I'm Lisa Hale.
I hope you've enjoyed this issue with its focus on travel, and we couldn't find a more
perfect musician to end Newisco weekend than Sam Ness.
He's based in Wisconsin, but spends much of his time traveling the world.
Terry Bar sits down with Sam to learn how, where he's been, is the inspiration behind many
of his songs.
So I throw my guitar in the back, say, hell, I don't know, well, I got things to see,
and I got itchy feet, I hit the road.
And I got nowhere to be, and I got this hunger in me.
I follow in your footsteps, Alexander, I need to find the truth.
I'm a little bit of a guy who's not a good guy, but I'm not a bad guy.
I'm a little bit of a guy who's not a bad guy, but I'm a little bit of a guy who's not a bad guy.
The song you are listening to right now is called Alexander, and it is done by singer
songwriter Sam Ness and Sam joins us.
Thanks so much for joining us.
Thank you very much for having me back on the show, Miss Terry Bar.
So this song, Alexander, what is it about?
I wrote that when I was hitchhiking through the outer hebrides outside of Scotland.
I was 18, and I was wandering through kind of like the West Coast and I met a guy in the
hostel, and we shot some pool, and he said, hey, I've got a hostel out in the hebrides,
you should come visit.
All right, sure.
A couple of days later, all the money that I had saved up was gone, and you know, I was
18, I didn't know any better.
I spent it all on pints and fish and chips, and I had like 40, 50 pounds left.
And I was like, all right, I should be able to make that work for the next three weeks.
I was walking down the middle of town in open, and something caught my eye right after
I bought my ticket out to the islands, and it was the headstock of a guitar that was shiny.
It was like a tuning machine that had glimmered, like something out of a movie, right?
It's like a cliche.
And I looked at the price tag, and it was the exact amount of money that I had left.
And so I spent the last dime I had on this guitar, and I spent the next three weeks hitchhiking
through the...hebodies just kind of trading songs for, like, food and places to stay and
making friends as I went from end.
And so that song was kind of an ode to that trip, but also for the inspiration that pushed
me to go out.
Alexander Super Tramp from Into The Wild is the kind of shout out in that song.
What a beautiful story.
You did so much of that over time, and, of course, you did so much busking.
Are you still going to do some of that, or do you feel like maybe that's a little bit
in the past now?
Actually, recently, some of that has come back up some festivals that I've been lucky
enough to kind of work my way into, have been trying to reach out and do more stuff with
pro buskers.
I think that there's been a really cool push online lately that recognizes buskers as
independent talent, because a lot of them, their craft is street performance.
Like, if you put them on a main stage, that's not where they feel at home.
And I was that way for quite a while, and...and so to appreciate and respect them as an
art form in itself, I think is really cool.
It's also a really strange time right now, you know, economies tough all over the world,
and post pandemic, a lot of buskers had to find a way to make it work that wasn't busking,
because there wasn't a lot of tourism around.
There wasn't a lot of people out on the street with extra money, and sadly, a lot of the
people that were pro buskers for decades just don't do it anymore.
And the scene has shifted a lot, and I still have such a passion for playing in the street,
and it really fills my battery quickly, so I try to go down and do it in Madison when
I can, but I have a special spot actually in the wall behind me for a bulletin board
for all the street performing citations that I've gotten, and it's only growing.
Sam, for the president of the buskers union, I like that.
Now before we let you go, wow, this song is gorgeous, and I've heard so much of your music,
but somehow I miss this one, she is love.
I had to listen to it several times, because every time I did, it meant something different
to me, but what do you hope people get from it?
I've had so many people ask me questions that I never would have imagined where questions
people would get from that song.
When I was writing that song, there was a question that I had at the time kind of been
repeating to myself over and over.
And faced with a decision, what is the most loving thing to do of these two options?
And if love was here, what would love tell me?
And so I decided to give love its own embodiment, and so throughout the song, I'm explaining
all the things that love would tell me, and then I felt like it was owed a grand explanation
in the bridge when it just comes down to she is love.
Sometimes I find silence in dark and deafening rooms, and Neon serves its purpose, I fill the space
above a stool, sometimes I hear whispers in a cacophony of noise.
Thank you for being a part of New Wisco Weekend, your look at travel and spring break.
New Wisco Weekend is produced and written by Terry Barn, Lisa Hale.
Our executive producer is Todd Michaels, directed by Lisa Hale.
Lead correspondent is Terry Barn with features from Conrad Krieger, Brittany Merlot, Melissa
Kay, Pete Schwabba, and commentator Amanda Nimmer.
If you have a story you'd like to hear covered, please feel free to email us anytime.
My email address is Lisa.hale at civicmedia.us.
I'm civic media Northeast Wisconsin Bureau Chief Lisa Hale for WISS and WGBW News, saying
bon voyage and be unstoppable.
