Name: Jim Hanft and Samantha Erin Yonack aka Jim and Sam
Occupation: Singer-songwriters
Nationality: American
Current release: Jim and Sam's Good on the Other Side is out via Nettwerk.

If you enjoyed this Jim and Sam interview and would like to know more about the duo and their music, visit their official website. They are also on Instagram, Facebook, Soundcloud, and twitter.



Where does the impulse to create something come from for you? What role do often-quoted sources of inspiration like dreams, other forms of art, personal relationships, politics etc play?

Together we write from a place of trying to understand what we’re feeling and also trying to understand what the people around us are feeling. Our song, “Leave Los Angeles for Good this Time” is an example of that.



It’s a reflection on the complicated relationship we have with the city we live in, all it’s given us and all that it’s taken away. Becoming parents, and having spent over 15 years here together, we’ve started to question if it’s the right fit for us, and also what about Los Angeles is keeping us here.

As we began writing the song, it was from a very personal place but as the song developed, conversations with friends that were going through the same thing, and friends who have actually left started to have an influence on what we were writing.

For you to get started, do there need to be concrete ideas – or what some have called a 'visualisation' of the finished work? What does the balance between planning and chance look like for you?

When it comes to songwriting it’s very much a moment to moment process for us. Usually the songs that end up making their way to the finish line start with the way an opening line is delivered, or the reaction we both have when our harmonies are communicating over a certain phrase or melody, then we build from there.

Anytime we’ve sat down saying, “we’re gonna write a song about blah blah blah” or were gonna make a song that sounds like “yada yada yada” we’ve usually ended up with nothing. Probably because if we are too rigid about how something should be we end up having an unrealistic expectation for that idea rather than letting something develop more organically and become whatever it wants to be and go wherever it wants to go.

What do you start with? How difficult is that first line of text, the first note?

It’s only difficult if you don’t show up consistently to see if there is anything there to sing.

We usually start with finding a few chords on the piano, or a guitar line that feels interesting … then we’ll usually start mumbling or “rabbiting” (a phrase we use for going down the creative rabbit hole to see if the muse is hiding anywhere) … we’ll then see if a melody, word or phrase pops out and wants to attach itself to the musical idea.

If it does … then we’re off to the races.

What makes lyrics good in your opinion? What are your own ambitions and challenges in this regard?

Because we write most of our songs together and finish all of our songs together, the baseline for a good lyric is if we believe the other person, and if we believe what we are singing about.

Our relationship to lyrics has developed and changed quite a bit since we first started. We used to have this stupid rule that there can be no cliches. (and looking back at some of our early work, there were times that a song suffered from that rule, because metaphors can be overused just the same)

That rule has disappeared for now; however, we now look at a cliche like a tool, or a way to bind two unique ideas together. Sometimes the song, the story, or the set of lyrics you are writing needs a cliche to bring it back to earth.

Many writers have claimed that as soon as they enter into the process, certain aspects of the narrative are out of their hands. Do you like to keep strict control over the process or is there a sense of following things where they lead you?

This is a complicated question for us, because oftentimes when we are writing together we both have different narratives going on in our heads that we are singing or writing about. I think that’s part of what makes collaborating with each other exciting.

Control is a delicate thing to have when writing a song, because there are moments where you’re writing the song and moments where the song is writing itself … and for us, if we can tap into that place where the song is just happening and the lyrics are just pouring out, we try to stay in that moment for as long as we can.

Our song, “Space for the Stranger” was born that way. It started out as a late night conversation about how our daughter Hazel was going to be born in a few months and our lives were going to be completely changed.



The next morning, the song started at the piano with the question, “do you remember late night in Boston…” and the rest of the song was written halfway through our first cup of coffee.

Often, while writing, new ideas and alternative roads will open themselves up, pulling and pushing the creator in a different direction. Does this happen to you, too, and how do you deal with it? What do you do with these ideas?

The pulling and pushing of a new idea or possibly changing the tense of a song halfway through can often be the death of the song if we’re not careful. It’s easy to be enticed by a line or a word that may change the entire direction of a song. So we always try to make sure that lyrics truly serve the song and story.

In some rare cases a new direction can be a good thing, but in the cases where you’re writing your second verse and having to go back to your first verse to change what’s happening, it can often get messy and tangled up.

In terms of new ideas chordally, rhythmically or melodically we usually try to entertain all of those ideas because those can really have a positive impact on the overall dynamics and composition of the song … oftentimes these new musical ideas make their way into our bridges. The contradiction to what we just said would be our song, “House on Fire” ...



For a few weeks that song was called “Abandoned House” with a whole different set of lyrics; however, something didn’t feel quite right … until during a writing session the words “House on Fire” revealed themselves and something finally clicked. So we went back and rewrote the song.

There are many descriptions of the creative state. How would you describe it for you personally? Is there an element of spirituality to what you do?

We were writing songs together before we were in a band and before we were even married. Writing songs together is without a doubt the place where we communicate better than anywhere else.

Individually it’s always been a place where each of us get to sift through the shit in our heads and make sense of things we are feeling or didn’t even know we are feeling.

Especially in the digital age, the writing and production process tends towards the infinite. What marks the end of the process? How do you finish a work?

We usually go through a few rounds when writing a song. The first session when we write a song is about keeping our ass in the seat. Even if that means writing a bad second verse knowing we can replace it tomorrow, we always try to write the second verse and get through a “version 1” of the song.

Then on the next day, with a fresh cup of coffee, one or both of us can sit down with the song and try to get back into the moment with the song and rewrite the second verse and touch up anything that needs to be fixed. Then we’ll record a demo of the song to our phone, start to finish so we can listen back in the car and on walks to see what it sounds like out in the wild a bit.

Then … the trickier part starts with trying to record the song and capture something close to the feeling we had when we started the song. We usually record a few demos of a song at different tempos, in different keys and different types of guitar performances before we lock in on what we want. Or, if we are working with a producer - we will lean on someone we trust to help us find out where to take it.

Half of our latest record was produced by a longtime collaborator of ours, Hustle Standard. On a song like, “Somebody Right” – we sent him a very rough demo that he cracked open and built a few ideas off of – he then presented us with a few thoughts and direction on where we should take the song.



From there we re-approached how the guitar should be played, committed to a new tempo / key and the song was built from there.

What's your take on the role and importance of production, including mixing and mastering for you personally? How involved do you get in this?

The production, mixing and the performance of a song is so insanely important. It’s as important as the song. For us recording and production has been a place that we have been spending a lot of time over the past few years. We have always been a band that loves to perform live, and we have always written songs from a place of “how is this going to sound live?” On this record we really started to switch our focus to “how will this sound on record.”

The songs on our latest album were all recorded by us, in our boiler room, between the short silences during our daughters naps or late at night … and the more we recorded, the more deliberate we began to get with how we wanted things to sound. So we ended up producing 6 out of the 11 songs ourselves; however, we have always leaned on mixing engineers that we trust to take the songs the extra mile.

Our song, “It takes a Lullaby” was a song we recorded and produced ourselves with the intention of it being as intimate and as stripped back as possible.



We then took the recording and had Hustle Standard mix the song to really elevate its sound and bring more clarity to our vision.