How does it feel to work at your music for years, cross continents and risk everything in pursuit of your dream, then finally see a song become a surprise hit? Singer, songwriter and self-billed hopeless romantic Sam Fischer found out when out of nowhere This City, a self-released single he’d salvaged from the wreckage of his first record deal, rocketed towards over half a billion streams. “It was like a runaway train and I was just kind of holding on for dear life,” is how he remembers it now. “I had a song that was exploding, I was going viral on TikTok when I didn’t even have TikTok downloaded on my phone, I’d just signed a new record deal, and then…”
Well, that part of the story takes us up to the first few months of 2020, so we all know what happened then. In Sam’s words: “The runaway train hit a pandemic-shaped wall, and I got thrown out of it… Into another wall.”
Sam reckons he’d managed to enjoy roughly three months of seeing his career take off before the carpet was pulled from under him. One minute he was on lavish video shoots, the next he was at his front door signing for camera equipment and a greenscreen. Sam’s debut US talk show appearance wasn’t in the Jimmy Kimmel studio, but shot on his phone and emailed in. “It was the shit I want to do,” Sam recalls now, “just not in the way I’d spent twenty years dreaming of doing it.”
All of the above — the sudden/not-so-sudden success, the abrupt pause, the recalibration of what success looks and feels like — became the inspiration for Hopeless Romantic, a release that Sam’s rapidly swelling fanbase immediately recognised as a very Sam Fischer sort of song: kinda sounds like a love song, kinda totally isn’t. “I’m not one of those hyper specific writers,” Sam adds. “But I also think that love is the most universal concept. So I try to turn whatever emotions I’m feeling into a love story.”
This approach has clearly struck the right note, with Sam’s naturally charismatic songs zooming up charts and into playlists around the globe, a Demi Lovato duet (100m-stream behemoth What Other People Say) and, more recently, his second ARIA nomination — and that’s in addition to his work as a songwriter for acts like Ciara, Keith Urban, SayGrace, Jessie J and MAX. “I try to write uncomplicated, honest truths about myself,” he adds. “Honesty and vulnerability should be celebrated, and if the last five years have taught me anything it’s that you should never be afraid to be your honest self.”
When Sam did eventually release This City independently he launched his artist career in the process. “When I wrote it, it was simply a light for me when I was in a dark place,” he says. “Nowadays I see it as a sign that everything’s possible.” Sam even found himself booked onto a pivotal tour with Lewis Capaldi — although he had to miss the opening date as it fell on his wedding day. “The tour made for a strange honeymoon, but Lewis is an absolute icon and a very dear mate and I probably wouldn’t be here without him,” Sam adds.