An Offbeat by CFUV artist interview
Photo via Bandcamp.
This is an excerpt from a conversation with Vancouver-based musician Sam Lynch. Originally aired January 27, 2025 on Grace Period on CFUV.
This interview has been edited for brevity
What’s the first song you remember hearing, or a song that shaped that part of your youth?
The first album that comes into my brain is Rumours by Fleetwood Mac. My parents played it a lot, and my sister and I would dance around in the living room. Now, looking back, it’s so funny because it’s such a dramatic record of heartbreak and infidelity.
Does the idea of an album as a whole influence how you approached making Outline?
I have always liked listening to albums, I like the idea of a record being a literal record of time. I haven’t necessarily approached album-making thematically, but both of the albums I put out have been record-of-time collections of songs.
What are your lyrical influences, and what does your writing process look like?
It’s just saying exactly what I’m trying to say or exactly what I’m feeling and then deciding how far I want to stray from that — I start with incredibly plain language… Most of my writing at this point is very tied to feeling, physical space, and body experience for me.
Are there themes that you return to across this album and in your previous music?
Myself — the last two records have mostly just been me, because they were the first two collections of songs that I’ve written with music being the primary focus in my life… It was like, “I’m responsible to myself right now,” so let’s take a nice hard look… Thematically, I ended up circling some of the same things that I had in the first record.
With Outline, I was a different version of myself…. It was like holding a similar picture up to a completely different light or in a different time of day, where things had just evolved or changed a little bit.
How do you approach producing your own music?
I really like it — I’ve had the opportunity to work intensely on these songs and it has felt like an extension of my songwriting process, because when I write a song, I’m already thinking about how it feels in its recorded capacity… So much of production and songwriting is tied to intuition and belief, but there’s also so much of it that is tied to skill-building and evolution. I think a lot about how to learn and expand without questioning yourself.
How did you come up with the ideas for your music videos, especially for “Hurt”?
I think a lot about how I want to represent songs, it’s all part of the translation process for me… I’ve been really lucky to work with some super creative and supportive people that are based here in Vancouver, like Lester Lyons-Hookham, who I worked with on all the videos for Outline.
I danced a lot as a kid, and I feel like I never really bridged the gap between dancing in my child body and dancing freely in my adult body. When you’re in dance classes, there’s this rigidity and structure that gets put into your body. I remember being a kid prior to those days where you’re just flailing and not thinking about it, it’s just this animalistic response to rhythm and sound.
How did you create the album cover?
I worked with an amazing Vancouver-based photographer, Raunie Baker. Lester had set up a little camcorder that was live broadcasting to this old TV, so I just stood in front of the camcorder and Raunie took pictures of the TV. The idea of the photo being a picture of another picture had this nice feeling of separation. Songs to me are like that — it’s never the feeling, it’s a feeling that you create around another feeling. That’s largely what the album is exploring as well — what happens if I take parts of myself, hold them out, and observe myself a little bit? I’ll be exploring it forever.
