Interview Samantha Urbani: “This album ended up being this intense, unexpected healing process”

On the cusp of releasing her debut solo album, Samantha Urbani speaks about the decade since the breakup of Friends, the loss that drove her away from music, and the community that brought her back.

Words: James Hickey
26th September 2023

Samantha Urbani has had a longer journey than most towards making a debut solo album. After the meteoric rise of her band Friends in 2012, followed by their breakup a year later, the singer has bounced between every conceivable project since. She has been a collaborator with a variety of artists, such as Blood Orange and Twin Shadow, as well as launching her own record label and branching into A&R. Factor in her other projects – fashion design and modelling, lecturing at UCLA and NYU, DJing – and you realise how it might have taken ten years to get to her own music.

It was well worth the wait, though. ‘Showing Up’ is a gem of ’80s-inspired pop, packed full of earworm hooks and rich, inventive textures. One of the defining elements of Samantha’s music and creative process is her sense of community, and this album is no different. There are too many collaborators on the album to mention, ranging from Stuart Matthewman of Sade to Rostam Batmanglij, and Samantha names every single one with enthusiasm. Now she’s gearing up to take the album on the road ahead in what promises to be her most exciting live show to date.

Speaking from her car somewhere in Brooklyn, Samantha talks to us about how tragedy almost stopped her from making music entirely, the journey it took to get back on track, and how she found inspiration at a party at Mac DeMarco’s house.

It's been ten years since Friends split up. Why have you decided to release a solo album now?

I feel like I’ve always been more of an intuitive person creatively. I really like to do things at my own pace with my own community, and Friends attracted a lot of attention from people outside that. In 2013 when Friends was coming to an end I had other opportunities that just felt like they were centring my community more. It's not like I waited to make a solo album – I just decided things really aligned in a way that felt true to myself. And then when that happened I made an EP with a very dear friend of mine called Sam Mehran, and he and I were super close and that creative connection was really deep and sincere, so it was heartbreaking when he died the following year. It definitely took me a full year to recover from that on any level – emotionally, creatively, mental health wise, everything. The really beautiful thing about this album starting was it ended up being this intense unexpected healing process.

Nick Weiss (Nightfeelings) produced this record. How did you decide to work with him after losing Sam?

We initially got together to go through Sam's hard drives. We didn’t meet to say “let’s make an album,” we met because we shared this mutual friend and we were just trying to work through the grief and think about how to reconvene and rebuild our community. Out of that we released a posthumous album of Sam's music, but it was Nick very gently and firmly saying “I know this isn’t the first thing on your mind now but I wanna hear what you two were working on before this happened” that started it. I was in a weird place where I had so much baggage and pain intrinsically connected to music, so Nick was unintentionally this mediator to get me reconnected to my joy in writing and recording my songs. We worked for a year at all these demos I had started with Sam, and we wrote some new things too, and we both ended up relocating from New York to LA and finishing the album together.

What was the writing process like for 'Showing Up'?

This album is really a combination of two different times. It's a retrospective of songs that I started a long time ago that were on the back burner that I didn’t finish, and it's stuff I wrote that once I found my inspiration and my inner voice for music again. It's something that was also very intentional having gone through all this super intense, painful stuff. I wanted to make an album that sounds joyful and has a cathartic energy to it, and I think it's very cohesive for that – when you listen to it, it doesn’t sound like it's been stitched together from different time periods. I’m a field recorder in the way that I like to work. I get so inspired being out in the world and seeing things happen organically and making connections. One song started at a house party in 2018 at Mac DeMarco's house, and some of us were just jamming and my friend John Carroll Kirby was playing piano. I took a video of what he was playing, and there was this little chord build and turnaround which I loved, and I was like “is that already something?” And when I texted Kirby the next day and asked, he was like “I don’t even remember playing that, come over and let's build it up.”

Have you considered what a live show will look like for these songs?

My thought process behind the album was that I know I wanna play this album live, and I wanna feel empowered to have fun playing shows. Even though I love going to shows where its super heart-on-your-sleeve and everyone's crying, for me as an artist and a performer I know that I’m in my best element when I can be the ringleader of everyone getting high energy and a sense of catharsis and a sense of euphoric survival, rather than opening up the memories of the actual deeply painful stuff. Most of these songs I haven’t played live at all which is a new thing for me – when I started Friends it was a live thing before it was ever recorded, but now it's quite the opposite. When I was recording it was so fun for me as a producer having such an amazing network of musicians and collaborators, so on this album I’ve been able to build a supergroup for each song, and there was a part of me that was like “Fuck! How am I going to be able to do it justice live?” But I just had my first band practices a week ago and my live bandmates are a total supergroup, too.

“I know that I’m in my best element when I can be the ringleader of everyone getting high energy and a sense of catharsis.”

You've been in a number of music projects. Does your new music represent a change in direction from what you've made before?

I think the charm of Friends was that it was more punk, and this stuff has the edge and the energy still but it’s a little refined. We’ve put a lot of thought into the arrangements. I want the live shows to sound very good but also keep it simple so we can travel a lot early on. Everything I’ve ever done live is very bass and percussion forward, for most people it’s like “I need a really good guitarist”, but as long as I have the slappingest fucking bass shredder and a sick fucking drummer I'm good.

You've spoken a lot about collaboration and community in making this music. Is that an important part of the process for you?

All my friends are so talented and weird and creative, I love these people who are making things from beginning to end themselves with no big team or budget. Any time I write a song it might have a different feel or arrangement in mind, but everyone who I’ve worked with has contributed really invaluable things that are so unique to them. To me a solo thing was never gonna be something that was hyper individualistic or very uptight about everybody knowing that I did every little thing. It does not make me feel discredited to centre the people who work on my music. I came up in the DIY community of Brooklyn and that’s always been my ethos, I think it always will be too. I had some tracks that didn’t go on the record that had bigger name features, but in the end the two on there are my friend Sasha Desree (Silk Rhodes, Drugdealer) who’s the only other person singing on this, and Rexy, a music project from 1981 whose album I helped reissue, and whose voice I sampled for 'Time Keeps Slipping'. It’s impossible to talk about this record without getting a little heavy at times because I was so excited by the idea to sample her, and I was waiting for the song to get mastered so I could show her, and the week I was going to send it back she passed away. It ended up feeling like it imbued the method with this deeper thing. The words she says in the sample are ‘we’re running out of time’, and a lot of the stuff on the album is about facing mortality or time going by, not with a sense of fear but a sense of urgency.

Are you going to focus on making more solo music now? You've explored so many fields: A&R, fashion design, DJing...

I just opened a gallery in LA too! I know myself well enough to know that I have the chemical makeup to be a depressed person, and how close darkness and sadness can be for anyone at any time. The busyness is literally me keeping that darkness away. I don’t want to become numb to things so I have to keep juggling everything possible so it feels like we’re going in the right direction. The time I spent away, I never for one second felt “let’s move on, that’s not for me, recording and performing isn’t for me.” The feeling was always “this is going to happen when it’s going to happen, and it’s happening now so why not now?” I have tracks I want to put out as soon as the record’s out, and I desperately want to come back and play in the UK again, those are my favourite shows. I’m always working on a lot of stuff but once this is out there will be more for sure. This is absolutely the entrance of a new era.

'Showing Up' is out now via Lucky Number.

Tags: Samantha Urbani, From The Magazine, Features, Interviews