Sam Roberts 'Love At The End Of The World' album

Sam Roberts, the man Esquire called the “best live frontman in music,” has completed work on his latest album, ‘Love At The End Of The World.” His third record, and first with Rounder, it's set for U.S. release February 17th, 2009. Critics around the country marvel at his “anthemic powers” (USA Today), and how he and his band play “with such focused energy and urgency, it sounds as if their very life depends on it” (Boston Globe).

On ‘Love At The End Of The World, ’ Roberts continues the peerless song craft and leave-it-on-the-stage ethos that so impressed critics the last time out. Standout tracks include “Them Kids” and the album’s closer, “Detroit ’67.” The drums on “Them Kids” chug forward relentlessly, complemented by guitars ringing like bells in true Johnny B. Goode fashion - but don’t ask for whom those bells toll. As Roberts says: “This song is a portrayal of a musician’s existential crisis, wondering how much longer he is still going to be able to hang onto the career he has worked so hard for. As the kids’ tastes change, you feel they are turning their backs on the true path, on all the things that are great about rock & roll music. The question is, will they forget you too?”

“Detroit ‘67” conjures its titular era – the barroom pianos and boozy harmonies all but zap you to a working-class bar in Motor City’s heyday. It’s also something of a history lesson. As Roberts says, “Driving through the streets of Detroit, I started noticing French street names, identical to those of my hometown of Montreal. So how did we get from then to now, and what happened along the way?” Roberts holds up a rock & roll mirror to reflect these twists and turns in the city’s history.

Sam Roberts will be on an extensive U.S. tour starting the day his record hits the shelves. It will take him from New York’s Bowery Ballroom to LA’s Troubadour, and all stops in between: Nashville, Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit, and more.

Sam Roberts biography
Canadian singer/songwriter/bandleader Sam Roberts has returned with his third full-length, Love At Then End Of The World. Produced by Joseph Donovan and Roberts himself, and mixed by Mike Fraser (AC/DC, Aerosmith), it encompasses all the great rock hooks, riffs, and insightful lyrics that are the touchstones of Sam Roberts’ sound.

His previous albums, We Were Born in a Flame (2003), and Chemical City (2006) both earned Roberts stateside raves. Esquire called him the “best live frontman in music.” The Boston Globe hailed him as “a classic rocker in an indie-rock world,” while AllMusic.com called Chemical City “a classic rock album for the modern age.” Sam and his band have performed on Late Show with David Letterman, Late Night with Conan O’Brien, Tonight Show with Jay Leno, The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson and Last Call with Carson Daly. Outlets like USA Today, The LA Times, and The Washington Post all sang Roberts’ praises.

Critics are equally in love with Roberts in his native Canada, as is the general public. Roberts’ debut EP became the best-selling independent release in Canadian history. His first full album scored three Juno Awards, and his latest, Love At The End Of The World, debuted at #1 there.

The Sam Roberts Band has earned its reputation live as well as on record, touring extensively in support of Chemical City. They are poised to hit the road again for an extended U.S. tour the day Love at the End of the World hits the shelves. As Jonathan Perry of The Boston Globe notes, Sam performs “with such focused energy and urgency, it sounds as if his very life depends on it.”

Sam Roberts on recording Love at the End of the World

This record was written and recorded between January and October 2007 in our hometown of Montreal, Canada. For our previous albums, we traveled far and wide – from Vancouver, British Columbia, to Africa, to Byron Bay, Australia – feeling that the further we got away from home, the easier the inspiration for new songs was going to strike.

The original plan for Love At The End Of The World was to record it on a houseboat while floating down the Ganges. As it turned out, my wife and I had our first child, a little girl, at the beginning of 2007 and so instead, this became the first album we made in Montreal. As a songwriter, this forced me to reexamine the place I had known and lived in all my life with a different lens, looking under rocks I would otherwise have passed right on by. I wanted to try to see clearly the ways in which people had figured out to coexist in the tight quarters of the city streets. To reveal the friction and the tension which try to pull us apart, but also the moments of peace and redemption, defying the odds and keeping us all together.

This is what Love At The End Of The World struggles with, right from the first note – how we push ourselves to the edge of the precipice, hell-bent on self-destruction, only to glance to each side and see that we are not alone, that the capacity for love exists in all of us, and can save us.

We once again partnered up with producer Joseph Donovan, who worked on Chemical City with us. We were at high school together and formed our first band, the ill-fated and ill-named “Happy Death Men.” The band broke up after being cut from the school talent show one time too many. But the roots run deep…and so, years later, we found ourselves making music together again.

I walked the length and breadth of Montreal, building the stories and melodies, drinking coffee and wine in significant quantities, changing the angles. After having been locked up for a couple of years, building the pressure behind the mental dam erected by months of touring, the songs came out in a flood. We shaped and harnessed them as a band in our rehearsal hall and then took them to the studio. We were trying to catch lightning in a bottle…

A few friends came in to add some color to the mix. From Senegalese percussion players on “Fixed To Ruin,” to the beautiful voice of Angela Desveaux on “Words & Fire” (I still believe she is the love child of Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris, conceived after their legendary concert in Quebec), there was even a little baby crawling around the control room - the album kept taking on new dimensions.

So here it is, a twisted ball of chaos and light, a yell from the swamp, demons wrestled into a shaky submission. This is a pitched battle against the corruption of the soul and a reminder that there’s still love at the end of the world…

Love at the End of the World: track by track

LOVE AT THE END OF THE WORLD: Each night on the evening news: The four horsemen of the apocalypse, rivers of blood, the end of days…Yet, amongst all of this, the stubborn feeling that life is worth living. We are pushing ourselves to the brink, yet the seeds of salvation and the answers to avoiding this destruction can only come from within. This was the last song written and recorded for the album. It’s all of the other songs distilled into one clear statement of intent.

STRIPMALL RELIGION: On September 13, 2006 we were in the midst of touring the American south. We turned on the news to see that a young man, armed with a gun, was on a shooting rampage at a school in our hometown of Montreal. It hit close to home. We all have friends and family who attended that school, we walk by it every day, and there it was on the television. We were in Texas and I have never felt so far away from home. Outside our window, we were driving passed miles and miles of strip malls, the ugly and ubiquitous appendage of the modern North American city. It gave me the feeling that we were like animals in a zoo, doomed to life in identical pens, the sameness of everything feeding into our collective paranoia, and suspicion of our neighbours’ intentions.

OH MARIA: Basically what happens when you transpose the Virgin Mary from Schubert’s Ave Maria with a hard-living biker mama, jailed for her murderous ways. The devotion of a man to a woman who walks the wrong side of the law…

WORDS & FIRE: This is a waltz dedicated to our devotion to love in all of its many shapes – it heals us and yet it breaks us apart, we are lost to it only to be resurrected by its saving grace.

LIONS OF THE KALAHARI: I once took a trip to the Kalahari desert in southern Africa. Every day the rains would come and settle the dust, a kind of purification ritual. It seemed that the cycle of life and death was woven into the very fabric of the place, and that, even as a visitor, you were given a chance to see it all clearly. Two years later, I found myself sitting on top of Mont Royal, in my hometown, realizing that the desert had stretched all the way from there to here.

UP SISTER: A reminder to live for today…your doubt and paranoia can only obscure your vision of what is possible. Avoid the false prophets and the leeches looking to make a fast buck off of your dreams. It is a call for a return to an elemental state – to think less, to feel more, to live the future NOW!

THEM KIDS: This song is a portrayal of a musician’s existential crisis, wondering how much longer he is still going to be able to hang onto the career he has worked so hard for. As the kids’ tastes change, you feel they are turning their backs on the true path, on all the things that are great about rock & roll music. The question is, will they forget you too?

END OF THE EMPIRE: Man colonizes man – it is an impulse deep within all of us and its effects ripple throughout our history in constant, expanding rings. But every empire ends, crumbling under its own weight and its inability to feed its boundless appetite. I had a picture in my mind of men wearing crisp white suits and pith helmets, nervously sipping mint juleps, jumping at the sight of their own shadows as the realization dawns that the golden years weren’t gong to last forever…

FIXED TO RUIN: A gangster’s tale. He’s in love with a woman, and torn between his desire to be with her and how to reconcile that with his sordid history in the mean streets. It’s decision time for this guy – will he be able to come to terms with his ‘evil ways’ and change his life around for this woman?

SUNDANCE: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid has always been one of my favourite movies. In the final scene, the two find themselves having to fight their way out of a corner against a small army of Bolivian police, to make their final stand. To me, it always epitomized the idea of battling the odds. Life is fragile. It can break and be lost at any moment. Life is hard, and we have to dig deep to rise and meet the challenges we are faced with.

THE PILGRM: I must have been watching a lot of cowboy movies while we were making this record…Rock & Roll people feel a close kinship with the idea of the Pilgrim. Wandering from town to town, never staying for long, never getting too close, because by morning, you’re long gone.

WAKING THE DEAD: This song places you in the moment right before sleep takes hold, seeing how thin the boundary between dreams and reality can be. Sometimes you are as real as stone, and others you are merely a phantom.

DETROIT ‘67: A song that rolls along, and you’re at the wheel with the volume up and the windows down. The idea for the song was sparked by one of the band’s trips to Detroit. Driving through the streets, I started noticing French street names, identical to those of my hometown of Montreal. So how did we get from then to now, and what happened along the way? This song peels back the layers of a city’s history from its foundation as an outpost of New France, up to the 12th street riots in the 1967. This was a year when Motown’s music had found the world’s ear and yet its people were being torn apart by economic hardships and racial tension. Rock & Roll is the mirror we hold up to reflect these twists and turns in our history.

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Sam Roberts - Love At The End Of The World