Sam Genders (Tunng)

This week my guest is the English singer/songwriter Sam Genders. Sam alongside Mike Lindsay founded the folktronica pioneers Tunng in 2005. His other songwriting and co-writing credits include artists such as John Smith, Mr Silla (Múm), Liam Bailey, Cibelle, Ben Ottewell (Gomez) and Kate Stables (This is The Kit).

Amongst various other projects and collaborations Genders has released several albums and singles under the name Diagrams, including his 2017 album ‘Dorothy’, the lyrics for which were written in collaboration with Orcas Island (US) poet Dorothy Trogdon and his 2019 single ‘Is This Real’ written in collaboration with two deep learning AI systems developed by Dr Maya Ackerman and her team at Wave AI in the US.

Tunng's latest album 'Dead Club' came out in 2020 and was designed to be a meditation on death and grief. To coincide with the album Sam and his bandmate Becky did a podcast series on the subject of death and grief ‘Tunng presents…Dead Club’, an exploration of society’s relationship to death, dying and grief that featured songs, spoken word collaborations and interviews with writers, philosophers and physicians such as Max Porter, AC Grayling, Dame Sue Black, Kevin Young, Derren Brown, Alain de Botton, Speech Debelle and Dr Kathryn Mannix.

In this episode we talk about how making 'Dead Club' changed Sam's viewpoint on death and dying and how he believes we should all be talking a lot more openly about these difficult yet inevitable subjects.

You can find more information about Sam by following him on Twitter @samgendersmusic

Music featured in this episode:

'Death is the New Sex' by Tunng (Listen here: http://bit.ly/3ZH1lis )

'A Million Colours' by Tunng (Listen here: http://bit.ly/3XjsWEE)

Feels Like Healing is a show where I talk to creative people about how grief and trauma has shaped their art.

These conversations are here to show how those who have suffered loss have found comfort and solace through the act of being creative and how creativity can help us all better understand our grief and reach a place of healing.

If you'd like to be in the audience for the special live episode of Feels like Healing at St John's Church in Cardiff on Wednesday 25th January.

You can reserve your place now (free of charge) by visiting https://feelslikehealing.eventbrite.co.uk

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Produced / Edited by Al Lewis

Theme music by Al Lewis

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