Cambridge Folk Festival favourite Sam Kelly set to release ‘introspective’ new album

BBC Radio 2 Folk Award-winning singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and producer Sam Kelly is back with a new album, set for release in June, and he will also be returning to Cambridge next month, a city he knows rather well.

The album, titled Dreamers Dawn, will feature Sam’s arrangements of traditional folk songs, interspersed with original music written by Sam and his Lost Boys band collaborator and banjo virtuoso, Jamie Francis.

Sam Kelly and the Lost Boys is a young folk collective that has developed a significant following over the last few years, both in the East of England (Sam grew up in Norfolk but was actually born in Huntingdon) and further afield.

That said, the band haven’t toured since 2021 – the year they released their acclaimed second studio album, The Wishing Tree.

“Yes, 2021 we did our last full-band tour,” confirms Sam, whom Irish folk artist Cara Dillon referred to as “an amazing singer with so much soul” – “so it feels like it’s been a long time coming to get back out on the road again, so we’re all super excited.”

Sam has previously played with the likes of Seth Lakeman, John McCusker, Phil Beer, Katherine Priddy, and Kate Rusby – and when he spoke to the Cambridge Independent, he was in the middle of rehearsing for a 15-date tour with the latter, which was due to start the following day in Doncaster.

On the subject of Dreamers Dawn, Sam says: “The new album’s been quite a long process; we started working on it immediately after we finished the last one in 2021.

“It’s been around a three-year process from inception to finish, and there’s many reasons it’s taken that long, with various band members getting married and having babies and things like that, that you start doing in your 30s!

“It’s also the first album that we’ve recorded ourselves – we haven’t paid for any studio time.

“A few of us in the band have got to the point in our lives where we’ve got our own studio set-ups now, so the beauty of that is you can be flexible and do it around other things.

“But the downside is it can take a lot longer; it’s been quite a long process but it’s an album that I’m really happy with.

“It’s a bit of a new artistic ground for me, in that it’s a majority of original songs, as opposed to traditional songs.

“We do have some traditional folk songs on there still that we’ve done a rearranging of, but this album is mainly original songs and I think it’s a bit more mature as a written piece of work.

“I think both me and Jamie Francis, who is the guy that I collaborate on most of my stuff with – and this album’s about a 50-50 collaboration between the two of us – we’ve done a lot more introspective writing.”

Sam will be joined on the album launch tour, which stops off in Cambridge on 9 June, by his full Lost Boys band, with support coming from Suffolk folk duo, Honey and the Bear.

Over the years, Sam has performed in the city, and at the Cambridge Folk Festival, on a number of occasions and in various guises.

“I’ve done it [the Folk Festival] five times, I think,” he says. “With my own project I think I’ve done it three times, but then I’ve also played it with Kate Rusby and I played there last year with a great Scottish singer called Ainsley Hamill, whose album I produced.

“So I think it’s five times I’ve done it now, and I’m very sad to see it not going on this year.”

Elaborating on this last point, Sam adds: “It’s a big shock to the [folk] community, but unfortunately it’s the case for a lot of festivals at the moment…

“Festivals are really struggling to get by, as are music venues in general, so very sad to see it go down this year, but hopefully it will just be a small hiatus and it will come back.”

Sam’s debut solo EP, Your Way Home, was released in March 2013. He followed it up with the widely-acclaimed Spokes EP in February 2015.

This further cemented the hardworking artist’s place as one of the most exciting young prospects in the folk scene, landing him a nomination in the Best Singer category at the 2015 Spiral Earth Awards and attracting the attention of BBC Radio 2’s Folk Show.

Touring as a trio with Jamie Francis (banjo) and Evan Carson (percussion), the talented threesome gained a reputation as a solid live act, playing venues and festivals all over the country.

After a memorable performance to a completely rammed Club Tent at the Cambridge Folk Festival in 2015, the boys were invited to play their first session on Radio 2 live from the festival.

Sam Kelly and the Lost Boys will be appearing at the Cambridge Junction (J2) on Monday, 9 June. Tickets, priced £20.50, are available from junction.co.uk. For more on Sam, go to samkelly.com.