Sam Fender calls for his bedside in “All Is On My Side,” an intimate track depicting a journey through a blueish night out with friends. Despite the release of the song almost five years ago, this is Fender at his very best.
The track sees Fender traversing over cocktails and cosmos whilst stumbling through the streets of London on a Friday night. His purpose? He’s not quite sure. But influenced majorly by his “boys” and loosened inhibitions, he intends to find out.
Fender seems to shine with the melancholy sift of the guitar and the pulse of the drums that beat behind his bleak voice. His song is honest, breathing fire under the U.K. tinge of his North Shields accent.
“The night is almost over,” he romances someone, anyone, “Take me back to your bed.”
With the consistent splashes of liquor blurring his thoughts and screwing around with his emotional capacity, Fender elicits a cathartic tone. He aches for more as the hours tick by into the night; he looks for it in the bottom of his glass, a sweet escape with somebody he just cannot seem to taste.
“All Is On My Side” is a track that is offbeat until the very end. It is apropos to the mundane, calling for a release that is seemingly out of sight and out of mind. The sentiment of craving more echoes through the bass of Fender’s voice as it picks up in pitch. His emotions are blanketed through his appeal to a physical connection.
“The time is now for me and you.” He repeats nearly four times, a passionate outcry to anybody who wants to escape with him, to join him on an adventure away from the dull.
Sam Fender mentioned on Twitter that “All Is On My Side” had been one of the oldest songs he has produced, citing it as, “It didn’t make my [first] album. I’ve played it for five years and wrote it when I was a baby.”
And to be honest, it is his best song.
“All Is On My Side” is a 4-minute monologue about greed. It is this construct of words that elicit the feeling of wanting more than you get in the moment and locating that with anybody that might pick up on your vibe. It is a track about taking the edge off and in doing that, finding something worthwhile.
It is my favorite song.
It scratches my brain in words I simply couldn’t describe.
It’s a bittersweet song, a call to the classic Eighties music renaissance. It is a song that is moody in tone but candid in emotion. It highlights Sam Fender’s strength in relating situations back to all human beings.
And it is a song that I will never stop listening to.
I hope it is everybody’s September song, too.