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Credit: Jacob Mulka
A highlight of Sammy Boller’s 2025 was the last-minute fill-in position he took on Goo Goo Dolls’ amphitheater tour, after lead guitarist Brad Fernquist came down with a shoulder injury.
Playing iconic anthems like Iris made it the “summer of a lifetime” for Boller. By fall, though, the solo instrumentalist was ready to re-route listeners into the lush and immersive plains of his Midnight Garden EP.
Boller strolls through Spellbound with dizzying, speaker-panning arpeggios and hammer-on-fluttery accents. The Mapmaker merges R&B-twitched digital drum production with pizzicato playfulness. The record’s Rama Bhakti spotlights a dulcet, multi-finger approach to tapping, at least until Boller bumblebees himself toward a busier triple-time motif and some backend shred.
“I’ve been doing the melodic tapping stuff for a while now,” he says. “I just love it because it reminds me of playing a piano, where you can play the accompaniment with the left hand, and then the melody with the right hand.”
Midnight Garden marks Boller’s first major solo release since 2020’s Kingdom of the Sun. Working alongside producer Nick Sampson at a trio of Michigan-area studios, he mainly dialed things in with a go-to Les Paul – though he also brought out a Friedman Noho 24, and aggressively thickened up rhythms with an eight-string Ibanez that was on-loan to Sampson from Polyphia’s Tim Henson.
“In my instrumental music, I like when it goes from super clean to super heavy,” Boller says of the dynamic shifts across the EP.
Another contrast-heavy Midnight Garden moment is bonus cut Mother Light, a heartfelt piece that ushers itself in with yearning grand piano chords but concludes with Boller’s soul-glowing display of bends and wails.
“I wrote that for my mom. I never thought about releasing it, but she passed away last year, so I thought it would be a nice tribute to her. She was an amazing musician, herself,” he says, explaining she’d sung in a band called Atlantis with his dad, and was likewise a talented comedian.
Midnight Garden also reflects Boller’s spiritualism, with songs like Rama Bhakti” coming inspired by Hinduist gods like Hanuman. He explains that his interest in those figures arose as he began writing instrumental music, and his understanding of their teachings are tied to both his personal and artistic growth.
“The spiritual search is about knowing who you are at the end of the day,” he says, adding, “The more you go inward and try to really know yourself, [the more] your music [develops] along with that.”
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