Sam Semple has just finished his second album, A Drinker’s Dream, following on from his debut Mystery Songs (championed by Janice Long and Stephen Fry).

The emotional core of A Drinker’s Dream, is a father’s love for his son. About the letting go of old ways to meet the challenge of being a good dad. It’s an album where both the father imagines a future world he’ll never know, while leaving his son some tools to navigate a changing earth without him.

The recording represents a hope that making an old-school “analog” record like this will one day serve as inspiration – that making time for playing, dreaming, creating can make for a full and happy life. Even in the darkening age of the robot.

The title A Drinker’s Dream is a coded reference to Hermann Hesse and the great Chinese poet Li Po, via Hesse’s wonderful novella Klingsor’s Last Summer. Li Po is the “drunken immortal”, a spiritual archetype who represents the wild and solitary, poetic part of us all – the creative fire – something inherently, deeply human that no AI can ever “know”. Added to this, the mysteries of spacetime so brilliantly captured in Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar, provides another motif that echoes throughout.

Musically, Sam wanted to bring these songs completely to life with a dynamic, vibrant production. The vibe sits somewhere between Laurel Canyon singer-songwriter traditions — perhaps also touching on Harry Nilsson, Cat Stevens, Leonard Cohen.

There are some wonderful musicians playing on A Drinker’s Dream, all friends of Sam: Jon Thorne (Lamb) on bass; Brad Webb (Amy Winehouse) on drums; and Grammy-nominated Danny Keane (Mulatu), as producer, string arranger, and pianist. A Drinker’s Dream also features The Webb Sisters (Leonard Cohen) who sing on a number of the album’s tracks with Sam, including ‘River’, which they co-wrote with him.

A Drinker’s Dream was mixed by Scott Greiner

Mastered at Abbey Road by Miles Showell

Recorded at The Fish Factory Studios, engineered by Simone Gallizio

Artwork by Henrietta Simson

Photography by Jaimie Gramston