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Sammy Kay – civil/WAR
Life works in a delicate balance, a push and pull of tragedy and hope. Americana singer-songwriter Sammy Kay teeters with acrobatic ease between both facets of the human condition across the entirety of his new record. A storybook by nature, civil/WAR depicts a smorgasbord of characters — many of them weary and downtrodden from addiction, mental health, death, suicide and heartache.
Kay, whose voice is unmistakably shattering, has played with or onstage alongside such iconic bands as The Gaslight Anthem, Mumford & Sons, American Aquarium and The Bouncing Souls. His impressive resume has certainly not diluted the craft itself; even after he wanted to walk away from the industry altogether, the songs inside his head drew him back in again.
“I came home from a tour, and I was just done. I didn’t want to do this anymore. It was November 2017. Everybody’s got mental health issues. I thought the road was really the issue, but it turned out that it was everything else,” he says. “When I got home from this tour, I said, ‘We’re going to leave this be and maybe, if something changes in the future, we’ll revisit it.’” His creativity tugged at him, and so, new songs poured out of him.
Essential cuts like “Silver Dollar” and “Forgotten Ones” are liquored up with the sobering reality that life is often devastating and merciless and brutal. “Miles and Miles, my head is unraveling,” he sings, his breath as ragged as his vocal cords. His conviction hangs thick in the air, only matched by the summer’s sticky humidity.
Before you can even recover from the emotionally-draining performance, he left-hooks your eardrums with “See You Soon,” a song about a friend who took their own life under excruciatingly-grim circumstances. But Kay takes great, stunning care to observe the ruins of a life snuffed out too soon and simply lets the listener feel the blunt force of such misery. “Just tell me why you left that night,” he pleads into darkness that threatens to swallow him alive.
“You can struggle and live a very poor life. Sometimes, you’ve got to go and do it and not be in pain. Some people say suicide is ‘selfish,’ and I see it a lot,” he says, stressing how social media has further exacerbated the agony to unbearable degrees. “What sounds to be a pretty love song, with how we did it with the mellotron and the pedal steel, it’s a love letter that’s also potentially a suicide note.”
That is one of many emotional threads Kay twists together on his new record. “This Old Misery” sifts through the pressures of living a sober life, always the monkey on his back, and then he later takes direct aim at sociopolitical inaction on the aptly-timed “Thoughts & Prayers,” the only explicitly-political track on the lineup. “Your thoughts and your prayers ain’t saving no one’s souls,” he sings, marrying the production’s chewy flavor with a decisively-icy, cutting lyric.
Throughout his career, Kay has dabbled in punk rock and soul music, linking up with many of music’s most enduring torchbearers. He played in numerous bands in high school and would soon befriend King Django, a heavy hitter of ska and reggae music in New York City who taught him the ropes of the business when Kay was 16. Kay initially began selling Django merch and soon linked up for sessions and collaborations with countless other local outfits, which led to support tour gigs for any major bands that traveled through the area.
His debut album, Fourth Street Singers, arrived in 2014 and cemented his potential as one of Americana’s most ambitious players. “I had always written songs as folk and turned them into whatever it was,” he says. That record was destined to be the catalyst for his entire career. During the album’s creation, he decided to sober up, and before it was even mastered, Gaslight Anthem and Mumford & Sons offered him various tour opener slots. He was later signed to Stomp Records (whose roster boasts such names as Creepshow, Joystick and Gutter Demons, among many others), and he dropped his follow-up, Untitled, in 2015.
With the help of The Bouncing Souls founding member, songwriter and producer Pete Steinkopf, Kay cobbles together an explosive, yet introspective, masterpiece. civil/WAR is indebted to his personal struggles with addiction as much as it is to his keen eye in observing the world around him. “I don’t care what I do, and I don’t care necessarily that I make money. I like to break even,” he says. “I fell in love with songs, and as somebody who struggles here and there with addiction and mental health, songs have kept me alive.”
“This album is what you see is what you get, in regards to mental health, the state of the country,” he adds. “It’s also the projection of self.”
The 10-song collection — featuring contributions from Pat Kelly, Alex Brumel of Westbound Train, The Mercy Union’s Rocky Cantese, Matthew Benneti of Toy Cars and Will Romeo — calls to the work of John Moreland and Ben Nichols, whose The Last Pale Night in the West is very much fused into Kay’s own sonic palette. Yet Kay emerges with his own undeniable style and a spirit that’s certainly learned a few things in this life. “This album made me think about who I was and how I could be a better person,” he says. “We’re all just trying to be the best people we can be.”
civil/WAR is, more than anything, a mighty confessional about what it means to live, to love, to fail and ultimately to rise triumphant.