@sam.varney

Bass for a Detroit post-punk band on hiatus; produces records out of a converted garage. The Jazz is a 2003 American Standard; the Sunn Beta a 1980 head he found at a moving sale for $200. Records direct as often as he mics.

Played fretless for ten years before realizing the fretted Jazz was what every recording wanted. The Sunn followed the same year — a friend's grandfather's amp, sold for the price of the move.

Grew up in Hamtramck, Michigan, raised by a machinist father and a librarian mother in a two-flat off Joseph Campau. Skipped college after a year at Wayne State and took a job at a guitar shop in Ferndale that doesn't exist anymore. Lives now in a small house in Hazel Park with his wife, a public-school art teacher, and a daughter who just turned four. The garage studio took eighteen months and most of a tax refund to insulate properly; the neighbors stopped complaining around month nine. Day rate covers the mortgage in a good month. Thirty-nine, no health insurance through the work, gets it through her.

Started on a beat-up classical his uncle left at the house, switched to a pawn-shop P-bass copy at thirteen after hearing Mike Watt on a Minutemen tape a friend's older brother dubbed. Took lessons briefly from a jazz upright player who taught at Wayne and made him read standard notation for a year before touching a fretboard, which Sam now considers the single most useful thing anyone made him do. Played fretless through his twenties in a Detroit post-rock band called Surveyor's Knot that toured the Midwest in a Dodge van and got a half-page in Magnet in 2011. Joined the current post-punk four-piece in 2017, switched to the fretted Jazz a year in, and the recordings finally started sitting right. The band is on hiatus while the singer finishes a PhD; Sam tracks bass for other people's records most weeks.