It is next Tuesday that the indie-rock quartet Sam Champion will release their first record entitled Slow Rewind. The band’s frontman Noah Chernin said he is counting the days until the record finally hits stores. “We’ve been waiting for it to be released for a while now. I’m just glad that it’s going to be in stores and that people will have the chance to buy it,” he said. Chernin states that thus far the band has received a lot of good feedback about their debut.
Sam Champion formed back in the summer of 2002. What started out as a duo quickly became a trio and then a four-piece. The band teamed up with Guster’s drummer Brian Reosenworcel who produced their Razor & Tie debut.
Chernin described Slow Rewind as a “very well made debut record from a band,” but added that there is still a lot of room for them to grow. The singer described the album’s subject matter as things that kids in their early twenties can easily grasp. “We are not writing about politics or life and death, [but] I wouldn’t call it a pedestrian record. It’s something that we believe in and write about,” he said.
Although they had originally planned to produce the record themselves, the band decided to send copies of rough mixes to different people, explaining that the internet made it really easy for them to get exposure. “We weren’t necessarily in search of a label, we were planning on putting out the record ourselves but it was an opportunity that fell into our lap and enable us to do a few more records.” Chernin said.
The band said they are very comfortable with not belonging to any particular scene in New York and that sounding different is not something they anticipated. “It’s just very natural, we are not trying to do something that is foreign to New York because we want to be different. We just do what we like and I don’t know if a lot of New York bands can say that, not to talk shit on New York,” he said. “We love New York and we probably wouldn’t be able to do what we do if we didn’t do it there.”
The band will be spending the better half of the next year touring in support of their first record. They hope to be in Canada in early 2006.
“Ultimately we’d love to be able to have a career being Sam Champion and playing music. Everytime we play in a certain city, the crowds get bigger,” said Chernin. “We don’t really have a grander visions of playing the Hollywood Bowl or the Garden,. It’s a steady process and we are just going along for the ride and trying to create opportunities for ourselves.”
