The Songwriters Speak: Sam and the Big Boys
Interview by Bennett Kelly
Twin brothers Myles and Zane Probus, on drums and guitar, Sam Summerhill on bass and Kody Martinez on guitar comprise Sam and the Big Boys of Gadsden, Alabama. All four players sing solo features and in harmony together: “As far as the harmonies go, it was always the intention of the group to be singing our asses off,” says Sam. They aim to weave their two guitars into a single 12-string organism, and for their music to sound like a “big, buttery, sumptuous steak dinner,” spelled by occasionally biblical, or maybe blasphemous, street-scene and history-sourced lyrics. They cut last year’s debut album The Sound of the Year over three live takes and a live audience at their performance space in Gadsden. Sophomore effort You Can Call Me Anything You Want was released on July 4 and is supported by a tour up the east coast into Manhattan (July 9), New Brunswick (July 11), and Brooklyn (July 12).
A common comp that gets tossed around is The Band, the obvious connection being a singing drummer of southern lilt plus the rock harmonies and lead vocals amongst all members. On Sound of the Year, we also hear the whimsical excellence of Mac DeMarco guitar play, but a little more grounded à la Lou Reed.
In a phone interview the morning after a June gig, all four bandmates talk of their collaborative songwriting and harmonies, look back at Sound of the Year, reference the Book of Job, Benedict Arnold, Ry Cooder, Dizzy Gillespie, Stephen King, Paul McCartney’s sheepdog, and more.
Editor’s note 1: It was tough to disentangle the four voices of the interview, especially the twin brothers, so some of the quotes might be misattributed and edited for clarity.
Editor’s note 2 for our Look At My Records locals: Sam and the Big Boys were first put on our radar by Tula Vera, after they hosted Tula Vera at their DIY venue in Gadsden last summer.
Look At My Records: How long have you been singing and developing your harmonies together?
Sam: Well, we’ve only been playing for two years, but we played around each other for a couple of years before that, too.
Zane: Well, me and Myles, we're twin brothers, and so we've been writing songs and playing music and stuff, we've been doing that for the better part of 15 years. But it’s been... I don't know, how long has it been since we met you guys? 2018, maybe? Me and Myles had a group that was just a three-piece group. It was me and Myles and another guy. And then Sam came and played bass with us a little bit.
Sam: I heard them, they were playing a street festival that we had, and I walked up to them and they didn't have a bass player, and I was like, Let me do that. And then they didn't [laughs], but it was cool. Our time came. But as far as the harmonies go, it was always the intention of the group to be singing our asses off.
Myles/Zane: Yeah, big time.
Look At My Records: What bands have inspired your harmonies? Beatles, Everly Brothers, The Band, anything like that?
Myles/Zane: Yeah, The Band. The Beatles for sure, and The Band a lot. The Who, definitely.
It seems like a lot of bands from particularly the late '60s, early '70s, a lot of the Bob Dylan stuff, they'll have people singing crazy harmonies on. Like Ray Charles and the Raylettes, that kind of harmony. We definitely got to do stuff like that. I don't know. There's so much… There's so many influences in terms of how to do the harmony, what cool little stuff to do.
Look At My Records: Do you practice it separately from even playing instruments?
Myles/Zane: A little bit. Sometimes in a rehearsal, we'll take a minute and just maybe have one guitar going and just run the harmony over and over again until we feel pretty good about it.
Sam: But not like a doo wop thing.
Myles/Zane: Yeah. We don't stand under street corners under street lamps and stuff.
Kody: Not yet, at least.
Look At My Records: For The Sound of the Year album, my first question is about lyrics. It feels like an effortless, cohesive voice throughout, talking about daily life and street scenes, and everything fitting into place. So I was curious what your whole process for lyrics is. Is it as easy as you make it sound?
Sam: I should say yes [laughs].
Myles/Zane: Sometimes, as far as songwriting goes, for me, it'll just happen really fast and I don't know where it comes from. But sometimes it takes quite a while.
Myles/Zane: For me, it's very tedious. It's like pulling teeth for me to get…it takes me forever, because I'm not so much a perfectionist about it, but I'm paranoid that it's going to sound goofy.
Myles/Zane: Typically, one of us will just bring a song in, and then we'll all just sort of jump on it.
Myles/Zane: There's plenty of songs where it's like somebody writes the verse and then another one of us will write the bridge or something, or another one of us will write the chorus. Then a lot of times we'll come in with two complete songs and mash them together, figure out a way to just make the two go together. Which I think has been... Those are my favorite times. I love doing that.
Look At My Records: That’s a little Beatle-esque, how sometimes Paul and John would just fit separate parts together.
Myles/Zane: Yeah, it's a lot like that. I think that what I find interesting is that no partnerships have developed. We're still all doing it all as four guys all the time. We don't split off into groups or whatever. It's just all of us all the time working on it.
Look At My Records: How about the philosophies of the lyrics? I feel like you built something almost like a rock opera where you've got a town, you've got streets, you've got all these characters. Did you set out to write a cohesive story or setting with Sound of the Year?
Myles/Zane: No, I never even thought about it [laughs].
Sam: But I really, really love that.
Myles/Zane: I love it, yeah. Because I love stuff like that. But no, that part was not intentional.
Kody: We just put together some songs that we really wanted to record.
Look At My Records: This is the part of the interview where I read too much into the lyrics. This is usually the fun part. And then, so “Sound of the Year” as a song, it's the first one I heard, and I feel like it has... I don't know if it has a unique time signature or something, but it's definitely got an interesting beat to it. Is there something going on with how that song is structured relative to the others? The others are more straight rock, but this one has just something different about it timewise.
Myles [drummer]: Well, I think that really just boils down to when I wrote the song, I had a pretty strong rhythmic thing. I wrote it on the acoustic guitar. I brought that to Zane, and he picked that up, he started playing that rhythmically. Then when I went to sing it and play the drums, I think probably what makes it sound like that is I've got to play it pretty straight on the drums in order to be able to sing it. Because I'm not very technically proficient [laughs]. So I think that might be what you're talking about there.
Zane: I think a lot of the time when Myles writes a song on the guitar and he brings that to me, I never quite play exactly what he played, but I typically really like the way he's playing it and I'm trying to grab… When Myles plays the guitar, it has a real improvised feel to it. And I don't play the guitar like that. I need a part. So when I'm trying to pull the part out of what he's playing, I try to grab something rhythmic that I find really interesting. So I think when Myles writes a song on the guitar, we end up having some fun and interesting rhythm thing going on, just by virtue of that fact.
Look At My Records: What is the meaning of the phrase “Sound of the Year?”
Myles: I mean, your guess would be as good as mine [laughs]. That song just came to me fairly quickly. That was another one that was written as two separate things that I then just smashed together into one song. Those lyrics just, I don't know, they came around pretty quickly. There's not a huge amount of intention behind them.
Zane: The one part that you're talking about is “Where'd you get that Dizzy cat?”
Myles: Oh yeah. That came from... I can't remember. There was some documentary I was watching about some jazz guys. Someone in the documentary was talking about the trumpet player Dizzy Gillespie and where he got his nickname. And someone said, Where'd you get that dizzy cat? And how’d you learn to play like that? And I thought, That's fantastic, that's a song.
Look At My Records: And then getting back to the whole opera element, you got Mrs. Grady, Margie, Arthur on the corner with Little Jack Horner, just in the first verse. Are any of these characters real people?
Myles: No, none of those are real people. Those are all just means to an end. I felt like I needed some names, so I came up with some names.
Look At My Records: “Smooth and Light” is next. Here’s another one, “Pick me up on Chestnut Street.”
Myles: That's a real place. And that may be fairly autobiographical. Chestnut Street is a real place in Gadsden. Gadsden is a big bar town, and there's every likelihood that someone had to pick me up off of Chestnut Street at some point [laughs].
Kody: I think I've picked you up on Chestnut Street.
Sam: Up off the ground.
Look At My Records: Not just, your Uber's here?
Sam: Yeah. Well, they also don't do Ubers in Gadsden. It’s really weird. It's a bit too drink-and-drive town [laughs]. It's like they're trying to encourage it.
Myles: That song was written a long time ago. Again, just written one line after the other, like ticker tape all the way through. And I think Zane was there when those lines were being written.
Zane: I want to say that I contributed the “Pick me up on Chestnut Street” line, and maybe not much else. I don't know. But I think I did contribute that.
Look At My Records: Are you guys sitting around working on lyrics together and things fall into place like a puzzle? “Make me smooth and light, make me rough like a rain-soaked night.” You guys are sitting around together doing that stuff?
Zane: That was all just Myles.
Kody: That was just all those parts like that that really, really fit and work. Myles has always been able to do that.
Myles: There have been instances where we've sat and talked about lyrics like that before. I think most of the time, we come up with big chunks of lyrics by ourselves, and then we bring them to rehearsals and do it like that. But there have been a handful of times where we just sat and really tried to put together words. Like remember how much we fussed over the end of “25 Years Old?” Stuff like that, where we have sat and word by word tried to come up with lyrics together. It's tough by committee like that, though.
Kody: Sometimes Myles or any of us will say, maybe let's change a word there just to make it a little bit more cohesive, I guess.
Look At My Records: “Get That” is next. That one's pretty unique because it goes from the bridge, which is, “Well, it's like a bad dream,” that part, straight into the outro, the “Gonna be alright” part. So I thought that was a unique structure, to go from bridge to outro.
Sam: Yeah well, that was Zane's idea, because I had come up with those two verses, and then we needed a bridge, and I'm pretty sure you just came up with that on the spot.
Zane: Oh, yeah. Well, I think I had a few of those lyrics already. Sometimes I'll just walk around with lyrics in my back pocket ready to use them on something. I think I had those, and I was like, Oh, that works.
Sam: I can't remember. Was it here I did the do, do, do, do?
Myles/Zane: I don't feel like it was.
Sam: Oh that was, we were just fucking around. That's what the guitar is doing. So we just started doing that. And then, I don't know, I just threw those “alrights” on there, which felt good at the time. But there's so many songs that do that [laughs], so it’s kind of whatever. But I think I'm most proud of the verses in that song.
Myles: I love just the way that it… I love that guitar thing, the strumming. It's between everything. It's like a touchstone. We always go back to that.
Look At My Records: And does someone actually, I forget who said it, keep a little pocket journal of lyrics or something? A little notepad?
Sam: No, these guys are pretty smart [laughs]. They can remember all that shit.
Myles/Zane: It’s been a minute since we wrote them down.
Myles/Zane: I never write lyrics down at all.
Kody: I write them down as much as I can. I try to write them down.
Sam: If I come up with some, I don't write ‘em down because I heard Stephen King one time say that if he has to write down an idea or he'll forget, then it's not that good.
Myles/Zane: If it's good enough, I'll remember it.
Myles/Zane: I'm big on writing it down. I started writing that shit down.
Look At My Records: Next is “Who Hit John.” So “You've been drinking that Who Hit John.” What does that mean? You've been drinking whiskey and fighting or something?
Myles/Zane: Yeah, it just means liquor. I read it in a book, and then I heard John Wayne say it in an interview. “Who Hit John” is just liquor.
Look At My Records: Who's the “American Judas” in that song?
Zane: Sometimes I will write a song that's based on, if I'm reading a book or something, I'll just... It's a book that's making me feel a type of way. I'll just try to grab the type of way it makes me feel and try to write a song that captures that same thing.
That song is, I guess, it's actually about Benedict Arnold because I was reading this really great book about Benedict Arnold. The guy who like, betrayed the American Revolution [laughs]. Before that, he was a war hero.
But I don't know. I think it's that thing about Paul McCartney writing love songs for his sheepdog. It's like he wrote the song about the dog, but the listener doesn't really know that, it just sounds like a love song. I try to do that. I try to just grab from disparate sources because it's gonna make the listener feel something. I don't know what it is, but it's going to make ‘em feel something. I like that interpretive exercise. That song is technically about Benedict Arnold, but-
Sam: Not John F. Kennedy.
Zane: Yeah. Some people thought it's about John F. Kennedy, but it's not.
Sam: That slide solo, I just like to point out is Zane calling out to Ry Cooder.
Zane: Yeah. Those are Ry Cooder lines that I just totally grabbed and used shamelessly. That's all Ry Cooder [laughs]. Not the whole thing.
Sam: If you're tuning in Ry, I love you, buddy.
Look At My Records: You mentioned John Wayne, so clearly the next one is a tribute to “John Wayne” I guess?
Zane: Well that one is… Kody had come up with those chords that we play as… I don't even know how it functions in the song, but Kody had these chords, and I started just playing the little bluesy thing over that, and I was like, Oh, we just got to keep doing that. I think the first verse to that I came up with on the spot in rehearsal, just totally improvised. Then I don't really know how the rest of it came together.
Kody: We wrote the bridge together at practice.
Zane: We did all of that together. Then I think the lyrics for the bridge were partly something that I had written for something else. But yeah, I love that song.
Sam: That's my favorite playing live. People like that a lot.
Kody: It’s not really even a tribute to John Wayne, is it. It's just a thing.
Myles/Zane: It's just his name because, I don't know. It was about strutting around your best John Wayne. Strutting around like a tough guy. Like that big lumbering walk that John Wayne had.
Look At My Records: “Jackboots,” which you say “Surf’s up,” don't you?
Zane: [Laughs] Yeah, we do. Myles hates that.
Sam: Myles hated it every time we've ever done it.
Sam/Kody: Well, can I tell them the reason why we do that? So that is something that ZZ Top either... I don't know if they still do it, but we watched a live concert when we were working with this guy building bases, and they did that.
Myles/Zane: Yeah, they yelled “Surf’s up,”
Sam/Kody: I can't remember what song they were playing, but they just stopped and yelled “Surf’s up,” and we just looked at each other and were like, Well, that's fucking, we're doing that.
Look At My Records: And then “Rock and Roll” is last. I like the lyrics there too. It’s got a lot of interesting and surreal phrases to be asking someone.
Myles/Zane: Those lyrics, again, I wrote those chords, and then those lyrics came just pretty quickly. All those lyrics are just what works in the context of those chords. There is some thinking behind some of the stuff in there.
Kody: One of the things I like about the lyrics to that song, is that it starts to have a biblical theme. And I like that it's all questions. The whole thing is just questions. Then those other questions sort of make it… I mean, I don't know. You know what I'm trying to describe here, Myles. There’s that part of… I don't know what Bible story it is.
Myles: There's this part in the story of Job where all the bad shit’s happened to Job, and he asks God, he's like, Hey, why did you do all this? And God doesn't give any answer. He's just like, Who the fuck do you think you're talking to? He's like, Have you seen the stores of snow and hail? And who feeds the ravens and all of these things. I found that part of that story very compelling.
Kody: What I love about the song is that then it's all... It's like, what if God just asked all the rest of those questions? Can you do the jerk? [Laughs] Can you do the stroll?
Myles/Zane: I thought it would be really funny if the song was made up of two parts, these very serious questions, and then just straight dance-time. I love that. I love the juxtaposition. If I could be pretentious for a moment and say that word.
Look At My Records: Well, that sounds like blasphemy to me. Good luck with that. No, and then “Fool’s Gold” the single is now out, and this was recorded in-studio. Sound of the Year was recorded live in your performance space. So what are your thoughts on the new recording, it's maybe a little cleaner sound or-
Kody: Terrible.
Sam: It doesn't even sound like us [laughs].
Myles/Zane: No. I don't know if you guys are remembering how difficult that was to record. It was Lucas' idea to start drums out front. Because it's a really tough one to nail, to get the right tempo so that when we get to the middle of the song, it's not too fast or too slow. We would start it and it would be too fast. We start it, we’d be too slow. He was like, Why don't you just start drums out front? And that worked like a trick. That was great.
Kody: And that's- Lucas Smith, he's the guy that owns the Lucky Sound Studio in Fort Payne, Alabama.
Myles/Zane: Appalama.
Sam/Kody: Abalama.
Look At My Records: Is this album [You Can Call Me Anything You Want] a new set of songs, or is it an extension of the Sound of the Year sessions or songs?
Kody: We've been playing these songs for a while.
Myles/Zane: I think some of those songs were definitely from before we recorded Sound of the Year. We still have unrecorded songs from before Sound of the Year.
Sam: But I think “Fool’s Gold” is brand new.
Myles/Zane: “Fool’s Gold” is the newest. We hadn't even been playing it for that long when we recorded it.
Look At My Records: Listeners can expect some more of the same type of songs and songwriting then, on the new album?
Kody: Yeah. Well, me and Zane were talking about it. It actually just blends well with the Sound of the Year. Looking back on it, it works out like it could be the same album.
Zane: Yeah, there's a lot of continuity. I think we're playing all the exact same instruments. And through the same amplification, I think everything just there is basically the same.
Sam: It's just that it'll have been done in a studio. But it was still recorded live, we sang while we played the instruments. So it still will retain some of that quality.
Look At My Records: It's a low number of takes, then.
Myles/Zane: Yeah, because we did it all in a day.
Sam: It was about three takes apiece, probably. I don't think there was one that we nailed.
Myles/Zane: “Sometimes” might have had one or two, I think we hit it on the spot.
Kody: We got really close on “Overboard” the first couple of times. I thought we were going to nail it, but then I think I fucked it up.
Look At My Records: Alright, cool. Well, I've come to the end of my questions. So we went over, but all good.
Kody: That was all off the record, right?
Myles/Zane: Let's start the interview.
Sam/Kody: You don't want to ask more about my genius lyrics?
Look At My Records: Actually, one question. So it sounds like the band was a pre-existing band, and then Sam maybe joined up as bassist. How did it come to be Sam and the Big Boys? Especially why when all four of you get featured singing.
Myles/Zane: Well, we're going to do a real answer or a fictional answer. What are you guys thinking? We'll do both. I don't know which one.
Sam/Kody: I don't even know.
Myles/Zane: I'll do the... I guess I'll just do the real answer, which is that before Kody came on board, me and Myles were playing with Sam. We had a five-piece band, but I think in the beginning, it was just the three of us before we had it.
Zane: Me and Myles have had difficulty in the past figuring out the name for a band, because we would both want it to be named for us [laughs]. And that’s a big argument, and we were like, Well, we'll just have Sam in the name. Me and Myles would have argued too much about trying to get our name in the band. Just to put out all that argument, we're going to put Sam in the name.
Sam: I was definitely the least prominent member, especially at that time. I was not singing at all.
Zane: And I don't remember who came up with the Big Boys.
Myles: It came from the Hat Boys.
Zane: Oh yeah. That's a weird Kyle Hogg connection. Kyle Hogg was like... I don't even remember how this happened. But he was saying something about us wearing hats, and Myles was like, Yeah, we're the Hat Boys. We started calling ourselves the Hat Boys, and I don't remember how that morphed into the Big Boys.
Zane: But then we had a five-piece band with an organ player and a different drummer, and Myles was playing the piano. Then we quit doing that, and then we got back together to do a Who tribute show. That's when we started for Halloween.
Myles/Zane: Then after that, somebody was like, You guys should do your originals. We all of us had a ton of originals that we weren't doing. Then we were like, let's get Kody on that, too, because we wanted to do a two-guitar thing. We started doing that, and it immediately worked. Just immediately, with no problems. Kody was also playing the saxophone a little bit in the beginning.
Sam: And keyboard.
Zane: Yeah, and keyboard. Kody was doing keyboard and saxophone and guitar. Which is just a mess.
Kody: Keyboard? I can't play keyboard.
Myles/Zane: You were still good, though.
Myles/Zane: I like the guitar stuff. You figured out how to play guitar together.
Sam/Kody: I think the keyboard, it was like a whole different thing.
Kody: Well we just decided to stick with just the straight guitar, figure it all out with just the guitar band, get a full sound.
Zane: Yeah. We just decided that we wanted to try to make the whole middle part of the sound two blended guitars at all times. We try to think about it like it's one big guitar. It's just a 12-string guitar. Typically, I'll play stuff closer to the root position, and Kody will play all of the fancy chords and do all the voice-leading and stuff. But we just try as hard as we can to get the two guitars blended, like when we're recording or we're trying to get them blended in the room. Of course, there's also what Myles and Sam are doing.
Sam: I feel like we're doing all the hard work.
Myles: Yes, all of the meaningful work.
Sam: That's really what you're listening to is for the rhythm section.
Zane: I think that the whole idea is to let Myles and Sam come up with whatever that they're going to come up with rhythm-wise, which is always great and never fails. Then at least the way I think about it is with the guitars, I want it to sound like a harp. I want it to sound big and buttery and glossy, and just coming at you from both sides of the stage.
Sam: Like a steak dinner.
Zane: Just like a big, sumptuous, steak dinner [laughs].
…D’you get all that?
Look At My Records: Yeah, that's good. That'll make the final cut.
Catch Sam and the Big Boys this week at The Bitter End (NYC, July 9), Sunday School (New Brunswick, July 11) and Pete’s Candy Store (Brooklyn, July 12). Follow Sam and the Big Boys on Bandcamp, Instagram and wherever you find your music.
