Samm Bennett: solo
        
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Samm's solo performances usually feature his song work. Spontaneity is key to his performances, and his songs often appear in very different interpretations and instrumental settings from performance to performance.
For accompaniment, he's likely to use the stick dulcimer, or the diddley bow (a one-string instrument straight out of the earliest reaches of musical Americana), or various jaw harps and mouth resonated string instruments (mouth bows). or various drums like the "walking drum" or talking drum or udu or frame drum, or various sanza and likembe-type instruments ("thumb pianos"). He sometimes employs drones and sonic textures that he's created on an old analog synth or with some bowed acoustic instrument. He sometimes focusses on using one or two instruments for an entire show, but also has been known to use a different instrument for every single song in a set. He likes to keep shaking things up, to keep things surprising for himself as well as his audience. But all this variety of curious and somewhat unusual instrumentation is really just a means of getting his lyrics across, which, perhaps more than anything else, is his driving passion and main objective. But his songs cover a wide range of lyric territory, from narrative to imagistic to humorous to absurdist to autobiographical (often obliquely) to political. and rather than talk about them here, it's probably best to let them speak for themselves.
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Samm Bennett solo performance videos
arranged by instrumentation _____________________________________________________
Samm Bennett lyrics
song lyrics and links to all videos of each song, where applicable |
