Into the soundscape with Sam Tout

Local musician and composer Sam Tout’s second album, Echoes In Balance, is set to be launched with an immersive live show by his five-piece band at Lyric’s Underground on Sunday, March 29. Tout will debut new material alongside select favourites in a powerful live set, with special guest Rosscoe Frantz joining him onstage. Tickets are available now from oztix.com. BOB GORDON sat down with Sam Tout to find more about playing with a five-piece band, different themes in Echoes And Balance and the spaces between the echoes. 

You’re always working hard. You don’t let too much time pass. Last year, when the first single, Along The Tightrope, came out, how far into the whole album were you?

Probably about 50 per cent at that point. I think I had most of the songs loosely laid out, but I hadn’t, hadn’t gotten close to getting things the way I wanted them to sound, but I just wanted to get the ball rolling, and I wanted to keep releasing stuff in the meantime.

And luckily, that song, Along The Tightrope, came up pretty quickly. So I did that as a placeholder while I got the rest of the album ready. So I’ve probably been working on it since about mid-2024 through to December of 2025.

With Along The Tightrope as a placeholder, once it was out there, did it create a touchpoint for how everything else should be?

That’s right. So it was the first piece that I finished off the new album, and it’s also the first track on the album. And I think the reason that I’ve put it as the first track is because it kind of sets the tone of the music that’s going to be presented throughout the whole album.

I think it sets a nice atmosphere and tells the listener, ‘This is what you’re going to be hearing throughout the whole thing.’ And it has quite a few changes in it, like it’s quite a dynamic piece. It starts off fairly quiet, it builds to quite a height and then comes right back down. To me, it’s a mix of a post-rock thing that I like to do and also blending in those atmospheric, ambient textures that I find really interesting in my music.

Having released one album, was there anything notably different about how you did this one because of what you learnt from the first?

Yeah, definitely. So Just Floating Around was sort of like my first honourable attempt at recording and mixing a large piece of work, and I was satisfied enough with it, but I knew it left a little bit to be desired. And I initially thought that I would hire someone to mix this next album to push it to the next level. But then I thought, ‘Now I’m actually pretty interested in this music production thing, and I want to get better at it, and I’m not going to get any better at it if I just pay someone to do it all for me.’

So I see that as a challenge to not only be the artist but also to be the producer and the engineer and try and always get better at those things. But there’s definitely a difference in approach… I think I was just creating a bit of a wall of sound the first time around. There’s ‘more, more, more’, which, of course, often ends up creating less because you can only pick out so many different parts.

So with this, I’m definitely doing a different approach. Some of these pieces are made to be played with a five-piece band, the more ambient ones. They’re not band pieces, but the tracks that have bass and drums in them—I design them very much with the idea that these need to be two guitar parts, one keyboard part, bass and drums. And if it can’t be faithfully reproduced that way, then it’s not good. And that’s something that I think people new to recording and writing need to realise: just because ‘I wrote it’ doesn’t mean it’s good. You can’t keep everything, and you’ve got to just think, ‘I can only do so many things, but let’s make the things we do do really good.’

What about the themes in the titles? Do you find things in life that spur you to find a sound that speaks to what you’re feeling in that experience?

I think I tend to do it backwards. I mean, I don’t write lyrics, and I can’t sing, but I imagine usually people would think about what they want to write a song about and then make it up. Whereas I come up with sounds that I like and chord progressions that I like, and then a tone or feel develops slowly over time, and then I sort of figure out what it’s about after.

I think to myself, ‘What is this? What does this piece make me think about?’ Usually the titles that I go with are kind of the first thing that I think of, because I want to be true to my gut feeling on these things, and I don’t want to think too much about titles and try and be all pretentious and artsy-fartsy. So I generally go with the first thing that I think of.

So there’s one piece, track seven on the album, where it’s mainly just a fingerpicking guitar part. I just kind of thought, ‘What does this make me think of?’ and I thought about just envisioning going for a nice walk and listening to some good music. So it’s just called Long Walks And Good Tunes. That’s kind of the process with creating titles; I try not to think too much about it and just go with my gut. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, but it’s all a process.

Echoes And Balance as an album title covers a whole lot.

Well, I think the fundamental goal of instrumental music is to create a sense of space and atmosphere. You’re not telling a story through lyrics, so you’ve got to paint the picture through sound. The title Echoes And Balance comes from the echoes of the layers and textures and fragments that drift in around the music. And obviously delay is an ambient musician’s best friend. So that’s the echoes, and the balance is how those elements are placed in the space. The listener isn’t overwhelmed and fatigued, which is sort of coming back to what we were talking about before, with creating space and even thinking more about what not to play rather than what you do play and creating space in those moments.

I wanted this whole album to feel like you’re standing inside a soundscape, rather than just being told what to feel. So some moments are busy, and some are almost empty, but I’m always trying to hold them together in balance, giving the listener room to breathe and create their own meaning about the piece.

From the last album and the things that you’ve noted about it, I can see how this is a real step forward.

I think it’s not so in your face. I think it’s more a bit more subtle and a bit more coherent, even though it has a lot of variety, because, as I was saying before, we have the band songs and we have the ambient songs, but I tried to tie it all together in such a way that it all feels like one body of work, rather than just a collection of songs that I’ve thrown together into one thing.

Are there any tracks that you’d like to single out or about which you feel you’ve got something particular to say?

I’m pretty happy with all of the tracks, actually, but I’m trying to push my playing to be better.

There’s a track called What To Do, which I found very difficult to record because musically it was at the top of my ability to get all these different pieces working. I found it quite an interesting track because it’s in 3/4 time, so it’s odd, and it’s got a lot of different moving parts all flowing in and out of each other in what I tried to do in a fairly creative way. And I’m pretty happy with how that one turned out.

I’m not doing so much guitar at the moment. This track was mainly piano-focused, and I was just really trying to experiment with really nice chords and textures and trying to really find a place for all these different instruments to sit nicely. So that song, to me, is one of my favourites.

What about Focused Frank?

Yeah, that’s about my car, a Ford Focus called Frank that refuses to die. It just keeps dying forever. And that was another thing where I was just creating this track, and I had a nice little energy, and it was fairly cruisy. And I just thought, ‘What is this gonna be about? It can be about the car.’ I really like that track. I got to use the lap steel on that one, which is a really beautiful instrument. I’m trying to get much better at that as well. So I tried to implement the lap steel a lot more on this album. It just opens up a whole new world because you’re not really playing the notes. You’re almost playing around with the notes with that. So you’re kind of always out of tune, but you’ve got to find a way to make that work in a musical way. And I’m really enjoying experimenting with that instrument, particularly.

Away With The Birds is a nice track.

That’s another one where it’s in 7/8, I believe, and that’s a fun track. I’ve got to use my e-bow on the guitar for that, which is always a good bit of fun. That piece, to me, is about daydreaming and just being off in another world and the sort of scenarios and worlds that we can create in our own minds. I tried to convey that in the piece. Pretty happy with that one.

Is At Last called that because it’s the last?

Well, yeah, that’s a funny coincidence. It wasn’t always the last track on the album, but then it just made sense; it could very well mean to the average listener, ‘At last, thank God we’ve made it to the end of this godforsaken album!’ But for me, it was about when you finally reach a goal that’s taken a really long time and just that sigh of relief of ‘At last, we got there.’ I was thinking about a particular thing in my life where I felt that feeling and tried to convey that into that piece.

You’ve intimately gone into the craft of guitar by way of doing these two albums. It must have had an incredible effect on your playing.

Yes, and one of my dad’s many great sayings was “Always be the dumbest guy in the room,” which I strongly agree with, and particularly when it comes to the band as well. So I purposely surround myself with musicians who are far more advanced than I am, because it pushes me to get better and go beyond my current ability so I can keep up with them. I used to think that just playing an instrument for a long time would make you better, and maybe it does a little bit, but I don’t really think that’s true anymore. I think you have to be really disciplined and work hard to push beyond where you are at the moment; otherwise, you get complacent in the music that you’re playing, because if you just keep playing the same licks over and over again, all you’re going to get better at is playing those licks.

So I’m particular with guitar because I’m not a classically trained guitarist. I’m mainly self-taught, so I have a lot of bad habits, and I’m not a virtuoso by any means. So I’m really going back to the drawing board, particularly with guitar, and learning all my scales again, and trying to really build up my technique so I can expand and just be a more efficient player. So I’ve still got a long way to go, but I’m slowly but surely getting better at all these things.

We discussed it one of the previous times about the notion of you being more an instrumentalist than a guitarist.

Yes, I’m not going for the guitar-hero-shredder thing. It’s not me, and that’s never going to be me. I like to look at the music as a whole. So when I’m playing the guitar, I’m just trying to think, ‘How am I going to create the atmosphere that I want to create with this instrument?’ Rather than, ‘How can I do the most show-off solo possible?’ So I think—and I’m really enjoying that—using things like volume pedals and delays and random chords that I’ve discovered with not knowing what they are to just enrich the sound.

But what I would like is to be able to play these chords and say, ‘I know exactly what this is, or we’re in this scale right now.’ So I am working on my theory quite a bit at the moment to be able to do things and actually explain what they are, because a lot of my playing is just ‘Oh, that’s cool, let’s record that’ and not actually knowing what it is.

How do you view the year ahead in terms of having the album out and your continuing work, but also in terms of giving the album a chance to have its own little travels and adventures?

I’m interested to see how it’ll be received. It won’t be for everyone, and that’s fine. Everyone’s got their own taste, but I think there’ll be, hopefully, at least one track in there that everyone can enjoy in their own way. There’s a lot of variety on the album. There are some pieces that hopefully will; people might like to just put on in the background as a bit of ambience and then other pieces that people might like to rock out to a bit.

So I hope people can appreciate it. But it’s just one of those things where I won’t know until it’s out there. I can’t make music for other people, so all I can really do is get it to a point where I like it, and if other people like it as well, then it’s a bonus. But you have to be true to your own impulses and your own time. Because if you’re trying to just make it to appease what’s in at the moment or a certain demographic, then I just think that’s a waste of time.

I listen to a lot of instrumental, atmospheric music, so I go, ‘Would this make it onto my playlist?’ For me, all these tracks would. So that’s kind of the test for me to know if things are good or not.

Echoes In Balance is set to be launched at Lyric’s Underground on Sunday, March 29, 2026. Tickets are available now from oztix.com