Music
Interview
Sam Palladio: “Grief and death are these universal connectors”
The singer-songwriter and Nashville star on his debut record and the loss that rocked his world
If you’ll forgive the country western pun, Sam Palladio is far from a one-trick pony. He’s spent years building a fanbase in the States playing musician Gunnar Scott in Nashville, embarking on live arena tours with the cast and writing original songs for the soundtrack. Last year, he took on the role of Curly in Oklahoma! on the West End. He spent his teenage years drumming in rock and metal bands. Now he’s gearing up to release his debut album – a record that somehow not only pulls in all those influences, but expands upon them.
Ahead of an accompanying headline tour, Palladio is ready for a change. “This is the first music that’s me,” he says. “I’ve been fortunate to do all these tours over the years with my cast mates from Nashville, and this is very different, but in a great way. These cool little intimate rock clubs, places I’ve seen shows before, King Tut’s in Glasgow – these kinds of places that set the tone for where you want to go.”
It doesn’t matter that Palladio has played bigger stages than these in various capacities – he’s relishing the opportunity to strip it back. “Just that intimate kind of thing will be really fun,” he says. “It’s just going to be hot and sweaty, and I’ll see the lights in their eyes. I think it’s important, as I’m doing a bit of a career reset musically, to get to know the fans and share my story, which isn’t the TV guy story – it’s very much me.”
Have you been approaching this period of your life as a career reset then?
In a sense. It’s the first time I’ve put together a body of work that is very autobiographical, that’s very heart on the sleeve. The record’s dedicated to my mum, who I lost a few years ago. It’s sort of sharing these stories, and sharing my own words for the first time. I’m usually reading someone else’s lines or telling someone else’s story. It feels very cathartic and exposing in a good way – terrifying in the same sense, where you can’t hide behind the big studio network saying, “Cut”. This is me in 11 songs. There’s a lot of music out there over the years that I’ve been a part of, so it feels good to start from scratch, in a sense, but hopefully with a little leg up.
How have your preparations for this tour differed from your tours with Nashville?
I play a lot of instruments on the record. Every note on the record, be it a bass line, a guitar line, a banjo line, a synth part – I’ve had a hand in writing those melodies. It’s all the micro stuff that might go over someone’s head; it’s detailed work, and I love that. Putting together a tour of my own music is great, but it’s a lot of work, because I’m very particular about, “Hey, there’s that little, tiny melody on song three that you’re not playing quite right”. My musician brain goes into overdrive. But I have a fantastic UK-based band that I’ve played with quite a few times now. We did a show at the 100 Club a couple of months ago in London, and I was like, “Okay, you guys are f*cking great. I’m in safe hands. Now I suppose I can just prepare and figure out the flow of the show”.
I’m probably going to play the record in order, because it feels like it has a bit of a story and a life to it. It’s things like that where I can be a lot more involved in the craft of the evening. Jamie Lawson’s going to join the tour and open for me, and even that, you know, I wanted to bring in somebody that I love, music that I loved, as opposed to just, “Oh, here’s a local band that I don’t know opening the show.” It feels like I can be the master of ceremonies, you know, for the night. I can be my own boss now.
Is this debut album something that you’ve been thinking about all the way through your acting career?
Yeah, absolutely. It’s taken me longer than I’d hoped, I guess. It was dedicated to losing my mom, and that was the end of 2018, so then the following year, 2019, was just very shit. Then I started, in that year, writing songs about that experience and about stuff that suddenly meant so much more than all these songs I’d written whilst I was on Nashville that I was just going to put out and turn into a record. Then this body of work became like, “Oh, okay, so here’s something I want to sing about. Here are the people that I love. Here’s me talking about grief and joy and love all mixed into one with some rhythm and some beat and some energy to the music.” It wouldn’t be the record it is without going through a lot of that.
I grew up playing in bands in Cornwall as a teenager. Music’s always been where I was trying to get to, I think, and Nashville was just the perfect combination of the two worlds for me. I learned a lot about songwriting, I learned a lot about the craft of it, and I think it was a great school, living here. There was a pandemic in the middle that slowed us down – this record’s actually been done for a few years, and then there’s been a couple of hurdles here and there, which is just the music business. It’s been a long time coming, but the time is now, I guess.
So you already had a big bank of songs throughout the years before you put this record together?
I think in 2017 I cut a six track EP, because at that point I was like, “Okay, I’ll put this EP out and start my music career.” Then I think Nashville got picked up for another season, another year’s work. Then it was like, “Oh, there’s not actually a great time to put this out now,” because I wanted to tour it. That got paused for a minute, and then I wrote some more songs and said, “Yeah, I think these songs are better, actually, let me put this to one side”. There’s been a few stops and starts over the years like that. There’re certainly hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of songs that are in the bank over the years.
Then, weirdly, after going through all those family things, I decided that I needed to go back to England and write this album, because I’d never done that professionally. I was doing a load of songwriting here with great people in Nashville whilst filming, but the British connection was missing. The songs were a little too country or Americana, and not really the kid from Penzance. That was the creative decision: go back to England, work with some top writers in England, and then try and find my sound, because it was confusing for a long time.
You’ve got musical theatre in your background, country, Britpop – there’s a lot of different influences. How did you go about reconciling them all on in this record?
Yeah, and I grew up playing in heavy rock bands – I used to be a metal drummer. It was hard to condense, but I feel like this record, I was able to call on some incredibly talented friends. Chris Shiflett from Foo Fighters is on the record. My hero, Simon Neil from Biffy Clyro, is on the record. We have a duet together. It’s just wild to me that I’ve managed to make some friends in those worlds over the years. That’s become a kind of backbone of the record, that guitar band rock that I love meets the sort of Simon and Garfunkel, Neil Young kind of sound. I play acoustic guitar mostly, and that’s how I write, so I wanted it to have an organic feel to it, but then lean into the indie side, if we want.
I consume so many kinds of music. I’m like “Chappell Roan! Sabrina Carpenter!” and then I’m like, “Metallica!” That’s my jukebox, and it always has been. I couldn’t decide on a lane, and I thought, that’s okay, because there’s too many influences that I want to showcase. Some of the demos that I brought were a little too like, “Okay, this one’s a bit too wild and rock, and this one’s a little too country.” Once I found some cohesion, it felt like, okay, this does actually sound like a record, and it sounds like it’s intentional. It was a lot; a long recording process, actually, which was awesome, with my producer, Soren Hansen, who was in the band New Politics. We were able to find a cool middle ground.
As a big Biffy Clyro fan, having Simon Neil on the record must have been a dream.
They’re still my favourite band. They still put out amazing music. When I went to drama school, that’s when I really got into Biffy. It was weird. It was a crazy situation. They were playing a show in Nashville in 2018 or something like that, and I got the night off work. I went to see the show and sent them a message before the show. I didn’t know them, obviously, but I was just like, Can’t wait to see Biffy Clyro tonight! Then I got a message back before I got to the venue, saying, “Great, can’t wait to meet you! We’ll put some passes backstage”. And I was like, what? It turned out when I went back to say hello at the end that they’d seen every episode of Nashville – they were like, mega Nashville nerds. I was like, “This is crazy. I love you guys. Your music’s my absolute favourite.”
They were just the sweetest guys. Simon and I became good friends, and he’s been a bit of a mentor these last five years, honestly. We started writing some songs together. I was like, “You want to write a song on Nashville?” He said, “I’d love to.” We pitched some songs for Nashville, and I was just getting voice memos of Simon Neil singing melodies, going, “Here, I’ve got this little song idea”. Like, this is crazy, my hero is sending me song ideas! When the record was done, I just said I’d be honoured if he’d consider being a part of this album, and he was like, “I’d love to. Thanks so much for asking”.
So then he couldn’t decide what song, because we had three or four that could work. I let him choose, because I couldn’t decide. And then he couldn’t decide either… so he recorded, like, three versions. We chose one for the record, but there’s another two versions of songs on the record that have Simon Neil features, which is wild. He didn’t just sing a melody. He sang and wrote harmony parts and wrote guitar lines and really went above and beyond. The song ‘Spill Your Heart’ that he sings on – he took that to a whole new place that was just beautiful. I love his warm tone, his folky style of singing, and his Scottish accent – that felt like real Biffy to me, as much as I love the metal scream-core stuff as well.
Could you tell me a bit about the writing of the lead single?
That song was a little unexpected gem. I’d finished the record, but I just wanted to keep writing. I was like, maybe there’s one more up-tempo, fun thing that I can add to this record. I’d come with that idea of tears in the car park, because I wanted to write a Britpop anthem, but, like, a sad boy anthem. That sort of safe space, which I think is true for a lot of people, when you have a hard conversation, or you go through a breakup… a lot of that I feel in my life has happened in the sanctuary of a car, in a car park somewhere. You’re having to give someone some bad news, or you need to be in a little safe bubble. Having gone through losing my mother and losing family members, and I lost a really close childhood friend as well – plus I’ve always been an emotional guy, and I cry at anything. So I wanted to create this song about tears in the car parks that has that British terminology that I think Americans find kind of fun.
There’s an element of finding joy in it, so I wanted to get a bit of a driving, euphoric throwback 80s thing going on, and then lean into a pop hook, because I’ve found myself writing more and more pop hooks and songs. I added my buddy Owen Fader to play the sax, and I was like, “Yeah, it’s got to have a big Springsteen 80s sax solo, because I love horns”. There’s loads of horns all over the record. I added lots of acoustic guitar because I didn’t want it to go too synthy, and then I played it to my management. The record was done, we were figuring out how to put the album out, and I was like, “Oh, well, I do have this demo that I did last week in England. What do you think of this?” And everyone was just like, “This is a banger. We’ve got to put this on the album. It’s got to be the lead single.”
The album title, The Perfect Summer’s Day, Before We Lost The Light, is taken from a lyric in one of the songs – could you talk about why you think that lyric sums up the record so well?
The lyric comes from my song, ‘Something On My Mind’, that was dedicated to my mum. That’s her song on the record. Like I said, this body of work is really special to me, and she was the light of my life, you know, she was just the most wonderful woman. All these songs came out of that tragedy and that loss that’s still very much with me every day. I wanted to celebrate her through art and through music. There’s a little voice memo of her in that song, and in a funny way it allows her to be part of the music, which I think is beautiful.
That lyric felt like it just kind of summed her up as that light of our lives, and it gave context for the record, the sunshine of the summer, the waves. I’m from Cornwall, and I just sort of picture her up in the sky and in the sea. It speaks to that transition between the light and the dark, which was happening in my life, and is still happening. Unfortunately, it happens for everybody. It felt like a poetic way to honour her, and artistically it felt like, “Okay, that’s the one.” I enjoy a long album title as well. Words are important; words carry weight.
Would you say that grief has changed your relationship with songwriting?
It definitely unlocked a lot more depth. Everything I’ve done in these last few years has all been about that, even if I’m going into a session like, “Yeah, let’s write a banger today”. I don’t write just happy songs. I don’t think I’ve ever been able to do that. My through line has just been this sort of trauma, honestly, and that’s okay, and I’ve come to terms with it. But in a funny way, it’s quite nice, because she’s always guided me through things, and now I’m able to have a lot more empathy in what I write. Grief and death are these universal connectors. I put that song, ‘Something On My Mind’, out in the last year as the first single for my project. It wasn’t a big, “Let’s come out swinging” song, but it felt like it set the tone for the intention of this music. I think there’s a little bit of wistfulness and sadness in the music that I’m writing and will continue to write. I think that’s sort of life as well.
What do you want people to take away from the record when they listen to it?
It’s autobiographical, so my intention was to pull back the curtain a little bit on me and my story. I want people to get a little sense of that. But a lot of these songs are connected to grief and loss, and it’s been really beautiful having fans reach out about certain songs and tell me stories about losing a loved one or losing a parent or a grandparent or something. Particularly when ‘Something On My Mind’ came out, I got lots of beautiful messages about that. It felt like a connector to fans. If someone can listen to the record and think about someone they love and it brings back great memories or gives them pause to take some time and reflect, that’s amazing.
It’s all about love at the end of the day, honestly. I wanted to get some energy in there, you know, dance through the sadness and all that kind of stuff. But if someone can relate to the messaging and it makes them feel something, then that’s all I’m after.
