Good Morning to you! This is Jacob Braybrooke, and it’s time for you to grab some Coffee and take just a moment out of your day to chill out with a soulful edition of my daily tracks on the blog, because it’s always my day-to-day pleasure to write up about a different piece of music every day! ‘Enough’ is a track that I gravitated towards after catching it on KCRW’s ‘Today’s Top Tune’ web-page recently, and it comes from the contemporary R&B and Neo-Soul singer-songwriter Samm Henshaw, who was raised in South London by Nigerian parents and he studied for a degree in Popular Music Performance at Southampton Solent, a public research-based university. He released his debut album – ‘Untidy Soul’ – on January 28th, 2022 via AWAL Recordings. That was a few months ago, and so this post is perhaps a slightly delayed reaction to the release, but it should feel recent enough for you and, as the sixteen-track project is his debut release, I hope the quiet weeks of January gave him some breathing room to stand out within. Henshaw has gained mainstream radio support from BBC Radio 1 and he has been supporting more well-known names like James Bay, Chance The Rapper and Allen Stone on tour in recent years. His previous single and EP releases have helped him garner over 20 million streams on Spotify. He wrote and performed ‘The World Is Mine’ – a track that became the theme track for the ‘Alex Rider’ TV series that you can find on Amazon Prime Video or IMDB TV. He began writing ‘Untidy Soul’ nearly six years ago, but he went through a change of creative direction when he switched labels before finishing the record in 2020. Produced by Josh Grant, it was mainly influenced by Kirk Franklin and Common, and the final project is a year-long document of self-discovery. Talking more about the title and LP in detail, he says, “The music I make has never felt nice and clean or like conventional Soul music – it’s messy, because I can be quite a scatter-brain and usually have a million different things going through my head at once”, in his press release. Let’s give ‘Enough’ a spin.
‘Untidy Soul’ features guest contributions from Maverick Sabre, Keyon Harrold and Tobe Nwigwe, and to describe the songwriting behind tracks like ‘Enough’, he says, “These songs all tell very different stories, but the overall theme for me is self-growth. You see the main character start in one place at the beginning and get to another place by the end, and hopefully, that inspires people to have some reflection on their own lives, how they treat others, how they treat themselves, because I think most of us are a bit of a mess on the inside. We’re all a work in progress”, in a recent article for New Wave Magazine. ‘Enough’ is his meditation on perfectionism and the lengths that you go to strive for your own satisfaction levels, with inward lyrics like “It’s getting heavy on my brain/Too busy trying to make a name” and “Three dots and no reply/Feeling like a social suicide” in the verses that discuss how your own thoughts can weigh heavily on yourself and how the stresses of modern, 24 hour-style society can affect your mind-set with a distinctively British sense of character too. The chorus hooks of “How rich is rich enough?/How strong is strong enough?” and “How much is too much?/When is enough enough” carries the same idea of answering questions that everybody asks themselves, while the overall track explores how we all, as human beings, through Samm as a study, have a tendency to push ourselves to our furthest limits despite it not being the most efficient thing that we can do to help ourselves. None of this is carried out with a doom and gloom, a woe-is-me or a too self-serious spirit however – as although Henshaw is sanguine and self-questioning with his vocal textures throughout, he comes across as quietly optimistic with his crooning as the self-effacing Funk backdrop mounts it’s comeback below the low-key and wry personality of Henshaw’s voice throughout. The instrumentation has a habit of feeling timeless, where the airy and radiant Trumpet melodies feel vintage and Motown-influenced, but the lyrics comment on contemporary issues to give the classical influences a more modernized spin. There’s also an underlying sense of Gospel to the entire ordeal, with layered female baking vocals giving weight to the signature Soul style. For me, Samm Henshaw feels a little like Britain’s answer to Curtis Harding or Leon Bridges as the instrumentation feels nostalgic but the production feels extant and immediate, alongside a wide sense of accessibility and relatability for casual listeners, thus overcoming the risk of the more nostalgic influences making it feel outdated and, instead, Henshaw carries a sense of the ‘ageless’ with his music. In conclusion, he feels almost like my favourite weatherman (Which is Channel 4’s Liam Dutton, if you were starting to wonder). His presence is simply soothing, with a comforting approach of not fixing anything that isn’t broken.
That’s everything for today! Thank you for continually supporting the site, and I’ll be back tomorrow to review an exciting new single by an Emily Kempf-led Post-Punk and Garage Rock band who are originally from Chicago, Illinois. They have toured the UK, the Netherlands, France and Germany supporting Twin Peaks, and their single ‘Wild’ was featured in an episode of The CW’s TV series ‘Charmed’ that began airing in 2018.
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