Sam Fender's 'People Watching': Beautifully Human and Hauntingly British
Last month, Sam Fender released his highly anticipated third studio album People Watching, after a four-year break following the hugely successful Seventeen Going Under.
The album has been welcomed with rave reviews, and I can certainly see why.
The opening track, ‘People Watching’ instantly grips the listener. The fast-paced, accelerating synthy chords evoke a sense of urgency as Fender sings about the characters he encounters whilst people-watching, coupled beautifully with his sense of wishing he could return to a previous version of himself. In keeping with his writing of working-class life in Northern England, Fender points to the dire state of our institutions due to austerity, singing about an elderly loved one, ‘I promised her I’d get her out of the care home, the place was fallin’ to bits, understaffed and overruled by callous hands…’ Overall, in typical Fender style, this opening track feels anthemic, with the rising melody of the chorus creating a sense of universality that calls the listener to contemplate their own lives and communities.
The next track, Nostalgia’s Lie, has a clear Springsteen-style sound with catchy, melancholic guitar riffs, which skillfully engenders, as the title suggests, a sense of nostalgia. In Chin Up Fender reflects on the effects fame has had on him, contrasting the working-class background he grew up in and now feels like he has abandoned.
Fender delves into a more folksy style, with twangy guitar licks and a brass outro on Wild Long Lie. Personally, when listening to Arm’s Length I was reminded of Jack Antonoff’s production style for his band Bleachers, with punchy, driving synths pulsating beneath the layered, harmonic vocals. The culmination of Fender’s feelings of isolation from the very circumstances which inspired his art in the first place can be found in Crumbling Empire as he meditates that, ‘I don’t wear the shoes I used to walk in…’ A personal highlight for me is TV Dinner. The song opens with a very unusual, almost ominous-sounding chord progression, with Fender rattling off a list of reasons why he, as an artist who is both from and champions the working classes, is increasingly excluded from the music business. It’s a dark song in which the verses feel more like slam poetry and there is an ever-present anxious feeling that permeates the track. The final song is Remember My Name, a personal song about Fender’s late grandfather. Fender utilised the talents of Easington Colliery Brass Band as backing instrumentation for this song. Though very different tonally, this track is equally anthemic to the opening, acting as an excellent bookend to an excellent album.
This album is quintessentially Sam Fender, retaining all the characteristic best parts of his previous work yet branching out lyrically as he explores the new terrain of viewing his hometown from the perspective of someone who has left it, reminiscing on the stories from his town, and the pain still experienced there even though he is now much more removed from it.
People Watching is an excellent meditation on how painful it can be to feel like you have outgrown versions of yourself, and the desperation to return to a different time.
