Singer Brad Sample uses the blues as a building block to delve into an array of styles that all add up to Blues Of Mass Seduction. When your band name makes a bold statement, you have to be prepared to back it up with your music, and BOMS does that in spades. This music doesn’t seduce in the conventional sense; rather, it’s the kind of blues that seeps into your mind, lingers there, and draws you back again and again.
The band’s new single, “50 Years (Since I Had The Blues),” recollects a lifelong love story juxtaposed against a haunting blues soundscape. What seems sparse on the surface is actually a lush, dark, sonic canopy, with lyrics that would not be out of place on a latter-day Nick Cave album. “All my songs are personal experiences,” Sample says. “None of this is fiction. Every song I’ve ever written relates to real experiences I’ve had. My wife and I have been married for 36 years, and as I began writing ‘50 Years’ I ran into what must have been three or four dozen couples who were married for 50 years or more; it was like they came out of the woodwork.”
Those couples Sample met are only a small part of the serendipity the band has enjoyed, as he always seems to find the common thread in seemingly asynchronous events that play into his songwriting. “It’s this sort of magical journey. As I’m writing these songs I see things and pay more attention to how they relate to the regular world. It’s almost instructional in some ways. People hear my songs and say, ‘Nothing like that ever happened to me,’ and I say, ‘Maybe it did but you weren’t paying attention.'”