Sam Lewis

Sam Lewis is a connoisseur of classic songwriting, be it blues, country, folk, soul or pop, which he has shaped into his own sound.
Sam has been playing the guitar since the age of 11 and a chance meeting with KT Tunstall in park in north-west London park led to Sam becoming her guitar player for her world tours from 2004 to 2009.
Sam’s released his debut album Everything You Are in 2007. The critically-acclaimed release features KT’s vocals on the song Another Lifetime. Second album The City and I has a fuller sound to the contemplative debut record and perhaps takes inspiration from working with Kenyan musicians and Damon Albarn for a project for Gilles Peterson’s Brownswood Recordings as well as spending time working in New York.
The City and I is scheduled for release in early 2012. The five-date City and I tour begins on 1 December at The Donkey in Leicester and concludes at Proud in Camden Town on 14 December. Buy tickets here.
Watch Sam perform The City and I and find out more about him by watching our exclusive interview. Visit us tomorrow another special acoustic performance from Sam. - PRS For Music Members' Magazine

Sam Lewis’s debut album Everything You Are was written while he was on tour as guitarist of K T Tunstall’s band. And you can hear it. There’s simplicity in the instrumentation, easily performed anywhere, with a location-less stripped down honesty hitting both words and music.
Opening track Ups and Down seems to establish Lewis as a traditional blues musician. It has all the elements; repeated octaves on piano, wailing harmonica, bottleneck guitar and a chorus about a woman who's so hard to please.
Then again Another Lifetime, in all its lap-steel guitar stillness shows him to have a voice with a deep lazy sonority, dropping off the ends of phrases in a similar manner to Jack Johnson. But it would be unfair to file him under the same category of that chirrupy surfer-songwriter. His is a spacious sound with timeless poetry, bringing to mind Ben Harper, Bon Iver or Iron and Wine.
Both Another Lifetime and Cursed Love feature unusually sleepy backing vocals from K T Tunstall, and Tunstall joins him again on the lush, warm duet Leonard which opens out into a sunny waltz underpinned by brushed snare and lap steel.
Pictures In My Mind surprises in its Richard Hawley-like Englishness. Title track Everything You Are mooches along nicely, with a philosophical bent along with some class blues guitar playing plus a novel method of ending a song.
It's all been recorded in the most beautiful manner. Each string plucked, each note played on the upright piano, has an intimacy that gives even the most despairing songs an intangible joy. ??
- BBC