Tossed back home to his childhood bedroom in Portland, Samuel Aaron found himself back in the space where he first fell in love with music. Although initially panicked, this immersion into the past sent him on the journey of releasing his first EP, All I Am Is All I Hear, at the end of 2020. Honoring the title, the five-track EP is a culmination of all the advice, wisdom, and words that have shaped Sam as a person and as a musician. Crawling in the corners of the Chicago-based musician’s mind is a plethora of undeniably good music. He credits legends like Stevie Wonder, Bob Dylan, Tom Petty, Bob Marley, and many others as key inspirations in his craft. Entering his tweens and teens introduced Sam to Top 40 Radio and an array of R&B and Hip Hop that contributed to the artist’s chameleon-like approach to genres. All I Am Is All I Hear is Sam’s way of honoring all that influenced him and ultimately, gave him the tools to be able to make it his own.

The first line on All I Am Is All I Hear (“I’m starting from scratch // I’m relearning my own name”) is a testimony to the discovery Sam would make throughout this process. This EP is a sonic representation of Sam taking inventory at a hard point in life, just like we all do. Vulnerable and refreshing, Sam’s music satisfies a degree of nostalgic lingering we all walk around with but this time it's repackaged with the new knowledge of the present. Per the Bandcamp description, which is perfect, All I Am Is All I Hear is “A musical soup of sorts. Hearty, sometimes zesty, and cooked with love.” Besides, who better to describe his work than Sam himself

We sat down with Sam to take a deep dive into All I Am Is All I Hear, talk about the unifying power of music, his creative process, and so much more.

Thanks for hopping on today, how are you? How has the first half of 2021 been treating you?

The first two months of 2021 have been a little mystifying. I'm sorta feeling a little lost, definitely excited and optimistic hoping that the fall will see us blooming into a new way of being and a new way of life. I'm hopeful but also just having released something at the end of last year I'm sorta trying to figure out what my direction is right now. I'm trying to figure out what comes next and I'm working on a bunch of different things here and there but I haven't found something that's pulled me strongly. The outdoors play a big role for sure, I had to get hit with some seasonal depression especially coming home. Creatively, it's been tricky and I'm trying to figure out what's to come next but I have a lot of fun ideas.

So for those that may not be familiar with you, can you tell us a bit about yourself and how you got into music?

Yeah, so I've really been making music in some capacity for as long as I can remember. I picked up instruments the second I could hold them and as a little kid, I would just run around the house with a guitar with like half the strings broken and just scream Beatles songs at the top of my lungs. I really have my parents to thank for a lot of my musical background. They have great taste and they've bestowed just fantastic music unto my ears from a really young age and I could not be more grateful for the music that they introduced me to ‘cuz honestly, it's still the most influential music to what I make. I was raised on Stevie Wonder, the Beatles, the Grateful Dead, Bob Dylan, Tom Petty, Bob Marley. As I became a person on my own, you know pre-teen and a teenager, of course, I discovered Top 40 radio and so I got really into R&B and Hip Hop and I'm still really into R&B and Hip Hop but it's still the folk and the soul music that resonates the most with me. It's that stuff I find myself turning back to the most. I like to think of my music as sort of just a unique amalgamation of everything that I listen to which really was the idea for this first EP, All I Am is All I Hear. I really wasn't sure what the direction was gonna be and so to take the pressure off I allowed myself to take it wherever I wanted it to go and that title really is just referencing how much what I hear has an influence on what I make.

What have you been listening to recently? Any inspo?

I spent most of January listening to a ton of Phoebe Bridgers, which I guess tells you where my mood has been- I’m fine, don't worry! But then what I realized is like every time I sit down to write music I end up writing these goofy, introspective but also not too serious folk ballads and then I just wanna add instrumentation like it was on Punisher, and I'm just super obsessed with her album right now. Over the last couple months it's been the Parcels, The Marias and I'm just trying to take inspiration and make it my own and I'm happy with how it turned out on this EP but I've been listening to so much new music that I have no idea what my next project will look like. Another album I just obsessed over was Dua Lipa’s, all summer 2020. The production on that album and just the songwriting and her vocals are fantastic.

What’s your creative process like and how does your connection to music shape it?

The weird thing about my songwriting process is that sometimes I'm writing music about emotions that I'm feeling in the moment and it’s really jarring for me too but a lot of the time honestly I'll feel something and write it down in my notebook or in my phone and then I'll use those lyrics in a song a month or two later. I get so detached from the emotion and so then like creating the song, listening back to these lyrics, releasing the song, and hearing people’s response- it runs me through the gamut of those feelings again. I've gotten so many different responses to music I've released and it's really lovely to hear that it's resonating with people. I sort of don't mind if people hear it and take a different message than I intended. If it means something to someone that's already so fantastic and that's already so beautiful to me that I don't really care if it means exactly specifically what it means to me. It's weird releasing your art ‘cuz the second you press publish or send, it's just not yours anymore but it's also beautiful because it becomes more of a communal thing. It's lovely to see people whose music I love also enjoy my music, it sorta feels like a beautiful exchange of love and feelings.

One of the most intriguing parts about your sound is how fluid it is through genre and category, can you talk a bit about navigating that?

It's like an identity crisis constantly. The worst was going to the distributor and publishing this project. Of course, I had to pick a genre for it to be under on Apple Music and Spotify. I called a bunch of my friends and I was like ‘of the songs I've played you, what the hell does this sound like to you?’ and I got folk, alternative, R&B, soul, rock, and pop… so, I don’t know I’m glad we’re moving into more of a post-genre age. I don’t know if it'll ever fully go away ‘cuz people like to put others in boxes and there'd be too many people in one category at the Grammys if we didn't have genres. It leaves me wondering what my music is; I've gone with Alternative because it's the most vague to me and most of the music that I find myself inspired by that's like contemporary music, barring the old rock and soul stuff, would be categorized as Alternative I guess but I don’t what that even means. The genre thing is tricky and I try not to think about it but then sometimes I'm writing a song and I'm like ‘Oh, this is obviously a folk song’ but I try not to ‘cuz when i think of a song I’m writing on my acoustic guitar, for example, as a folk song I tend to wanna box myself in production-wise and I'll be like ‘oh i should only use acoustic instruments or I should only use acoustic drums or I should keep my production really dry’ and I'm trying to lean away from that ‘cuz I think there's really cool opportunities when you mix things. The last song on the EP “Keep On” started really as a dry folk ballad and then I brought in this vocal synth that I'm really digging, sort of a vocoder throughout, and I'm glad that I did not limit myself to folk instrumentation ‘cuz i think it would've been a lot more boring. A lot of my favorite music right now is blending acoustic and electronic elements in cool ways.

From what I know, you’re originally from Portland and college is what brought you to Chicago. How have these places contributed to your identity as an artist?

So I found myself in Chicago for college but my dad’s from here originally so I have family all over the city. The Portland music scene is really cool and really vibrant, as is the Chicago music scene, and there's very little crossover. Both scenes have a lot of depth to them. I've made some really fantastic, really talented friends in the Portland Hip Hop scene. Just some fantastic singer-songwriters, rappers, and producers who are really doing their thing. In Chicago, I found it a little harder to break into mostly just ‘cuz I've been here for less time and everyone is just doing their thing and it's really lovely ‘cuz I haven't actually found it to be competitive in an off-putting way. It's super inspiring, I meet so many people in Chicago that are really, really just day in and day out doing what they want to be doing and understanding that these things take time and that the payout does not come immediately but I think you know as a young adult and as a young person, in general, it's a nice time to be on your grind, hustling and really really trying to make something happen. I've met a lot of cool people in Chicago my age that are really striving for great things and the competition is really healthy actually and I think it breeds a lot of collaboration too. Portland is… sorta a big city with a small-town feel and everyone knows each other or everyone is at least one degree of separation from one another... It’s cool because I have all these artists that I grew up loving in Portland and just by word of mouth they've heard my music now.

I'm looking to definitely establish myself [in Chicago] but I think that'll happen naturally. I'm not too stressed about it. I'm just gonna keep doing my thing, keep making the music I wanna hear, and trust that lovely collaborators will come my way.

How did the EP come about originally?

Back in March 2020 when COVID hit, I found myself back in my childhood bedroom as I know a lot of people did, you know, just back living at home with my parents, 2000 miles away from this new life that I was setting up and it freaked me out. But I also wanted to make the best of it and after some panic and some crises of ‘what am I doing here? What is the world looking like?’ And obviously, we couldn't have predicted anything. After that initial panic subsided, I really was excited to start delving into my origins as a musician, which sounds silly to say as a 19-year-old, but I really was excited to be in a space where I first learned to love music. And so I just started writing and working and the first song from that EP, “Restart,” is probably the closest I have to an obnoxious ‘'I’m living in a pandemic song,” which just no one wants to hear your song about COVID-19. I think that was like my way of doing that without doing that. I don't know if that makes sense. So yeah, the first lyric is “I'm starting from scratch” And that's really how I felt musically, personally, and situationally. That track was the first one I made for this project. I definitely wrote it and was like, ‘Oh, this will be the intro!’ And then I was like ‘the intro for what?’ and that's sort of how this project came about. I wanted it to be somewhat conceptual, there's no narrative to the project that goes throughout but there is an auditory concept of diving into my influences. A lot of the lyrics are things that I've been told, things that I've heard, or little pieces of wisdom here and there from people in my life. Musically, All I Am is All I Hear references that I was just diving into the music that shaped my musicianship and then lyrically and content-wise, All I Am is All I Hear, really just references how susceptible I am to being formed and molded in different ways by the things that I hear and the messages that I've chosen to take with me from people in my life.

Any goals for the year? Anything we can keep an eye out for from you soon?

I’m not a very good goal setter and I've tried to become a better one simultaneously while it's been harder than ever to predict the future. Goals wise I'm definitely excited to collaborate more, I'm excited for the world to open up in different ways and to build a community. I miss playing live like I really miss playing shows and I miss seeing live music for sure, which obviously everyone does. I also don't want this to become a ‘these are the things I miss and I’m sad and I want Covid to end because I'm sad’ but whether or not the world is able to open up in safe ways, I’m looking forward to collaborations that are coming. I doubt I will ever do another project entirely on my own and even this project wasn't entirely on my own, I wrote all the songs and produced them all but I had help along every step of the way. I had close friends and family who helped with mixing questions, and then of course sent it off to be mastered by a family friend who is fantastic but it was very much an isolating process that I brought upon myself. I don't think I want to ever do it again because there's just so much more to explore and I find that the concept of writer's block can often be completely eliminated with another person in the room. We’re constantly fed this idea of the lone genius who’s like slaving away in a room in a log cabin but even without Covid writing is tough to do collaboratively. Whether it's prose or poetry or songs but there are ways to do it that I really enjoyed and I had a couple of virtual songwriter sessions with other musicians and they've been lovely. I'm just looking forward to helping musician friends with what they need and it's just lovely seeing the success of other folks in my community. At the moment, I'm not sure what's next for me but I'm really excited for some of my friends' music that's coming soon. For now, I’m having a great time exploring the corners and far reaches of random ideas and new sounds. I have a lot in the works, so keep an eye out for new music very soon!

Starting From Scratch with Samuel Aaron