EXCLUSIVE! ‘There For Me’ by The Sam Chase & The Untraditional

The Sam Chase & The Untraditional

Our Monday exclusive this week is a slice of slow-grindin’ soul-blues out of San Francisco that comes in video form

For today’s track exclusive, Songwriting proudly presents the world premiere of the video for There For Me, a track taken from the forthcoming third album by The Sam Chase & The Untraditional. Based in San Franciso, The Sam Chase & The Untraditional describe themselves as a folk-rock band but, as you’ll hear below, there are strong blues and soul flavours to this particular track.

The new album, Great White Noise, is out on 29 April, and follows 2012’s The Sam Chase Will Lead Us To Victory and 2013’s The Sam Chase Will Never Die. The video for There For Me was directed by RJ Muna, and when we asked frontman Sam Chase about it, he waxed somewhat lyrical…

“I don’t write many love songs.  I’ve never really cared for them: they’re usually contrived and diluted of any character development in order to fit an entire relationship into three-and-a-half minutes. It is also easy to write a love song.  Most people understand the feeling of love and it isn’t hard to write lyrics that can take the listener to that familiar zone: rhyme the words “love” and “above” and call it a day.  A love song can be a cheap high that delivers a quick thrill but doesn’t teach you anything you didn’t already know. I don’t mean to say this song is any different, but it’s less a casual summer fling than it is the slow burn of a long-term commitment to love the imperfections of one another. It’s a song about me recognising that, at times, I’m definitely not the optimal partner, and neither are you, but one thing that never wavers is the support, trust, mutual respect and love we have for one another. It’s a positive song about a powerful bond, but if it doesn’t make you feel a little sad, then you aren’t really listening.

“The music video is meant to show the variation of how we all relate to the same piece of music.  A single relationship can pull us in multiple directions at once, and each character in the video, listening to the song for the first time, alone in a dark room, is meant to represent the wide emotional spectrum that exists in any strong, singular relationship. To make it happen we made a call out to all of our fans (via social media) who had a Sunday free and didn’t mind spending it with us at a studio in San Francisco. No one in the video had heard the song before we hit Record on the camera: we wanted their sincere reactions to the song and told them that they could react however they wanted. I feel that we achieved a wide spectrum of reactions, from tearful to joyous, reflective to thoughtless abandon.

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