Where Two Hawks Fly

In hindsight, it was always obvious that Sam Grassie would emerge as a trailblazer in the new British folk scene. Though cemented with the release of his dazzling and dark debut album Where Two Hawks Fly, that status has been long in the making. As a toddler, Grassie recalls, he’d sneak out of bed to eavesdrop on the family’s living room sessions. Once able to help carry gear he’d accompany his father’s ceilidh band on weekends. At eight years old he asked for a drumkit, but was given a guitar instead. His love of traditional music “started as far back as I can remember,” he says. “Some friends from St Roch’s Comhaltas would hide their instruments from school friends, but I’d never really shy away from it”.

Doubling down on his innate talent for fingerstyle playing through tutorage under his father’s bandmate Matt Smith, Fleadhs and Ceol Mhor, he was imbued with a deep appreciation of the form’s potential.  “I was around musicians, young and old, playing with such skill,” he says. “I’d go to see a rock band, but I wouldn’t be as enamoured as I was when I’d go to a gig that my dad was going to, and the guys would be absolutely flying on their instruments. It wasn’t ‘til meeting the folk in the London scene that I appreciate the academic side of it, it was all feeling back then”

It was while visiting his uncle in Galway, bouncing between the hedgerows in his converted ambulance, that Grassie first heard the music of Bert Jansch. Grassies’s father had recently left home and was living in a cabin in the woods. “The darkness in that music and the raw approach on the guitar immediately spoke to me,” he says. “I was really drawn in by lyrics and poetry and turns of phrase too, and that’s all very apparent and immediate when it’s just a guitar and voice, you can really take it all in.”

Moving to Glasgow at 17, Grassie fell into the city’s burgeoning electronic scene, and for a time the fiddle was left to gather dust. The guitar however remained a constant companion. Naturally, after then relocating to London – first for a few pandemic-curtailed months in 2020 and then for good in 2022 – it didn’t take long for Grassie to establish himself as one of the keystones of the city’s erupting young folk scene. Even in this fertile ground he soon stood apart – a magnetic performer, drawing influence from that same raw emotion that Jansch did, but also the melodic command and fluidity of John Renbourn and Pierre Bensusan.

And yet, Grassie’s journey to these heights was also a bumpy one; that rich emotion all over Two Hawks Fly was not conjured out of thin air.