t listen to all the songs here, you may try Deezer or Spotify. This is the link to the whole album on Deezer:

Homotopia

The second single was the euphoric I Think We Should Take It Fast:

The third single was the charming Gayby. When asked in an interview which was the hardest song to write, he replied: “Gayby was the first song I wrote, so I made a lot of mistakes on it. And then I had to fix them all. That took a damn long time.”

Then there’s Isle Of Man, the tale of a married man with gay impulses, which is, he states, “the song that best exemplifies the non-judgemental narrative approach that I’ve attempted in the record, and the response I’m looking for is therefore the one I’m generally seeking: that the listener feels compassion for the people in the story regardless of their relative merits morally speaking; that the situation lends itself to a more thoughtful approach to subjects that are otherwise thorny.” It’s one of my favorite songs in the album.

In the song Faggot, Vance-Law adopts a punky snarl befitting the narrating character’s darkly satirical self-hatred (“I guess I could go and get corrective therapy / Find a pretty girl and start a normal family / Then climb in my bathtub and slit my wrists / Cause I’m a faggot”) only for the beat to dissolve one minute in as his vulnerability is exposed once again. It’s a very powerful moment, and far from the only one.

The songwriting has a wit to it, selling concepts that otherwise could run the risk of sounding sentimental, as on Let’s Get Married:

This is the confessional Stat. Rap.

The album’s opening track was Wanted To. The song is, according to the artist himself, “about those moments where the potential for something beautiful is undermined by bigotry.”

… While the album’s closing track was the tender Bye Bye Baby:

Music critic Tina Engelmann said of the album: “On his new debut LP, Homotopia, Canadian-born, Berlin-based artist Sam Vance-Law explores the subject of being young and gay. With a voice reminiscent of Adam Green, Vance-Law emanates a style of airy chamber pop that hints at his own connection to classical music and pulls in the rich, cinematic style of collaborator Konstantin Gropper of Get Well Soon.”

Music critic Ben Devlin added: “ Sam Vance-Law has a truly lovely voice. It has a baritone range, which is all too rare in pop. It has superbly-written songs to sing. And it delivers them with a grace and sensitivity that makes the Berlin-based artist’s debut album Homotopia (…) a very satisfying debut from a very talented artist.”

This is Vance-Law covering My Old Man, a song written by his friend, Mac DeMarco:

This is a live performance of a new song of his, which will probably appear on his new album, called I've Been Drinking:

Sam’s vocals are also featured in the song Nightmare No. 2 (Dinner At Carinhall) by producer Konstantin Gropper aka Get Well Soon:

Finally, this is a Sam Vance-Law interview that I’ve found on YouTube. He seems to be a really cool, down-to-earth guy.

Now, it’s time for our statistics. Instead of focusing on last week’s stories, here are the most-visited stories of 2019, so far: At #1, with more than twice as many visits as #2, is the presentation of the film “Martyr” (2017). At #2 is the salute to the United States through songs. It has a comfortable distance from #3, which is another film, “The Fruit Machine” (1988). A film is also at #4 (“The Hate U Give”), while at #5 is a 3-way tie between the songs about religion and the most recent stories about Pansy Division and Josh Zuckerman.

As far as countries are concerned, France and Italy suffered minor losses, while winners include the United States, Australia, Brazil, South Africa, and Ukraine. The other major players kept their percentages stable.

Here are this week's Top 10 countries:

1. the United States

2. Russia

3. the United Kingdom

4. Canada

5. Germany

6. Australia

7. France

8. Ukraine

9. Brazil

10. South Africa

Here are the other countries that graced us with their presence since our last statistics (alphabetically): Albania, Antigua and Barbuda, Argentina, Austria, Bangladesh, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Cayman Islands, Chile, Colombia, Côte d'Ivoire, Croatia, Cyprus, Czechia, Denmark, Ecuador, Egypt, El Salvador, Finland, French Polynesia, Georgia, Ghana, Grenada, Guyana, Hong Kong, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Jamaica, Japan, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lesotho, Libya, Malaysia, Mexico, Mongolia, Montenegro, Morocco, Mozambique, Myanmar (Burma), Namibia, Nepal, the Netherlands, New Caledonia, New Zealand, Nigeria, Norway, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, the Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Romania, Rwanda, Saint Lucia, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, Seychelles, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Korea, Spain, Sri Lanka, Suriname, Sweden, Switzerland, Syria, Taiwan, Tanzania, Thailand, Trinidad & Tobago, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Uganda, the United Arab Emirates, Uruguay, Venezuela, Vietnam, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. Happy to have you all!

And here's the all-time Top 10:

1. the United States = 34.7%

2. France = 15.6%

3. the United Kingdom = 11.2%

4. Greece = 7.3%

5. Russia = 2.9%

6. Canada = 2.0%

7. Germany = 2.0%

8. Australia = 0.98%

9. Italy = 0.84%

10. Cyprus = 0.74%

That's all for today, folks. Till the next one!