When you think of professionalism, Samantha Martin and Delta Sugar leap into your mind. The band has been nominated for a boatload of Maple Blues Awards and they continue to rack up more. Wall of sound…powerhouse blues…big band music…all these terms aptly describe the band. Their new album The Reckless One is a sophisticated follow up to their 2018 Juno-nominated Run To Me album.
Ken Wallis interviewed Samantha Martin for the radio show Blues Source Canada. Excerpts from the interview follow.
Ken Wallis
Samantha Martin And Delta Sugar…they have a new album out. It’s called THE RECKLESS ONE. And joining us to talk about the album is Samantha Martin. Samantha thanks for coming on the show.
Samantha Martin
I really appreciate you having me on the show. Good to see somebody.
Ken Wallis
First of all, I really have to comment on the actual cover of the album. It's a three piece foldout, it is spectacular. Not many people pay that much attention anymore to covers.
Samantha Martin
So the cover artist who made the grenade, the Faberge grenade, his name is Dave Crowfoot. And I met him in Toronto. He's since moved to California, but I met him in Toronto and just really, really loved his artwork. And when I called the album, The Reckless One I thought of one of the pieces that he made. So this particular piece is called The Paradise Grenade Honey Lips. Because the album really encompasses the common theme of love and that sort of thing…love can be fragile and delicate, but it can also be fragile, like a grenade, it could blow everything up. So I thought, well, that's a great visual for how that encompasses the theme of the record. And then Roberta Landreth…she's out of Winnipeg and she helped tie the rest of the package all in together. We did all the gold foiling and embossing. I was thinking people are really buying CDs again and trying to support artists. So I wanted to give them something when they hold it, it's tactile and very visual. So in lieu of live music
Ken Wallis
It's really classy. I just I love it and I I've actually kept it on my desk because it looks so good.
Samantha Martin
Thank you. Yeah, it's a wanted piece of art.
Ken Wallis
Sure is. So tell us who's on the album with you.
Samantha Martin
There's a whole bunch of artists do you have all day? [LAUGH] It's the core members of Delta Sugar. So that's Sherie Marshall and Tafari Anthony doing backing vocals. Curtis Chaffe on guitar who also helped me write some of the songs. Andrew Moligun played a lot of the instruments on the record from keys to sax and vibes and all sorts of stuff. Ian McKeown is our bass player. And we had several different drummers on the record, Will Fisher, Dani Nash. They did the bulk of the drumming, and then we also had guest drummer Adam Warner, who's really fantastic as well. Depending on the song is depending on who played on the song, but we had Emily Ferrell, Brian Walters, James Rhodes… those are the horns and then we had Jimmy Bowskill both guilty some guesting on the guitar and some strings. We had Jeff Heisholt play a lot of the organ parts. And Ross Hays Citrullo, who's our engineer, he played some of the acoustic guitar tracks and Renan Yildizdogan, who's also the producer on the record, he played a lot of stuff because when, when we went into quarantine, we couldn't really get a lot of people together. So Renan ended up playing a lot of the extra doing a lot of the extra overdub stuff like percussion.
Ken Wallis
And you wrote or co-wrote basically all the tunes except for one of the tunes… how do you go about writing your music
Samantha Martin
I'll try to write as many songs as I can on my own. If I'm feeling that the song needs a different perspective, or I've kind of hit a wall with it…that's when I start bringing in co-writers and that sort of thing to kind of help bring another idea to the table for the song. And then sometimes I just sit down. for example, with Paul Reddick when we wrote, So I Always Know, I just I really wanted to write a song with Paul Reddick because I find him to be a very poetic writer. And he says a lot with very little. It was just really nice to work with somebody who approaches lyricism differently than I do.
Ken Wallis
Where did the title The Reckless One come from?
Samantha Martin
it was me. I am The Reckless One. I had gotten out of a relationship and very hastily moved out. And so I spent the better part of 2018 2019 sort of bouncing around. I lived with Steve Marriner and Curtis Chaffey, for a little while. I had a basement apartment for a little while I was homeless for a little while. I was never out on the street or anything like that. I'm very fortunate and blessed to have a lot of really great friends with a lot of plush couches, but I bounced around a little bit and at the time when I was writing for the record, I just felt reckless…I felt a little bit ungrounded…but it's all paid off for the better and I fell in love and the rest is history.
Ken Wallis
Any tunes on the album that are your favorites? I know. It's hard sometimes to pick out one particular one. But let's say there was a listener that hadn't heard your music before. Is there one song that you would recommend they listen to first?
Samantha Martin
I really love I've Got A Feeling. It was our second single on the record. You know, like I think they would really like I've Got A Feeling…it's very Otis Redding blues, soul. I really, really love Loving You Is Easy, which will be sort of the track that we really try to focus on when the album comes out. Man, I don't know I love them all, because they're all like my little children. But those are sort of my top two.
Ken Wallis
Where can listeners get a hold of the album?
Samantha Martin
So there's a few different ways. It's obviously available on all streaming platforms. But if you want to see that beautiful artwork, you're gonna have to feel it and have something to hold. Please visit my website, it's Samantha Martin music.com. And there's a web shop up there and you can buy a copy of the record. And I will mail it to you personally,
Ken Wallis
With very few live performances going on right now, because of the pandemic, what are you been doing with your time?
Samantha Martin
So everywhere from the time we locked down to the time that they started lifting into July, I did a lot of the mixing and mastering and artwork and all that kind of stuff for the album….he album was supposed to be out in May. In April we decided to hold off, and just wait to announce it. And that's about when I started growing tomatoes and reading books.[LAUGH] But since August, when we decided that we were going to release the record in November, it's been a lot of admin stuff behind the scenes and getting ready to release a record. We're Gypsy Soul Records…on a skeleton staff because of COVID. Renan, and I do a lot of the work, you know, just the two of us. So we're trying to put out a record during COVID with a skeleton staff, but trying to do it the way we would normally do it. And yeah, it's been a little it's been a lot. So I find that I've not really bored by any means.
Ken Wallis
And by the way, congratulations. You're nominated for another Maple blues award.
Samantha Martin
Yeah we got a couple more Maple Blues Award nominations… we got Female Vocalist of the Year, Entertainer of the Year, which is funny because I guess maybe because I did a tour in February, I guess that gives me the opportunity to be the Entertainer of the Year and then electric act of the year. And then our drummer, Danny Nash got nominated for drummer of the year as well. So,, if you include Danny Nash's drumming, that's 17 Maple Blues nominations that have been attributed to Delta Sugar or myself or, you know, members of Delta Sugar. So that's a lot of nominations. Not a lot of wins. We'll see what happens.
Ken Wallis
Sam, thank you so much for your time, and keep safe and we'll keep in touch.
Samantha Martin
Thank you Ken… it's a pleasure.
Website: samanthamartinmusic.com
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