Time To Listen: Sam Fender reveals the 5 songs that shaped his life

Following in the footsteps of U2 bassist Adam Clayton, chart-conquering music sensation Sam Fender has appeared on Absolute Radio’s new series Time To Listen to discuss the songs that have inspired him and shaped his life.

Time To Listen explores music’s positive impact on our mental health and, during Danielle Perry’s evening show from 7pm on Monday to Thursday, a guest musician picks a song each day that has made a difference to their lives.

A special omnibus half-hour show with all of their choices from throughout the week, plus an extra fifth choice, airs each week in The Sunday Night Music Club from 8pm.

Last week it was the turn of Sam Fender to choose the tracks that have sound-tracked his life and he cherry-picked classic songs by Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan and his personal hero Bruce Springsteen, plus two of his own intensely personal songs.

Listen to Sam Fender’s appearance on ‘Time To Listen’ in its entirety right here:

Sam's five choices were as follows:

Joni Mitchell ‘Both Sides, Now’ (2000 orchestral version)

“First up I have picked ‘Both Sides, Now’ by the amazing Joni Mitchell, who is probably my favourite songwriter of all time. There’s two versions if you don’t already know. There’s the one from back in the sixties when she first released it, and she released another version in her later life and it’s an orchestral version. It’s a song about coming of age, it’s a song about growing up and how you see the world differently as you’re getting older. It’s spellbinding. It’s such an incredible track. The first time I heard it, it’s one of them things when a song just punches you in the chest. It did that. I was like proper, proper in tears, sat in the tour bus like (mimics crying).

“The thing about this song for me, I think like a lot of people I got into my mid-twenties and had a bit of a tussle with mental health. Which I think a lot of people, at some point in your life, you do. I think that song is almost like the anthem for coming of age or the anthem of early adulthood – for me anyway. As your perspectives change and the rose-tinted glasses fall off and you’re starting to understand politics to the point where it makes you feel sick, and you’re waking up and the hangovers are getting worse… I think that’s what that song resonates with meself, like. Most people who hear this song or know this song I think it means that for them too.”

Sam Fender ‘Dead Boys’ (2018)

“The next song is a song I wrote called ‘Dead Boys’. ‘Dead Boys’ is an important song for me because I wrote it as a reaction to losing a friend to suicide a couple of years ago. I initially wrote it as a reaction purely for myself because I didn’t know how to articulate the way I felt. I actually wrote a few of my songs in my friend’s house who passed away. And then I looked into the stats and saw that it was the biggest killer of men under the age of 45 in the UK and it takes 84 lives a week or something like that, which is just staggering. That song just weirdly became this kind of anthem for that and since then positive things came from it. I mean the perfect example was there was a guy actually driving on the way to kill himself and he coincidentally had the radio on, and I was on the radio talking about Dead Boys and talking about why I wrote the song and stuff, and this guy stopped the car (and) apparently bawled his eyes out at the side of the road for three hours and then turned the car around and drove back to his wife and then opened up and got help. I met the guy and he said that was the moment that turned it round. It doesn’t matter where my career goes after this, it doesn’t matter if I never sell any records, it doesn’t matter if my album bombs and I never do this again and I go back home… it’s the best thing that ever happened in my career and it always will be.

Bruce Springsteen ‘Born To Run’ (1975)

“I was 15, my older brother Liam Fender was giving us a lift to Manchester ‘cos I was a failure of an actor – attempting to be an actor at the age of 15. My brother was driving us down in a beat-up fan. His van was tip because obviously he was rock and roll. I was 15 and he was like ‘have you ever listened to Bruce Springsteen?’ and I was like ‘no’. And he put on ‘Born To Run’ and I was sat there, 15, and he whacked the volume up on his stereo to the point where the speakers were rattling in the car and, literally, I could feel the bass, and that opening with that massive drum roll at the beginning and straight into that wall of sound… and I was like ‘Jesus! What’s the hell’s this?!’ It hit us right in the heart and I was like ‘this is the greatest thing I’ve ever heard.’ It was big, it was hard, it was tough, it was sensitive; it was all those things rolled into one and best of all it was desperate – and that’s what I was. I was desperate as a kid.

“I think most kids have that feeling of like going ‘Gah, I’m going to be stuck here all my life, I’m going to turn into my mam and my dad. I’m gonna be like this, I’m gonna be stuck here forever. I hate this town; I want to get out.’ That’s what I was feeling at 15, I hated school and all I wanted to do was play my guitar. And that was the first time I’d heard Bruce (Springsteen). It was just that magic moment getting hit by lightning.”

Bob Dylan ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ (1965)

“I chose this next song because it’s by one of the greatest singer-songwriters of all time, the man himself Bob Dylan. It was probably the first song by Bob Dylan that I really, really loved. It was also, I hear, one of the first music videos. It’s just Dylan holding up loads of placards in the middle of the street and they’ve all got lyrics on, and he’s just dropping through them and they’re going all over the shop and it’s just a one take. It’s immense. It’s one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen. And obviously like most of Bob Dylan’s songs back then it’s really bluesy, it’s really rocky, it’s got this proper classic Dylan-esque tongue twister lines y’know that constantly spin. The man, he was an MC, man. He’s a lyrical genius. It’s a banger. I supported him at Hyde Park, which is my claim to fame – I opened up for Bob Dylan and Neil Young, which will be the thing I brag about for the rest of my life.”

Sam Fender ‘The Borders’ (2019)

"I wanted to write a song about two kids who are raised like brothers. It’s drawn from experiences I’ve had in my own life. It’s about the duality between their lives and how the outcomes and outlooks are completely different. Their lives keep coming together every so often and it kinda comes to loggerheads every time they see each other. It’s a very dramatic song. There’s a lot of turmoil throughout it that they experience. For me this was loosely based on parts of my own childhood and parts of my own adolescence. It’s the first time that I’ve ever, on the album, wrote a song which is specifically drawn from a specific time in my life and specific personal experience. It’s about guilt really, it’s about guilt that your life has gone well, which, my life has gone well. I’m sat here on Absolute Radio, I’ve sold 40 odd thousand tickets for my tour. I’ve got a record deal, I’ve moved house. Two, three years ago I was on benefits. Now I’m doing well and making money and that is essentially where the song comes from. The song came from the pit of me stomach… when I’ve felt guilty about that.”

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