Interview with Nelson Sobral: ‘Willie Nelson and Otis Redding are two of my favourite songwriters, if they wrote a song together, it would sound like this’

Toronto-based soul singer Nelson Sobral has out his second album Second Arrow earlier this month, a beautiful album that he describes as ‘for Saturday nights and for Sunday mornings’.

‘Second Arrow’ is a reference to a Buddhist saying, according to Sobral: ‘If someone does you harm, that’s the first arrow,’ he said. ‘Dwelling on it, that’s you causing yourself the next wave of suffering. The second arrow is the arrow that you fire upon yourself. It’s all about how you deal with things.’

Through Second Arrow’s bar room-stomping, Motown-inspired soul (‘In The Middle Of The Night’), fiddle and mandolin-heavy Americana twang (‘HoneyBee’), to moving tracks (‘Raining In Nashville’) and the electric guitar-centric rush of the title track, you get the feeling that Sobral isn’t standing still long enough to ever be struck by that figurative ‘second arrow’. Instead, he’s building a body of work that brings a sense of elation, a raucous revelry and a kind of healing that only music can induce. 

The opening track, ‘Dancing Fool’ is a gorgeous, upbeat and uplifting track about letting go of holding onto things, capturing feelings of release, elation, and surrender: ‘It started out as a laidback folk song and the more rockin’ it became, the higher I pitched it up to the song you hear today, re-recording as I went,’ he said. ‘As it goes “You dance like the wind, moving round the floor/You never give in so you dance with me once more, and we dance right out the door.” This song channels an acceptance of the endless possibilities before us.’

As the song kicks off: ‘I laid in their arms til I forgot about you/ I laid in their arms ’til it was all I wanted to do/ It was all I wanted to do.’ 

It’s a track that has evolved a lot since he first wrote it: ‘I love playing with open tuning, it’s a blues trick,’ he said. ‘It’s open G tuning but I wrote it several notches down for me, I wrote it really low. It has a cool little opening riff. I’d sing it in the shower but every time I’d sing it, it would get higher and higher (laughs). It felt like a fun little song. I didn’t really understand what I was referencing at the time, it was more subconscious. Later, I realised that it was about letting go of the past. The end of the song is about my wife dancing like the wind.’

‘Willie Nelson and Otis Redding are two of my favourite songwriters, if they wrote a song together, it would sound like this’

One of my favourite songs on the album is ‘In The Middle Of The Night’, which has a real Motown-inspired soul vibe, so much so, that the first time I heard it, I assumed it was a cover and when I tell him this, he’s delighted: ‘I wrote it in Nashville, it’s normal to be a musician there – unlike here – that energy is prevalent, there’s more of a community,’ he said. ‘I was sitting around the house one day and full of that good energy and that song just came out of me. Sometimes you can mess with a song too much. I left it for a few days and then I went back to it. Willie Nelson and Otis Redding are two of my favourite songwriters, if they wrote a song together, it would sound like this. It’s got Otis Redding’s “bam bam” and shotgun Willie descending to the minor (laughs).’

As the song goes: ‘Crossing over border lines/ Far as I can go/ I don’t care ’bout the cold/ Covered in snow/ On my way to you/ Well, that’s why I gotta push on through/ In your arms is all I really wanna do.’

His mum is a huge music fan, playing CHUM FM radio when he was a child: ‘They played 60’s and 70’s stuff, my mom would blast it every morning (laughs). I’d hear Otis Redding, Elvis, Tom Jones, Aretha. It was a really good radio station, my mom loved it. She’d crank it up, it was seeped in my consciousness! I was into Metallica as a teenager but I’d also put on The Beach Boys, my mom’s music. You have to rebel against your parents’ music as a teenager, it’s a rite of passage.’

His inspirations also include heavy rock: ‘I was a huge Kiss fan,’ he said. ‘I got into punk rock. A good album for me has different flavours, like the Stones and The Beatles. I longed for albums to have that.’ Locally, he is a fan of Mountain Head, who he describes as ‘old school with a crazy techno vibe’, folk-country singer and guitarist Mattie Leon and folk-soul singer Kunle: ‘I’d like to see all of them on a bill tonight,’ he said.

‘It’s a traditional sitting on the porch kind of song’

‘Yours & Mine’ on the album is another old school track, with a faint country vibe: ‘It’s my mom’s favourite song, or so she says, it’s a traditional sitting on the porch kind of song, one that just tumbled out,’ he said. ‘I didn’t want to mess with it too much, I wanted to keep the “I love you” vibe.’

That comes across in the sweet chorus: ‘If I say I love you/ Know that it’s true/ Even though I’m out of my mind/ As long as we live/ Let’s just try to give/ I’ll be yours and you’ll be mine.’

I ask if it is him playing the sax on ‘Raining In Nashville’: ‘No, there’s a Turkish saxophonist I use, Selçuk Suna, he has Arabic influences. I like his flavour, he has a sort of warble when he plays that’s slightly different, he’s phenomenal!,’ he enthused. ‘I play the mandolin and kazoos on ‘HoneyBee’ ‘cos kazoos are cool!’

Astonishingly, for someone who is such a natural at it, Sobral never envisaged singing in a band: ‘I never wanted to be the singer,’ he confessed. ‘I wrote songs and gave them to the singer of the band I was in at the time. I always wanted to be Jimmy Page, not Robert Plant. Out of necessity, I’d sing if the singer in the band left. I played in one band where I shared the vocal duties with another guy. I could kind of hide behind him, I could experiment and hit the notes that I didn’t think I could hit. I started to think that I could sing a little bit, it boosted my confidence. Now, I do a lot of lobby gigs and restaurants where I sing four hour sets. People were being more complimentary about my voice than my guitar playing and I thought “Hey but what about my guitar playing?!,” he said laughing.

He acknowledges that some covers can be tricky to sing: ‘The song I found that gave me difficulty was Kelly Clarkson’s ‘Since U Been Gone’. I changed the key, haha! You get away with a lot of mistakes at home. When I first sang it live, the first verse was ok but I really went for it in the chorus and couldn’t hit the high note! Then I had to pitch it down after that (laughs).’ It turns out that he’s also a huge fan of Welsh rock band Stereophonics and we chat for a while about how brilliant some of their recent singles have been: ‘I think their song ‘Maybe Tomorrow’ is a gateway song,’ he said, clearly deep in thought. ‘We cover it a lot. I’m a fan of the tightly written song. One day, we covered the whole of The Beatles’ Revolver album, those songs really take on this life in your mind. ‘Good Day Sunshine’ on there feels grandiose and long, you assume it’s around five minutes long but it’s only a couple of minutes.’

Incredibly, it turns out that his mum met The Beatles when she was just 16: ‘She won a contest on that radio station and saw them play at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto, then she got to go and meet them. Just imagine, she was this immigrant from Portugal, shaking their hands. She was so starstruck she didn’t say anything, she doesn’t even have a photo.’

‘They changed everything, The Beatles’

He asks me if I had to pick a favourite Beatle, would I say Paul or John? I say that I’d go with Paul but I love George Harrison’s songwriting and he nods: ‘I’m a Paul fan, too,’ he said. ‘He plays all the instruments, he can switch, he’s got that range. I love Ringo’s drumming, if drummers don’t love him, get out! He was the most musical drummer, he’d come up with weird musical little fills that elevate all of those amazing songs. They changed everything, The Beatles. You have to pay homage to them and their three-part harmonies. Their chord changes are so beautiful. ‘In My Life’ is a John song, I added it into my set. The chords are brilliant, you can hear Paul’s influence. When I play that song, I get lost in it. You’re playing it and thinking “Oh, how beautiful is this, how beautiful are the lyrics” and you forget where you are.’

I tell him that another musician told me the story of Paul and John taking a bus to the other side of Liverpool as kids because they’d heard that someone there knew how to play a B7 chord on the guitar and they wanted to learn it and say that I really hope the story is true. He grins: ‘It IS true, oh my god! I heard Paul talk about this in an interview once. Hey, I’d have to get on the bus to find that chord! I totally understand that in my heart. It must have been the gateway to opening up their sound.’

Sobral’s baby son is also picking up a few of father’s moves: ‘I beatbox for my 10 month old son all the time and he tries to sing the notes, I’m blown away,’ he said proudly. ‘He knows how to strum now, it’s sooo great!’

‘My favourite song by him changes every day but I love ‘Try A Little Tenderness”

He is still a huge fan of the legends like Otis Redding that he grew up listening to: ‘Man, my favourite song by him changes every day but I love ‘Try A Little Tenderness’, ‘Cigarettes and Coffee’, ‘I Can’t Turn You Loose’ and ‘Hard to Handle’. I love The Black Crowes’ version of that but it bugs me that a lot of people think they wrote that song and don’t realise he sang it first.’

Sobral has some great advice for aspiring musicians: ‘Play all the shitty shows you can,’ he said. ‘You learn so much from them. What not to do, how loud your guitar should be. How to make your way through a long gig with a smile on your face. Or, you might say “I’m in time but the band is out, let’s figure it out”. I try to find a point in the distance and focus on that but in small venues you can see people in the crowd, you can see a dude staring at you. Without even meaning to, you eyeball him back (laughs). Now it’s become a competition, who’s gonna break first?! But he can’t stop looking at you and now you can’t stop looking at him, so it goes on and on!’ By now, we are both laughing so hard at his energetic eyeballing on our Zoom that we have to compose ourselves before he can finish his story: ‘I don’t even realise I’m doing it most of the time,’ he said. ‘I’m a starer, my wife says I do it all the time (laughs) and my son does it, too!’

Otis Redding would head his dream line-up: ‘That’s easy!,’ he said. ‘I’d have him with Booker T (an American multi-instrumentalist), who was famous for ‘Green Onions’. I’d have The Stones in 1972 and The Beatles, obviously, at the time of their Let It Be album (1970). Then Led Zeppelin in the same era, they’re so iconic. I’d love to have Aretha Franklin on there. And Ike and Tine Turner. He was a horrible human being but the music they made was amazing. Ooooh, and Parliament Funkadelic, Sly and the Family Stone. And Willie Nelson and B.B. King. I’m just going to bask in their glory, I want to be in the presence of greatness. Haha, isn’t this a great festival?! And the best part is that tickets will only cost $7 like they did in the 70’s!’