In Conversation: SAMWOY

Sled Island 2026 taught me three new things about Calgary: the Palomino isn’t as good as it smells, the trains are free downtown, and there is more than one library. The last one may seem insignificant, but when you’ve agreed to meet at a library for an interview, it becomes quite important. When I went to meet Sam Woywitka (of SAMWOY) for a 1 p.m. interview on June 19, I paced around the building for 10 minutes before realizing there was, get this, another library, at which point I dashed outside and hopped in an Uber that took me to the correct spot. When I arrived, Sam was very forgiving and led me to his car for the interview below. Unfortunately, my recording equipment (iPhone SE 2020) overheated during our interview, so only about half of it was captured. Luckily, Sam had a lot to say.

Ned: Who were your first big musical influences?

Sam: Well, I mean, honestly, my buddy Kale. He lives in Calgary now and is in this band called Riot City. We were super metalheads and always played basketball. We would lower the hoop and we'd all dunk. At one point, Kale broke the shit out of his knee and his leg, and his recovery took a long time. He had a guitar at his house and just started playing it. Like with Guitar Pro. Is that what it was? Guitar Pro. You know that shit?

Ned: No, I don't. What's Guitar Pro?

Sam: It's like this thing where you would have a guitar tab and you would just input the notes on each string and it would sound really eight-bit. In Courtenay, everyone in the scene used Guitar Pro. It was funny. All the bands were fans of each other, and we would learn each other’s songs by sending them to each other with Guitar Pro. And the drums were all like [eight-bit drum noises] and it was super Game Boy-esque; that was all we listened to. It was before everyone had started using MIDI programming.

Anyway, Kale broke his leg, then he started playing guitar and got Guitar Pro. I had a drum kit because I always wanted to play music and I tried guitar, like a shitty acoustic one. I was like, “This is too hard, I can't do this.” So I got a drum kit and then I sucked at playing drums too. But Kale just came over one day, hobbling over with his broken leg, and he was just like, “Get your drum kit out, I wrote a song.” I couldn't do shit, man. I tried to play the drums and he was like, “Man, just do this [drum noises].” We started jamming from then on and just never stopped. We ended up meeting our other best friends through an MSN group chat.

Ned: What's MSN?

Sam: Yeah, shit, dude. So it was like group chatting. You would add your friends and it basically was instant messaging, but on the computer. You could add big groups of people and you could just add all your contacts or whatever to one super [group chat] and everyone would find it so annoying, and they’d all leave. All the young kids that were 15 were in the other bands, and we ended up being the last people in this group chat. These are people that are still my best friends. So that was kind of how I started playing music. It was more those people than it was being inspired by any music. I was a metalhead, but I wasn't like, “Oh, this is what I want to do.” I didn't have some big vision or anything. Is it okay if I go on these tangents?

Ned: Yeah, man. It's great for me.

Sam: So we started playing in bands and we had the same four people in six different bands. We had our goblin metal band and our sludge band. But we never performed. We just had one band where we started touring; we bought a van and shit when we were like 15. We got this guy to play bass with, and he had a driver's license and shit. We would play the interior [of B.C.], we would play on the Island.

Our parents were like, “This is crazy, you guys can manage to book shows.” It was awesome. We made an album. Made all the merch, would burn all the CDs and sell them.

And then fast forward to when I got into a really bad car accident when I was 17. We all moved out here [to Calgary] when I was 16. We all got construction jobs and were living on our own. We were like, “We're gonna go play music and have high-paying Alberta construction jobs.” We started doing that, and we never played music. We just ended up partying and we never practiced. And then I got in a really bad car accident when I was 17. Then during my recovery, I went back home and started playing drums again.

It took me probably two years before I could start using my body again. I had a really bad traumatic brain injury and my body didn't work right and stuff, and I was trying to play drums as part of my recovery. I had no memory and shit, and it was really trippy.

Then I came back to Alberta and started working again. I was just working at a place called Bark Mulch Depot. I was always hungover; it sucked. We would just bring these huge trucks full of bark mulch, and just dump it in front of a house, and then I'd have to wheelbarrow it to all these different garden beds and spread it out and make all these rich people's houses look nice. And then, there was just one day, I remember I was just standing there, and was like, “Oh my god, I need to get back into music.” I had some gear, like a Digi 003 rack and a Native Instruments Maschine, I bought a guitar, and an electronic drum kit. I was like, “I'm gonna make beats.”

I didn't know how to do it at all. Eventually, I figured I needed to go to jazz school or I was going to do some sort of music production thing, even though I always heard music production schools were awful. But I ended up going to one in Vancouver and learned a lot of stuff from some pretty cool people. When I was about halfway through the program, I just started getting hit up by bands all the time. And then I just sort of became a producer, which was not my intention. I just wanted to learn how to record myself and figure some shit out.

But then I became an engineer-producer and that brought me to L.A. I was often between Vancouver and L.A. and I was producing a lot of hip-hop and working with bigger hip-hop producers like DJ Khalil, Chin Injeti, Focus Beats, and De La Soul. Eventually, I felt like the producing stuff had run its course, so I was like, “I'm going to just go to Montreal for a little bit, and see what's up.”

Ned: What made you pick Montreal?

Sam: Mostly that Isaac, one of the guys from the MSN group chat, was in Montreal, and he played in a band called Half Moon Run. And then on my drive out there, I got a text message from a guy named Franz Schuller, who is in a band called GrimSkunk, which was a really big Quebec 90s punk band, and they run Indica Records. Anyway, Franz was like, “I heard you're coming out, come by the studio, blah, blah, blah.” Then on my second day of being in Montreal, I went by Indica Records, met Peter Edwards, who ran the studio, and I said, “Hey, I'm an engineer and a producer, I'm looking for a place to help out.” And then the next day, they gave me keys and I just started helping run the studio. So I produced some albums there and that was kind of the beginning of me getting into the Montreal scene.

And then when COVID happened, it felt like I could finally try taking a break from producing and engineering people, and maybe try and pursue putting out my own music again. And that became me and my friend Mishka Stein, who's the bass player from Patrick Watson. I originally thought SAMWOY was going to be a modular synth ambient kind of project. But then there were some punk tune outliers in there. And then Mishka had some ideas that I worked on, and that became our band Fang, that was our COVID baby kind of. And we put that out and that was going well. But Mish was playing with TEKE::TEKE and Patrick Watson, and then there were just opportunities that I felt like we couldn't do because he was busy or on tour.

[phone overheats and dies]