Like John, Paul, George and Ringo, does The Sam Willows have differing roles in the bands?

Ben: Absolutely. We like to think of it as our own little business enterprise. On the boring end of the spectrum, each of us handles a different department. That way we’re all accountable to the progress of the band. On the creative and therefore more “fun” side of the spectrum, we’re all equal stakeholders. Everyone throws in musical ideas, and from there it’s more of sieving out what we feel works best for our sound.

Jon: We all have different roles in the band. But when it comes to writing music, we enjoy the process to be organic. Sometimes one person would come with a riff, or a simple melody, and then we expand on it and write a song. Every song we’ve wrote has a different story behind it, which makes it more meaningful for us. It also helps that all of us are different in terms of musical genre, Ben loves folk; Sandra Soul, Narelle Jazz, and myself Blues and Country music.

Narelle: What we learnt from a lot of the conferences we’ve been to, such as SXSW CMF (Canadian music fest/week) and even Music Matters in Singapore is that you can’t have everyone doing everything because it just becomes slow. Like a company or a clock each of us have different roles. In a nutshell, Ben handles social media, Sandra handles design, Jon handles operations and I do finance. Of course there’s a lot more than just these four so sometimes when things need to be done we then delegate one person to overseer, but essentially everyone still has to play a task. Like songwriting, you need everyone’s effort but not everyone can arrange together (which is what we actually usually do). It helps that Ben takes on the role of “leader” for song writing, in that sense. He helps ensure the whole process is moving smoothly. But our team is more than just the four of us. The main team includes our manager Audrey who handles all the liaising and gigs (in a nutshell) and we have a sound engineer Teddy Looi and a videographer, Ben Ong.

Sandra: I personally feel we compliment each other very well. We’re very different yet very similar at the same time. Jon is the highly organized one, doing lists and planning schedules, running the ‘operations’. Ben is the musical genius and the calmest of us all. Narelle is the super excited one and a natural at social media. Where as, I’m the slightly crazy one and I handle most of the design work together with the team.  When it comes to writing songs, as Jon said, it’s pretty much rather organic. Sometimes, Ben comes in with an idea or with a backbone of a song, and the rest of us jump to put together the rest of the parts. Sometimes it’s Jon with a guitar riff; sometimes it’s Narelle or myself with a chorus or an idea for an interesting beat.