Sam MacPherson outside the Basie’s Vogel Theatre earlier this week. (Photo by John T. Ward. Click to enlarge.)
By JOHN T. WARD
With “a kind of stupidly ignorant confidence,” Red Bank native Sam MacPherson transformed himself from soccer player to songwriter who’s played some 50 cities this year.
Next week, just seven years after he first picked up a guitar, he’s set to finally make his hometown debut at the Count Basie Center for the Arts.
MacPherson and band rehearsing at his family’s Red Bank home a year ago. (Click to enlarge.)
A graduate of Red Bank Charter School, located just a few hundred feet from the theater, and Red Bank Regional High, the 26-year-old grew up in a houseful of music.
His father, Jeff MacPherson, is known locally as the leader of Zeke Moffit and the Late Juliets, and his mother, Carmelina, filled their South Street home with soul music. His younger brother, Jack, who’s in Sam’s band, took to guitar years ago, and quickly displayed “brilliance” on it, said Sam.
But while he loved listening, MacPherson “never thought to try any of it” growing up, he told redbankgreen in an interview outside the Basie this week.
“My dad, obviously, is a musician, and I grew up hearing him play songs, and going to his gigs, and being a fan of the music he listened to,” including songwriting heavyweights like the Beatles, Paul Simon and Crosby, Stills & Nash, he said. “We grew up with a lot of guitars in my house, but I never picked one up, played it. I never sang, any of that. I was just kind of like, ‘that’s Dad’s thing.'”
MacPherson only began turning his attention to making music after two years of playing Division 1 soccer and majoring in nursing at Sacred Heart University in Connecticut.
“I did two years of both of those things and, pretty much in the same week, decided that none of that was for me,” he said.
He transferred to the University of South Carolina and began teaching himself to play guitar and write songs, just because he knew that, well, if others could do it, so could he.
“You go to college, and you’re figuring out who you are, and there’s a little bit of reinvention phase of ‘this is who I’m going to be, these are the parts of me I’m putting to bed,'” he said. “All of my music abilities kind of happened at once.”
All his life, MacPherson said, he’d been a music lover, and fascinated by the process of making music. His “mind-blown” record, he said, was Stevie Wonder’s “Songs in the Key of Life,” in part because Wonder played every instrument on it.
“I was just in awe of the songwriting and the soulfulness and the storytelling,” MacPherson said.
It was around then, he said, that he realized he carried inside himself “a surplus of music-appreciation energy that I didn’t really know… I don’t think I understood how deep my appreciation to music was, or could be.”
Pursuing a strategy of building an audience online, MacPherson has racked up tens of millions of streams on Spotify with image-rich songs such as “Play Dumb,” “Stretch” and “Safe to Say.”
The past year saw MacPherson and his three-piece band playing dozens of cities across America, both as a headliner and opener for Jeremy Zucker, sometimes for audiences measured in thousands. Just about everywhere, fans would sing along to the chorus of “Backseat” – “Nobody breaks up in the backseat…”
Now living in Los Angeles and signed to Elektra Records, MacPherson was reported recently to be working on his first full album of songs.
The December 21 show at the Basie’s 800-capacity Vogel theater will mark only the second time MacPherson has played in New Jersey; the first was a year ago at the House of Independents in Asbury Park, which is temporarily closed as a result of a flood in September.
“That was a hometown-enough show, but this is really a hometown show,” MacPherson said, standing beneath the venue’s marquee. “This couldn’t get any more hometown.”
And what’s it like, being in his shoes?
He said he knows many people locally through his family, school and soccer, “but as anything but this. My relationship to this place has always been as something other than a musician. And now, I’m coming here, and playing a show, and people are coming to see me as a musician. Like last year, it’s a bit of a strange reintroduction to people who know me as… Sam.”
Tickets for the Thursday night show were still available Friday. Get ’em here.
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