Guitar Lessons Leeds

 One of the 50 Essential Texas Albums-    Texas Music Magazine

waves he walks down to the ocean bends to touch the water kneels to pray writes her name in the sand waves wash it away truale drive an hour out of dalhart it's one long straight line there's a ranch house out of nowhere there's a cross road there's a sign she was born in that ranch house her daddy slapped her alive the doctor still in town too drunk to drive baseball there are soldiers in the way of harm a girl holds a baby in a blanket in her arms a man a man with a flag leaves for work a woman pulls a tread from the hem of her skirt thursday it's a parking lot in waco where she sees things clear got a back seat full of babies and a frosty full of tears change there was a dry good store a flower shop a barber with no nose one alcoholic cop pony then love was a porcelain angel in a church in mexico dressed in silk painted tears we worshiped what we did not know kitchen they are fighting door to door at jerusalem's gate millionaires play baseball oprah talks about fate iron it's ironthat he hangs he loves his work he drives hours each day he's never been hurt got a back of steel burns on the sleeves of his shirt steel no one is just an observer the same bell tolls for the served and the server angels call a truce call a war everyone is a bastard everyone is a whore everyone is a saint everyone is redeemed everyone is at the mercy of another one's dream

Press

MOJO

“a deceptive simplicity and an insouciance that at times recall John Prine”

The 60 Best Albums of 2006 by Geoffrey Himes

Number 1. Sam Baker: mercy.  A cross between early John Prine and prime Townes Van Zandt.

Texas Music Magazine

September 2006

By Geoffrey Himes

Producer Gurf Morlix gets a lot of demos from singer-songwriters. Mountains of demos. So when he stood on the back stairs at Antone’s between sets and told me that he had just discovered the best songwriter he’d heard in years—a songwriter as good as his former and current clients Lucinda Williams, Mary Gauthier and Ray Wylie Hubbard—I paid attention. When he told me he had nothing to do with the songwriter’s one and only album, I paid closer attention. Go to sambakermusic.com, he said; you won’t be sorry. I did and I wasn’t. The CD arrived in the mail with the words Sam Baker and “Mercy” on a white frame around a black-and- white photo of a baby-boomer with chiseled features, tousled brown hair and a black turtleneck. The fourth song, “Thursday,” begins with a simply picked acoustic-guitar figure, but an eerie pedal steel guitar note, courtesy of Whiskeytown’s Mike Daly, hovers overhead like something bad about to happen, like the threat of rain from the east. Responding to thatthreat is the anxiety of Tim Lorsch’s octave violin and Ron DeLaVega’s cello. When Baker’s voice finally enters, it’s a sandpaper drawl reminiscent of John Prine’s. In short, compact lines, he sketches a picture of a young woman in a second-hand car, her two babies in car seats, a plastic case of huggies in the front and the father far behind. She pulls up to the drive-through window at a Wendy’s in Waco; the older child asks, “Daddy gone?” It’s raining now. The mother cries; the babies cry, and the teenager in the window asks, “M’am, is something wrong?” This is the point in the song where you want something good to happen to this poor woman. You want the irresponsible father to show up and do the right thing; you want a kindly stranger to take her by the hand and find her a job and nice home; you want a fairy godmother to flutter down from the sky and wave her wand. You want it as a listener; you’d want it if you were the songwriter. But Baker stubbornly refuses that temptation. Hehas his protagonist pull over in the Wendy’s parking lot, collect herself, calm her kids, eat her French fries and get back on I-65 towards nothing in particular in San Antonio. You realize this single mother is going to struggle through days like this for years and years to come, and the realization is devastating. “It’s like a country song,” Baker sings, “but it feels a lot sadder than what the radio plays.” The whole album is like that. An emotional weather is established by the instruments. Baker’s characters—a newly widowed man, an aging party girl, a beer drinker watching the TV news in his underwear, a construction worker who rolls his pick-up—are evoked so economically, so vividly that we ache to keep them from the disappointment and doom headed their way. But Baker refuses to let wishful thinking distort his pictures of the way things are. Musicians aren’t the most reliable critics—they’re too protective of their friends—but Morlix was right about Baker. He’s a major talent,too important to wait around for a second album before spreading the news. Connoisseurs of Texas songwriting need to know about this Austin resident now. We need to find out how he resisted the temptation to make things better for his characters—or to at least add a moral lesson for his listeners. Where did he get the discipline to be so spare in his language and so unsparing in his attitude? “In popular art,” he ventures, “there is an expectation of magical resolve, where happy-ever-after is mandatory. I think happy-ever-after is a distinct possibility, but in my world, happy-ever-after involves a fair amount of bumps and bruises. That doesn’t mean it’s unavailable; it just means that it’s not magical. It’s a practical matter. At this phase of my writing life, I like the songs to stay in line with what I can see, with how I see ordinary people resolve things, which is usually in ordinary ways. In ‘Thursday,’ for instance, the babies stop crying, she stops crying, she starts up the carand they take off. “It’s a jolt of reality when someone can see into their own life and see the profound difference between that life and what they hear of others on the radio or TV. The woman in ‘Thursday’ finds herself in her own song and it’s more compelling than what she hears on the radio. It’s the nature of us as people. Because it’s so easy to stay in the world of popular culture we all sometimes stay outside ourselves so long that it’s hard to come back and reside in our own small worlds.” “Thursday” is a country song, even if it feels a lot sadder than what the radio plays. It’s a country song because Baker’s baritone echoes Itasca, his small hometown between Dallas and Waco. It’s a country song because the arrangement is built around acoustic guitar, fiddle and pedal steel guitar. It’s a country song because it’s firmly in the tradition of Texas singer-songwriters such as Guy Clark, Lyle Lovett, Townes Van Zandt, Lightnin’ Hopkins and Mance Lipscomb. “I’m just one tiny, dimthread in that great, colorful fabric,” Baker, 52, insists. “I’m of that world, of those stories and of those people. When I write, it works best when I write about what I know, just as it did for Townes and Guy. We’re all writing about the same trees and rocks and the same people struggling. I’m responding to the same sort of things they responded to, the way the prairie lays out, the way the wind comes off the Gulf Coast. If you all look at the same tree, there’s bound to be some similarity. “Part of what Townes and Guy taught me was that to look around and see what’s in the yard is what gives songs their strength. They both kept their vision pretty close to home; I don’t think they ever looked over to India or Germany for inspiration—they didn’t even look over to Arkansas. If they wrote a bout a leaf falling from a tree, it was probably a tree near their house, and I thought that was a valuable lesson.” Baker had always fooled around on guitar, but for years he never took itseriously. Instead, after graduating from North Texas State, he worked as a bank examiner in Midland and Odessa and El Paso. Tiring of the nine-to-five life, he dropped out to run river rafts out of Terlingua and to work as a carpenter in the off-season. That gave him lots of time to travel, and in 1986 when a friend asked if he wanted to come along on a trip to the Peruvian mountains, Baker said sure. After hiking ice-capped ridges for six days, they wanted to see Machu Picchu and flew into Cuzco to catch the train. “There was a heavy military presence in Cuzco,” Baker remembers. “The newspapers were full of stories about a prison riot, and the Shining Path was attacking villages in the mountains. The government had used some heavy-handed tactics, so the country was pretty unsettled. But everything seemed under control in Cuzco. I was sitting on the aisle next to a German kid across from his mother and father. I paid no attention to the red backpack above his mother’s head on theluggage rack.” The train was still in the station when the dynamite in that backpack exploded. The German kid and his parents were killed instantly; five more people died immediately and two more died later from their injuries. It was one of the Shining Path’s first urban attacks. “I had a severed artery,” Baker says matter-of-factly 20 years later. “First there was a panic, because the pressure wave of the blast knocked all the air out of my lungs. You take breathing for granted, but I couldn’t get my lungs to reinflate for a second or two. I wasn’t knocked out, but I was put instantly in a different space, a place of dying. I was in Cuzco for a while, and then I was airlifted to Houston. It didn’ t look good; I had gangrene and renal failure.” If this were a country song that the radio would play, Baker’s near-death experience would have brought him closer to God, closer to a good woman, closer to a dream or closer to something. On the two songs that Baker actually wrote about theexperience—“Steel” and “Angels”—things aren’t that simple. “Everyone is a saint,” he sings on “Angels,” but he adds that everyone is also “a bastard [and] a whore.” There’s no grand design, he implies on “Steel”; you can’t predict the randomness of the world, “’cause trains explode; steel flies. The sisters ring the Catholic bells; smoke rises through a hole in the roof.” Yes, there are dreams, he acknowledges, but those dreams can belong to the Shining Path as easily as they belong to Martin Luther King. As he sings on “Angels,” “Everyone is at the mercy of another one’s dream.” “For a while,” he admits, “I was under a fight-or-flight reflex. I felt every room I walked in, every car I rode in, every plane I flew in, was going to blow up. I thought every moment could, faster than I could blink my eyes, change to me dying. But once that response began to subside, another view that had been there all along emerged. Because you know that it can all be taken away in an instant, you embracewhat’s here all the more intensely. I realized that I was in extra innings, that every day, every minute is a gift. Every cup of coffee, every cheeseburger.” In an effort to make sense of it all, he turned to fiction. He went back to work as a bank examiner and wrote short stories in his spare time. He wrote and wrote and got better and better, but he never reached the point of clarity he desired. Then, in 1998, his sister Chris Baker-Davies released an album, “Southern Wind,” that included a few of the songs that Baker had tossed off during his fiction years. Hearing them sung by someone else with a band, he realized that songwriting might provide the economy and focus he hadn’t found in fiction. So he began writing the songs that became “Mercy.” “The editing part of the short fiction helped the songwriting,” he claims, “because I had learned how to take something that seemed alright and tear it up into small pieces of confetti, let them swirl around for a while and see where theyland. If I can’t do that, I can’t rewrite, and I think rewriting is God. I felt I was in a box crowded with words, and you have to throw some words overboard so you have room for new stuff. I don’t think I could have gone forward unless I could let some of it out.” The results were some of the best songs to ever come out of Texas, even if no one heard them other than a handful of Baker’s pals and a few unwary listeners at a roadhouse on the Llano River. In 2003, though, Baker opened for Walt Wilkins, a Texas native now recording and producing in Nashville, at a bed and breakfast in Llano. Wilkins immediately recognized the quality of the songs and told Baker, “I know what you should sound like.” That appealed to Baker, who didn’t, and they made plans to record an album in Nashville. Wilkins and his co-producer Tim Lorsch set up a chair, two mics and a candle in the studio and had Baker sing the songs as he normally did them. Once they had acceptable takes, the producers started addinglayers of pedal steel, cello and violin until the arrangements resembled the chamber-folk-rock of Alejandro Escovedo. Jessi Colter, Joy Lynn White, Kevin Welch and Chris Baker-Davies added harmony vocals. Then Baker released “Mercy” in 2004 on his own label with no publicist or radio promotion. Like most self-released albums, it fell like a tree in a forest where no one could hear it. But slowly, very slowly, people began to discover it. When Baker opened for Morlix, the headliner was so impressed that he started passing out copies to musicians, writers and DJs, including Bob Harris at the BBC. When Morlix produced Darryl Lee Rush’s album, “Llano Ave.,” he convinced Rush to open the album with Baker’s song “Truale.” There was an article in the Houston Chronicle this year and some airplay here and there. As Baker records his second album with the same cast of producers and musicians, his first one is finally being discovered. What listeners encounter are songs like “Baseball.” The firstand last lines are the same: “There are soldiers in the way of harm.” In between, though, is the seemingly unrelated story of a Little League game, a description of 10-year-old boys chasing pop flies blown by a Texas wind while their parents drink sodas in the stands. A lesser songwriter would have made explicit the point that the boys on the field will someday become the soldiers in harm’s way, but Baker leaves that connection unspoken. He can afford it, because his words describe the game so well, and because his music wordlessly links affection for the boys’ innocence and fear for their future. “I wrote ‘Baseball’ sitting around a kid’s baseball game,” he explains. “The kids were just completely happy to be in the sunshine and wind with their pals. They had uniforms on, and the ball would fly by and sometimes they’d grab it and sometimes they wouldn’t, but that was all secondary to being on the field. This was during the run-up to the Iraq War. I was almost a reporter, describingwhat was going on including the emotional overlay of the war. My job was to get it down right. “In my world, those details are like stones that I use to build the wall. I don’t have a blueprint or a landscape plan that says this is what the wall is supposed to do. I put the walls in some odd places, now that I think of it. You go out in a field and there are a million stones out there, and as a writer if you use them all, it’s going to be a mess. What I do is, as opposed to planning ahead, is I wait for an emotional sense of something. Then I pick the stones that fit and throw the rest away.”

m e r c y         Number 1 on FAR Chart #79 March 2006