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Interview: Sam Robbins Talks Music, Industry, and His Upcoming Album Release ‘So Much I Still Don’t See’

Sam Robbins talks about his upcoming album, the stories behind his songs, the highs and lows of navigating the music industry, and much more. A deep dive into his creative process and musical journey!

By Eugenia RoditisMusicngear Editor

Sam Robbins is a modern troubadour with a voice that echoes the warmth of classic folk and the heart of a true storyteller. His music isn’t just inspired by the road but shaped by it. With tens of thousands of miles behind him and countless stories collected along the way, his upcoming album, 'So Much I Still Don’t See' out on April 25, is an ode to the moments, places, and people that have left their mark on him.

In this insightful interview, we talk about his touring experiences, the gear that defines his sound, the philosophy that drives his creativity, his vision for the future, and much more.

Eugenia Roditis, Musicngear: Sam, your upcoming album, 'So Much I Still Don’t See', is deeply inspired by your touring experience. Having driven over 45,000 miles a year for several years, how has this constant movement shaped you both personally and musically? Were there any standout moments during your travels that directly influenced specific tracks?

It’s definitely shaped me in a lot of ways! It’s funny, I recently moved back up to New England this past year, and with that, I’ve realized that I really haven’t “lived” anywhere for several years. I was in Nashville for about 6 months before COVID, and I called that my home until a few months ago, but really, I’ve spent the past several years almost completely on the road. I was bouncing between different areas of the country constantly, trying to find my way. And I still am!

I think I wanted to get out there in that way because I didn’t want to try to find any shortcuts – I knew that the only way I was going to improve and find something more in my music and myself was through actually getting out there, physically going to unfamiliar areas of the country and being with people face to face. I committed to meeting new audiences, new experiences, and new people head-on as much as I could. It was and is definitely an interesting ride!

The songs were all written in different areas of the country, and written from little moments – the title track, “So Much I Still Don’t See” was written after a very sweet interaction with an older black woman in Birmingham, Alabama. She was so excited to be buying a black Ariel doll for her granddaughter. “Piles of Sand” was written right after a walk in a public park in Tennessee (that’s literally the first line!). “Ride With Me” was thinking back on a very memorable trip my now-fiance and I took to Savannah, GA right when we had started dating. “The Real Thing” was written after driving through a suburb of Dallas, TX.

Musicngear: You’ve got such a unique sound, especially with your guitar playing at the forefront. Can you walk us through the gear that helps shape that sound? What’s your go-to guitar, and are there any pedals or amps that play a critical role in bringing your songs to life in the studio and live? 

Thank you! And absolutely! I’m a huge acoustic guitar fanatic. I think having a great guitar that works for what you do is really the key to everything. Everything is downstream from that for me. Access to gear was a huge benefit of living in Nashville, and I would regularly go to music stores around the city and try different guitars whenever I could.

The week I moved down there in 2019, I visited Carter Vintage Guitars and absolutely fell in love with a really interesting Martin. I didn’t know too much about the different tonewoods, body sizes, etc., I only knew that I loved this guitar. I felt totally bonded to it right away. I traded a LOT to be able to afford it, but I went home with it, and it’s the guitar that I recorded this album and all of my albums on. It’s also the one I’m holding on the album cover. This guitar has shaped my playing in a lot of ways.

It wasn’t until a few weeks of playing it that I learned more about what the guitar is. I’ve since done a lot of research because it’s a pretty unique model! It’s a Martin Guitars custom shop 12-fret 0000-18S, built for Gruhn Guitars in Nashville. The 0000 body size is interesting – it’s a thinner body, like a 000 or OM, but with a larger lower bout. I think this is why I loved the sound so much… that extra inch on each side of the lower bout adds so much depth and bass to the tone. It just grabbed me!

A big reason why this guitar has shaped my playing and why it’s such an interesting model is that, to me, it perfectly mixes the old with the new. It’s a 12-fret guitar, meaning that the neck meets the body at the 12th fret. This was typical on all Martins before the 1930’s. This moves the bridge lower into the center of the body of the guitar, supposedly allowing for a more open, wider sound. It was also built with a wider, 1 and 7/8th inch nut width, which is great for fingerpicking. The fretboard is flatter, but with a uniquely narrower, more playable neck than a vintage or even a standard new Martin, called a “performing artist tapered neck”. This combo of old stylings with new playability really makes for an amazing instrument.

Something that I didn’t realize about this guitar until much later was what the “S” means in the model number. The 18 means that the back and sides are mahogany, but the “S” stands for “sinker mahogany”. This means that the wood was pulled from old-growth trees found at the bottom of rivers. Yes, seriously, with scuba gear and everything. It’s actually insane, but maybe that’s why I found the sound so amazing that day when I played it for the first time!

It’s shaped my playing because it forced me to play accurately. The wider fretboard didn’t allow for nearly as much sloppiness as had been in my playing before, and so it forced me to really work on what I was doing and clean up my playing. That’s something I hear a lot – that my playing is “clear”, and I credit this guitar with getting me there.

These days, I use it as more of a recording guitar, and I use a Taylor 552ce 12-Fret Urban Ironbark guitar live – it’s a super warm, all-mahogany guitar with a very short scale, and I find that the Taylor playability is absolutely unmatched. I love the extra short scale as well. This guitar absolutely blows my mind – it doesn’t quite have the depth of tone that my Martin does, but the intonation and playability are just amazing. It’s always in tune, and very easy to adjust!

I use almost exclusively L.R.Baggs electronics. I use an L.R.Baggs Anthem SL pickup into an L.R.Baggs Venue DI Pedal and L.R.Baggs Align Reverb Effektpedal. I try to keep my sound as clean as possible, and through a lot of research and A/B-ing, I found that the LR Baggs pickup, DI, and reverb pedal all together create the cleanest, warmest sound that really fills up a room. I’m starting to delve into other pedals however – for me and my wife’s annual Christmas tour, I’ve been using the EarthQuaker Devices Dispatch Master to create a spacy vibe on certain songs and I love it.

I’m not much of a pedal guy – I really do think that it all begins and ends with the guitar, and the electronics and pedals are just the way of getting the purest sound out to the audience. Maybe I’m boring for that but that’s okay!

Musicngear: What’s been the biggest obstacle you’ve faced in your career so far, and what advice would you give to other artists who might be dealing with similar struggles?

I think I’ve let other people’s opinions, criticisms and praise hold too much weight. Looking back, especially when I was in college and just after, I was very confused about where to go in my career. I had been at Berklee College of Music, which I felt had really pushed me to dive deep into Nashville co-writing, and when I got to Nashville and dove in… it sort of spit me out. I quickly realized that I was not that guy. I couldn’t go and write 5 songs a week to try to get picked by a country star. In the short time that I was trying to do that, I was absolutely miserable.

I was briefly on The Voice when I was in college, and really took all of the advice there to heart. Then, I went and was a part of a musical theater writing camp. Then I went to Nashville. These are three very different music worlds, and I think I just took in too much information and too many opinions, and I let it stray me from my intuition. 

A song on my new album, “People Gonna Talk”, addresses this actually. It’s a song I wrote for a young singer-songwriter from my hometown named Harrison Gooddell. He’s an amazing singer-songwriter and is doing great out there. When he was 16 a few years ago, he came to me asking for advice. I wasn’t sure what to tell him exactly, so I wrote it into a song. Essentially, I tried to get across the idea that holding onto your instincts and your intuition is the most important thing… there are so many distractions pulling us in different directions as artists these days. I think staying the course and trusting yourself is the most important thing.

Musicngear: You’ve been open about the influence of Stoicism on this album. Could you explain how Marcus Aurelius’ teachings helped you shape the emotional core of 'So Much I Still Don’t See' and how it’s affected your songwriting process overall?

Absolutely! This is an interesting aspect of the album because it wasn’t really something I realized was a big influence until we had narrowed down the songs we were going to record. I had spent a long time reading Marcus Aurelius’s “Meditations”, which is essentially the Roman Emperor’s diary. I had no idea what Stoicism was, but I loved the ideas that he wrote about… the fact that we are all here for just a brief moment, and worrying too much about time passing is basically completely futile. 

It’s best to try to remember that everything that happens to us as we age and make our way through life is natural and is what’s meant to be, and trying to fight against that will only bring pain. There’s a strong focus on man’s connection to nature, and how we have been in the same struggles as humans since the beginning of time, over and over again. It’s who we are!

Songs like “Piles of Sand” and “All So Important” really dive into this head-on, but the influence of Stoicism has certainly dripped over all of my songwriting since reading that book.

Musicngear: You’ve mentioned your work with Music Therapy Retreats and the deep emotional impact it’s had on your writing. How has working with veterans on their stories shaped your own artistic expression, and are there any specific songs from the album that reflect this influence?

Oh man, working with Music Therapy Retreats is the best thing I get to do in music. I think working with the veterans and helping them get their stories out has really brought me a lot of hope for humanity, as cliché as it sounds. It’s interesting – as I’ve been hearing the response from early listens to the album, I often hear that it’s a very hopeful album in hopeless-feeling times. 

I think working with these veterans has given me hope because it’s shown me connections and healing moments that are deeper than I could’ve ever imagined before. I’ve written with veterans who almost couldn’t be more different than me on the surface – but through kindness, empathy, and music we are able to truly reach a place of healing and create an incredibly strong bond.

I think this influence is what pushed me to write many of these songs, and what pushed me to record these ten songs as an album. It all came about naturally, but these are the songs that spoke to me the most over the past few years – songs of hope and connection through the darkness, which is what these veterans understand on a deeper level than most of us could ever know.

Musicngear: In terms of your career’s trajectory, what’s your next big goal? More streams? Booking more live shows? Getting on major festival lineups? And how do you plan on reaching that goal in the coming year?

I’ve been having a great time touring the country over the past few years, and that’s what I really love – being with people, face to face, in a room, sharing music. I definitely want this to continue as much as possible, but I want to focus it in a little bit. I want to try to consolidate some of the traveling so that I can continue to build my audience in different areas of the country by partnering with great venues in major markets. 

I want to try to maximize the impact of every show in every way, and I’m going to do this by focusing the touring a little more than I’ve done in the past. But the spirit of adventure is still there!

Musicngear: Is there an artist you’ve always wanted to collaborate with or a venue/festival you’ve dreamed of performing at? 

I’d love to play with Tommy Emmanuel – he’s my favorite guitarist and just seems like an amazing guy and amazing supporter of musicians. I’d love to just experience his energy, both musically and personally. 

For venues/festivals, I’d love to play the Cayamo Cruise, which he plays, actually! This is a singer/songwriter cruise that just seems like a dream in so many ways.

Musicngear: Given that Spotify pays musicians mere pennies while raking in billions, do you believe the music industry would be better or worse off if the platform disappeared overnight?

Hmmm… this is a toughie because I think it’s more of a question of the entire internet existing/not existing. Spotify is one thing, but people could still find all of my music in so many places across the internet. This is something I think about a lot… the “state of the music industry”, and I almost think that “the music industry” as we have known it is dead. Music is completely abundant, there are 100,000+ songs uploaded to Spotify every day, and there are soooo many artists in every corner of the internet.

This could be a situation of “Oh no, everything is so terrible, there’s so much chaos”, but in a way, isn’t it kind of awesome that there is so much music so easily accessible these days? Were the days when major labels had all the power and were able to market music down everyone’s throats, when only a very small number of artists were ever able to make any money at all, really better? I just can’t imagine that that was really the best system, but it’s all we’ve had for the past hundred years. Except that now, there is no physical product to sell! So what is the “music industry”?

To me, I think we’ve entered an era of patronage – an era of trying to build a smaller but loyal fanbase that supports what you do, not of trying to appeal to everyone. The days of me dreaming of becoming an overnight pop sensation are long gone. I even think that the idea of a popstar is just so different than what it used to be. People are still becoming very famous (i.e. viral) overnight, but I think that it is becoming much harder to sustain that level of attention and turn it into a career. Going viral, having huge internet success is, to me, ultimately fleeting. Creating a deep bond, working on your music and your connection with your audience, is where a longer lasting career can appear.

So, in short, I’d say that if Spotify disappeared overnight, it would be better for the music industry, yes. But, honestly, I don’t really consider myself in the music industry – I’m in the audience industry, the patronage industry.

Musicngear: If from now on you had to choose only one format to release visuals for your music, what would that be? Official music videos or TikToks/Shorts/Reels? And why?

I love live, long form videos! To me, these are the best way to showcase the music. I think music videos and shorter content videos are awesome, and take a lot of vision and skill to pull off, but I just think that at the core of who I am is a singer-songwriter. 

One man, one guitar. I love videos that capture that energy!

Musicngear: Before we wrap up, let’s have some fun; if you had to swap lives with any musician from history for a day, who would it be and what’s the first thing you’d do?

Cool question! I think I’d love to experience what it was like to be Bob Dylan at the Newport Folk Fest not when he went electric, but at the festival in 1963. Maybe it’s because I just watched the new movie and I’m feeling all Dylan-y, but I recently rewatched the video of him at this show. 

I would just love to experience what it must’ve been like for him at that moment in music history – I think it was really all a combination of timing, his great songwriting and performances, and a lot of great marketing, but I’m sure it was interesting to feel like you were the zenith of a new era in popular music and in culture. But… then I think I’d be okay to leave. Just a day of that is enough I think!

Connect with Sam Robbins
Facebook // Instagram // Spotify // YouTube // Website

Be sure to keep an eye out for Sam Robbins' forthcoming album on April 25 and catch him live on tour as he brings his new music to stages near you.

More info on tour dates here

About Eugenia Roditis

Eugenia's passion for music was ignited from an early age as she grew up in a family of musicians. She loves attending concerts and festivals, while constantly seeking fresh and exciting new artists across diverse genres. Eugenia joined the MusicnGear team in 2012.

Contact Eugenia Roditis at eugenia.roditis@kinkl.com

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