SAM BUCKLEY | INTERVIEW + TRACK REVIEW
There's a world of difference between knowing how to play the blues and knowing how to make the blues your own. For Australian guitarist and songwriter Sam Buckley, finding that distinction has been a lifelong pursuit, one built on countless hours of practice, an appreciation for the genre's history and a determination to discover his own musical voice. Growing up on the Mid North Coast of New South Wales, Buckley's earliest experiences with music came from playing alongside his father at church, before the sounds of Albert King, Stevie Ray Vaughan and Eric Clapton opened the door to an entirely different world. What followed was years of studying the greats, developing his technique and gradually learning that the most meaningful notes aren't necessarily the fastest or the loudest. There's a refreshing honesty to the way Buckley talks about his craft. He understands the importance of learning from those who came before him, but he's equally passionate about the responsibility of finding something personal to say. For him, the blues isn't simply a collection of familiar guitar licks. It's a language that demands patience, discipline and, above all, feeling.
That philosophy eventually led Buckley to an extraordinary collaboration with some of Memphis' most respected musicians, including Lester Snell, Reverend Charles Hodges and Willie Hall. Working remotely between his Australian home studio and the legendary Royal Studios in Memphis, Buckley set out to combine the unmistakable groove of American blues with the character and experiences of his own Australian upbringing. It was a process that challenged him in ways he hadn't anticipated. Hearing his compositions interpreted by musicians with such a deep connection to the genre was both inspiring and intimidating, forcing him to reconsider his own playing and spend countless hours finding a way to sit naturally within their rhythms. Yet it's precisely that willingness to be challenged that makes his story so compelling. From spending years practising a single note against a metronome to learning how to leave space between phrases, Buckley's journey is a reminder that musical expression often becomes more powerful when a musician stops trying to prove everything they can do and starts concentrating on what they genuinely want to say.
These days, Buckley continues to take that philosophy onto stages around the country, travelling in his motorhome, affectionately named The Baez, and embracing the unpredictable lifestyle that comes with being a working musician. Having spent years playing alongside established artists and learning the realities of the industry, stepping into the spotlight under his own name has brought a different set of challenges, including confronting his early fears about singing and accepting that not everyone will connect with his music. But there's a genuine enthusiasm in the way he approaches it all, from the physical demands of playing heavy strings to the simple pleasure of performing for people who appreciate what he does. Beneath the technical ability and musical knowledge is someone who still believes that the greatest reward comes from picking up a guitar and finding something honest within yourself. We caught up with Sam Buckley to discuss his musical beginnings, the influence of gospel and blues, his remarkable Memphis recording experience, the search for an individual sound and why a lifetime of playing guitar is really a lifetime of learning how to tell your own story.
TRACK REVIEW - Never Give Up
There's something incredibly satisfying about a blues track that has your foot tapping before a single word has been sung, and Sam Buckley's Never Give Up delivers exactly that. From the opening moments, the band locks into a beautifully infectious groove, punctuated by a big, expressive guitar bend that immediately lets you know what's coming. It's a confident introduction, allowing the instrumentation to establish the song's personality before Buckley's vocals even enter the picture. And when they do, they fit perfectly. There's a wonderful rhythmic quality to his delivery, with the phrasing sitting so naturally within the groove that the vocals almost become another instrument in the rhythm section. Those little vocal runs are particularly enjoyable, effortlessly carrying the listener into the next section while keeping everything moving.
The musicianship throughout is excellent, and there's a real sense of understanding between the instruments. The keyboard solo is an absolute highlight, bringing another layer of soul and personality to an already engaging arrangement. But it's Buckley's guitar tone that really stands out to me. There's a crispness and clarity to every note, with the bends carrying just the right amount of expression without losing their definition. It's the kind of sound that suggests countless hours spent refining not just the technical side of playing, but the subtle details that give a guitarist their identity. Knowing Buckley's dedication to developing his own voice within the blues tradition makes that attention to tone feel especially fitting. Nothing sounds unnecessarily complicated, yet every musical choice seems to serve the groove.
What I particularly enjoy about Never Give Up is how effortlessly it brings everything together. The guitar has plenty of character, the vocals sit beautifully within the rhythm, and the keyboard adds a fantastic burst of energy without taking anything away from the rest of the band. There's a warmth and authenticity to the performance that makes the whole track feel inviting, with the musicians allowing the groove to do much of the talking. It's a wonderful example of how effective blues can be when the emphasis is placed on feel rather than unnecessary flash. From that opening guitar bend to the beautifully controlled phrasing and excellent instrumental interplay, Never Give Up is a thoroughly enjoyable listen. A fantastic track to start the morning, and one that makes it almost impossible to sit still.
Your earliest experience of playing music was alongside your dad at church, and later you were pulled toward artists like Albert King, Stevie Ray Vaughan and Clapton. Church music and the blues have a complicated history together. Looking back, do you think those church jams taught you something about blues before you even knew you were learning it?
Interesting question! Yeah, I think that church music and gospel has a lot of sensitivity and feel required to deliver it with the reverence it deserves. Blues is also all about expressing raw feelings and this came partly out of church music in the USA during the time of oppression and slavery of African Americans. The slaves would sing in the field hollering across the cotton fields to each other during the week and then sing gospel in their churches on Sundays. If you go visit a church in the deep south to this day you will hear a tonne of Blues influence infused into their hymns and singing so yes I think the two genres are very closely entwined.
Blues is a musical language spoken for generations, which creates an unusual challenge: you have to respect its vocabulary without spending your life repeating somebody else's sentences. When did you first hear something in your playing and think, “That's not Albert King or Clapton anymore. That's me”?
I started playing guitar at 11 and spent many years listening to all the greats and trying to copy them and learn their vocabulary. This was the initial thing that inspired me to play…at first I just wanted to be able to emulate them. But over the years I began to realise that a lot of the things I was playing didn’t really resonate with me at personal level.
So in the end I just kept things that meant something to me. This in turn then forced me to branch out and develop my own style as I had less ‘licks’ to choose from and over time I just kept refining and developing things that I like.
These days, I just try and play my own ‘style’ and I have an inner alarm that goes off whenever I get into someone else’s territory too much. It’s funny but I actually feel a quite strong aversion come up and so this always directs me back to focusing on my sound.
I also think I wear my influences on my sleeve but that being said I think I’ve really personalised the things that I play. How you play vibrato, bend, syncopate, accent, articulate and your own sense of rhythm and groove really does provide a lot of area to infuse your own soul resonance and if you listen hard enough and allow it to come though I believe you will find you have your own voice within that wants to come out.
Some I think struggle with this part because you have to go inside to find it and in turn it can be confronting to go on stage and reveal these raw and unfiltered parts of yourself on stage. But in the end it comes down to this: you gotta do your years of homework first and learn the vocabulary. There’s no shortcut for this process - you have to do the time.
You spent years labouring during the day while studying and playing music around it. Guitarists often talk about developing their hands through practice, but yours were also being shaped by physical work. Do you think those years affected the way you physically approach the instrument, or even what “working hard” at music means to you now?
Yes I think my physical background definitely influenced my playing. I’ve always played quite heavy strings and bent a lot which takes a certain amount of physicality and willingness to work hard on stage. Some of that confidence and determination to learn to play that style probably came from my years of lifting and moving building materials around sites and working physically demanding jobs.
You grew up on the Mid North Coast and eventually travelled to Memphis to record at Royal Studios with musicians connected to a history you'd admired from the other side of the world. Was there a moment in that studio when the mythology of Memphis disappeared and you suddenly realised you weren't visiting that history anymore, you were contributing something of your own to it?
So my album was actually recorded remotely. I did a demo of all the tracks in my home studio and sent them over to Lester Snell, where he then arranged my album for all the instruments. He then recorded the album for me in Royal Studios with an All-Star cast of Memphis blues royalty: Lester Snell (piano) Reverend Charles Hodges (organ), Willie Hall (drums), T.O. Crivens (rhythm guitar) and Ray Griffin (bass). It was all recorded in Royal Studios with Grammy award-winnering Boo Mitchell engineering it.
Next, Lester sent it all back to me with everything completed except for the lead guitar and vocals. I recorded vocals and lead guitar in my home studio and then sent it all back to Royal Studios, where it was mixed and mastered by Boo Mitchell and Brandon Snell (Lester’s son) and then it was sent over to Osiris Studio in Los Angeles and mastered by Michael Graves.
My vision of the album was to write and arrange songs that captured ‘my take’ on the Blues. So it’s packed full of different grooves, riffs, melodies and ‘feels’ that were then interpreted and laid down by some of the original legends in the Blues genre. I then added my ‘Aussie’ flavour to it and worked really hard to find a way to make the two flavours gel. It took me a lot of time but I think I got there in the end!
Recording with people who have spent their lives around blues and soul must create an interesting test of authenticity. Was there anything you arrived in Memphis thinking you understood about blues that Lester Snell or the musicians there quietly made you reconsider?
When Lester first sent me back the tracks I was completely blown away. They were even better than I thought they were going to be. The problem was, when I started laying down pre-production takes in my studio, I realised how out of my depth I was with these musicians. This was thoroughly intimidating! Their sense of groove, feel, time and the sophistication and discipline of their parts really exposed my weaknesses and to be truthful, there were times where I wondered if I’d ever be good enough to complete the project.
So in the end what I found worked was just to take my time with the project and have fun with it and to really listen to what they’d done and soak it up. And then I just did tons and tons of takes until I worked my way into the grooves and I gradually found a way to infuse my style of guitar with them. I think it’s important to mention that the way those musicians play a Blues groove is very different to how we do it over here - they are heavily groove driven and have a particular feel, that sounds simple, but it’s very hard to do it right. So the really great thing was playing along with them and doing all those takes really taught me a lot about how they play the Blues over there and what it means to play it authentically, while still putting some of my Australian flavour into it.
A lot of guitarists spend their early years trying to prove how much they can play, then eventually discover the power of the note they don't play. Where are you on that journey now? Has becoming a better guitarist actually meant learning to play less?
Yeah I definitely followed that script. I started off playing fairly virtuosic Blues/Rock and shredding like crazy. In my early years that’s what resonated but as I’ve grown older and had more life experience as well as listened more deeply to my own soul and what I’d like to actually say, my playing has changed quite a lot. I do a play a lot less now and focus more on emotion, melody and telling the story. There’s a place for both though, the most important thing is just to be true to you and to play from an authentic place.
Your music connects Memphis blues with a distinctly Australian coastal life. If you removed the accent, place names and biography completely, what do you think makes a Sam Buckley record Australian? Can geography somehow end up in the way somebody plays guitar?
Yes, geography definitely influences music. Culture, lifestyle, and landscape all feed into what you’re creating/expressing in your art. I don’t see myself as an ‘authentic Blues guitarist’ because I haven’t grown up in the deep South of America learning the music first-hand. I’ve learnt it off records and mostly secondary sources and Australia is very different to over there so this is bound to be reflected in the music.
However I’ve been disciplined over the years and worked hard to learn the skills of the trade. Blues is all about the shuffle and the triplet. All Blues grooves are derived from this. There was a period of years where I spent an hour a day playing one note on the metronome learning how to make the metronome swing in order to learn the shuffle. Because in Blues, if you are good at the shuffle then all the other grooves become much easier to play. I still practice with metronomes weekly.
I’ve also been lucky to have had some great industry mentors such as Robert B Dillon, John Durr (Black Market Music), and Lester Snell. These professionals worked with me and really helped to give me the insider tips of the ‘music biz’ and the direction to learn the skills to play this style of music. I’ve also been fortunate enough to go to America where I competed in the International Blues Competition and was exposed to the music in its home element.
So in answer to your question I think I am developing my own style which has come about from a mix of combining authentic learning of the Blues and also my experiences living a mostly coastal life here in Australia. I think, in some ways, this is an advantage and helps me to create originality in my playing/music.
You've gone from being part of established bands to putting your own name above the door. When you're no longer serving somebody else's musical identity, you lose somewhere to hide as well. What have you discovered about yourself since becoming responsible for every expectation attached to the words “Sam Buckley”?
I always wanted to lead my own band for as long as I can remember but one of the reasons I didn’t do it earlier is that I was scared of singing! Lol.
The other big thing that delayed me was I kept getting offers to play in really great original bands that had management, a label and production. It was too good to knock back. In hindsight though, all those years working with industry professionals and great singers and musicians taught me the industry. Had I not done these years as a sideman, I’m not sure I would’ve had the skills and resilience you need in order to steer my own career.
Fronting my own show has been frightening at times. I’ve had to face my fears around singing and learn to cope with plenty of criticism and rejection. When you’re the front person you hear it all: the compliments but also the criticism. This has taught me to have thick skin and I’ve learnt that the most important thing to do is to just to simply keep playing the music I love and to focus on putting the sound out there that I want to hear. The people that like it will support and turn up to my shows and also, not everyone has to like you! And that’s OK.
Another thing I’ve learnt is that being a band leader means you must be able to lead. There’s also a lot of the pressure on you as the front person and (as you said) nowhere to hide! So it’s risky and confronting but on the flipside, also incredibly exhilarating and fun. I really love the challenge of all these things and most of all getting the opportunity to play the music that I want to play.
There's something beautifully contradictory about recording at a studio with enormous musical history and then taking those songs back onto the road in a motorhome called The Baez. Does constantly moving around change your relationship with ideas like home, success and what a music career is actually supposed to look like?
Being a musician is a life of constant movement; I am constantly living in the moment because every day is different: a new town, new stage, new people. So I believe being a musician really is about travelling and taking your music to wherever the people want to hear it!
And all these experiences in-turn enrichen the music and give it more life. The trick is being able to balance these demands with some stability and to maintain your relationships also. I’m very happily married to an amazing woman and so she comes first to my music…but thankfully she’s very supportive of my career and really helps tremendously to keep me doing what I love. So I think you have to try and balance these things so that you have a good quality of life also.
Imagine your guitar was handed to another musician fifty years from now with no recordings, photographs or biography explaining who Sam Buckley was. If somehow the instrument could retain the habits you put into it, the bends, spaces, attack and feel, what would you hope that guitarist could learn about you simply by playing it?
Ha haaaaa, good question! My best wish would be that that musician would love the guitar and to play it as much as I do and then in time to tap in and channel whatever music is in their soul and to bring it out and tell their story.
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