Premiere: Sam Ritchie cuts ties with the past with new song, ‘When?’
The pop newcomer delivers an urgent, yet wondrous, new tune.
A throbbing heartbeat pokes through a blanket of stars, and Sam Ritchie lies just beneath. He winds the listener through an otherworldly tumult, navigating through an on-again, off-again relationship that nearly left him emotionally stranded. With his song “When?,” an inquisition as much as a rebellion, premiering today, the pop newcomer shovels through such influences as Phoenix and Blink-182 to crack untouched earth. His presence and style is wholly his own; he’s not chained to such unlikely predecessors but simply touches upon their musical adeptness.
“You only come around to tear me down,” he laments. As lonesome as he’s felt in the past, he checks those feelings and instead collects up the courage and strength he has since gained. “When?,” which opens his forthcoming self-titled debut, acknowledges the pain but shuffles to a much brighter future brimming with clarity. “Here’s my everything,” his words soon slip into a pit of distortion to further underscore the revelatory message.
“We’re running out of time / So let me know,” he sings. His lyrics, also sharpened on the heart and shot into the sky, seem to call to life’s fleeting, ever-relentless nature. Particularly in the age of an ongoing pandemic, such necessity to sever toxic relationships and connections, as well as one’s personal health, is of the first order.
On the song, the so-Cal musician writes to B-Sides & Badlands over email, “‘When?’ is my experience of someone who would be in my life one second and gone the next. That’s where the chorus of this song came from: ‘If you haven’t got the time then let me know / if you plan to stay or let me go.’ I don’t think anyone should waste time on hoping someone will stay and we should all enjoy the time we have. I really wanted to portray this point in a positive way so this is more of an anthem for the hopeless romantic rather than a sad song about someone leaving.”
Sam Ritchie’s debut LP is slated for September 25.
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