
On Sunday the 24th, I had the pleasure of seeing Blue Violet perform live at King Tuts. If you aren’t familiar with the duo featuring Sam and Sarah Gotley, I would characterise their music as indie folk with vivid rock undertones. Sarah’s performance live is incredible. She knows how to sing how to move where to look and what to do. Not to say that there is a specific way of moving about the stage that artists should be familiar with, but she performs with a certainty that definitely makes you think there is. I sat in the back because I had a cold and I was tired but their energy was so vivid and electric that I felt it from the back of the venue sitting next to a very old man and having to squint because a bunch of men were standing right in front of me. ‘Undercover’ was a great song to start with, the harmonies were beautiful and Sam’s voice reminds me of Gregory Allan Isakov. The set list was an accumulation of their biggest and loudest songs which I thoroughly enjoyed but having delved into their discography after the gig, ‘Rabbit Hole’ a slow beautiful track was one that I repeatedly kept coming back to. ‘Blue Violet’ are currently supporting ‘Echobelly’ on a tour around the UK leading up to the release of their sophomore album ‘Faux Animal’ (Release date – 24/01/25) and I had the pleasure of catching up with them a few days after the gig for an interview:
How do you generally feel when you’re performing live, what’s that experience like for you?
-Sarah
I love it, we gig in Scotland quite a lot and the crowds here receive music so well, they’re drawn in by music and I think when you play to a crowd like that, its such an incredible feeling and obviously that’s the point. That’s why you want to create that, you want to connect with people and I feel like you get a really connected crowd very often in Scotland and every show we’ve done in King Tuts we love. It’s also such a great venue, It’s one of those grassroots venues that have been around for ages so they still have that real grundgy kind of gutsy feel to them and it feels like that on stage as well as in the audience I think, so there is something really special about that.
What does your sonwriting process look like? Do you both write the melody, lyrics and the instrumentation or do you usually have seperate roles within the band?
-Sam
I kind of do a lot of writing by myself, on this album I did a lot of arranging in Logic on the computer before bringing it into the studio, but I guess there’s a kind of ongoing colaborative process between me and Sara where I’ll do a bit and then I’ll say ‘What do you think about this? Which way should I take it?’ Even though I’m doing the music and the lyrics to the point of conception.
-Sara
Sam really does write just about everything apart from a few songs on the second album that were co-writes with a couple of other people as well. But he’ll bring me an idea, sometimes when you’re writing a song it all comes together straight away but other times it’s the beginning of an idea so he’ll bring it and we”ll kind of both work on it together and see how it sits vocally for me. That’s kind of the collaborative space that we have.
What are the things that usually inspire your lyrics?
-Sam
Mental health, there are quite a lot of songs on the album that are based on my own experiences with that, and also I guess writing in the traditional way where you are observing things about the world, so there’s a lot of songs about the ways that society behaves as well on this new album.
-Sara
Sam is like a listener I would say, he’s kind of observant of the world, in big conversations with a lot of people it will seem like he is reserved but he’s just observing. He takes that and turns it into his lyrics very often which means that the topics can be quite broad because they can be about something that people are talking about, or about observing people’s behaviors, or generally about what’s going on in the world but it stems from being quite an observant person.
That’s very interesting, I was actually listening to a lot of your songs and then I read somewhere that ‘Sam and Sara Gotley used to be a band called ‘Broken Bones Matilda’’ so I had to ask you, how do you feel right now looking back at your career starting from ‘Broken Bones Matilda’ to your first single as Blue Violet ‘All you have to do is dream’ which eventually led to ‘Faux Animals’? What has that experience been like for you and how do you feel right now in comparison to where you used to be?

-Sara
With the first band we did everything ourselves, it was amazing in a lot of ways but it was a lot of work and we built it all in a very grassroots way and did every show that we could possibly get our hands on, the year before covid I think we counted we did 87 shows and we played loads of festivals and it was amazing. But I think the music that we were making wasn’t actually what we wanted to be making. It was quite americana, it was quite rootsy, it fitted that world of music really well but it didn’t suit our personalities that well and I think we wanted to lean into more of our british identity or my french identity and take elements of that and bring that more into the music because obviously we’re not Americans and that was very americana. So that was how the transition from one band to the next happened and in terms of where we are musically now, I definitely felt like this album, in terms of what we can present live and what we’re trying to say, I feel like that’s much more in keeping with who we are as people.
What was the writing process for ‘Faux Animals’ like in comparison to ‘Late Night Calls’? Did you find that to be a different experience? Did you approach it differently?
-Sam
it’s interesting cause I guess on your first album you’re putting together a collection of songs that, there’s nothing that preceeds it, so you’ve got all of these songs and you think ‘How can I make those fit together? With this one there was more of an intention to have a running theme that was based around the first three or four songs that we had written, and I really like to write in that way because I think that you come up with things that you wouldn’t have come up with if you hadn’t decided to take that road.
-Sara
We had quite a lot time as well because we started writing the second album during lockdown since we’d actually finished the first album before Covid, so we had all that time and then when we came out of lockdown and we decided that we wanted to get going on the next album, we wanted to kind of develop it. So we went to the studio with a couple of different writers which means that some of the songs on the album are written by Sam and then some of them are cowrites with a couple of other writers which was not the case in the first record.

Do you think of ‘Faux Animals’ as a concept album? Because I saw that visually it also has a very specific identity which feels different from what you did before.
-Sam
Loosely maybe, I really love our first album as well, I wouldn’t say concept album but maybe
-Sara
It’s kind of leaning more into that and I also think that we’ve kind of enjoyed developing the style and the image and the sound all as one thing and it was a conscious move from where we were in the first album to where we wanted to go on the second album, so maybe not a concept album per say but definitely a conscious theme, the style around it and everything was very intentional.
I wanted to ask about your visual interpretation generally because I saw that you have numerous different music videos, I really like ‘Rabbit Hole’ I love that music video and I was wondering how important the visual interpretations of your songs is to you.
-Sara
I would say really important. Nowadays people are like ‘Is there any point in doing music videos?’ Because everyone watches 3 seconds of things but I think that for us (and this is the same kind of thing with making an album over just releasing singles), when we create things we have a real vision of how we want it to be and I think we’ve been really lucky with finding incredible artists to work with. So Jared did all the videos for the first album and he’s in South Africa so some of the videos are filmed in South Africa and it really worked well with the style of that first album and then Luke who’s done all the videos for the second album, his style is a bit darker, a bit more edgy and that really suited the style of this album so it’s really really nice to find people who’s vision matches what we’re trying to create and actually work alongside those artists.
-Sam
Yeah and I think that with the videos for this album, one of the intentions with the music on this album was to write some stuff that had higher energy because we had the live set in mind. So these videos have got more of a live performance element than the ones on the first abum which were more story based I think
What are your aspirations for ‘Blue Violet’? What do your future goals look like?
-Sara
I think definitely for me just continuing to play live as much as possible and connecting with real humans cause I think there’s a lot of emphasis now put on the numbers of things and how many streams you’ve got and the thing that I’ve loved about music from an audience perspective and from an artist’s perspective is the real life connection that you get in music and you can get that from listening to music on a recording of course, but I think the connection that you get when you either play or see someone live is something that is really really important to me. So I would just like to continue to grow that side of it and be able to play to more people and be able to share with wider audiences and we’ve been really lucky so far with the audiences that we’ve had so that would definitely be my main goal.
-Sam
Mine is similar on the songwriting side of things as well. I think I just like to be writing as much as possible and recording and kind of furthering my knowledge of that and collaborating with people.
-Sara
Have already started on number three so

Ahh exciting!! And how has it been so far supporting Echobelly? How is the tour going?
-Sara
Amazing, they’ve been so welcoming and sweet it’s been so fun, really really fun
-Sam
One thing I really noticed post covid which was really positive is that people really appreciate the support bands. Before, you would turn up to do a support and there would just be a few people having a drink and stuff like that but with all these shows it’s been packed out so I think definitely in a digital world people still appreciate the human connection and they’ve been really really nice as well.
That’s really great, and lastly I just wanted to ask: How does it feel right now in comparison to when you started because you started independently so you did everything yourselves and now you don’t, so how does that feel? Having people around you who can help with these things?
-Sara
It’s amazing, it’s one of the things I think is quite funny when you think of doing everything yourself verses having the support around you. You’d think that then you’d have less work but obviously the workload increases because you’re getting given more work so it’s incredible to have the support but then you’re trying to catch up all the time but we are also very lucky with the team that we’ve got. We have always been very lucky with the team that we’ve got and the people around us really believe in the music and encourage us incredibly so yeah it feels good.

Make sure to get your tickets for Blue Violet while you’ve still got a chance!!