| Geoffrey Himes Writer |
2007 Best Of
1. Carla Bley - The Lost Chords Find Paolo Fresu
2. Modest Mouse - We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank
3. Terence Blanchard - A Tale of God's Will (A Requiem for Katrina)
4. Sam Baker - Pretty World
5. Marty Ehrlich & Myra Melford - Spark!
6. Mika - Life in Cartoon Motion
7. Jim Mize - Release It to the Sky
8. King Wilkie - Low Country Suite
9. Jimmy Duck Holmes - Done Got Tired of TryinÕ
10. Mary Gauthier - Between Daylight and Dark
1. Carla Bley - The Lost Chords Find Paolo Fresu
2. Modest Mouse - We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank
3. Terence Blanchard - A Tale of God's Will (A Requiem for Katrina)
4. Sam Baker - Pretty World
5. Marty Ehrlich & Myra Melford - Spark!
6. Mika - Life in Cartoon Motion
7. Jim Mize - Release It to the Sky
8. King Wilkie - Low Country Suite
9. Jimmy Duck Holmes - Done Got Tired of TryinÕ
10. Mary Gauthier - Between Daylight and Dark
Paste Magazine
August 2007
Few songwriters can write verses
evocative enough that they need no
explaining in the chorus. Fewer still can
resist explaining things anyway for
listeners who aren’t willing to draw their
own conclusions. Townes Van Zandt
could resist that temptation, and so could
the later Joni Mitchell and the later John
Prine. And on his new album, “Pretty
World,” Sam Baker writes verses so
sharply observed—so taut with tension
between the life his characters want and
the life they actually have—that nothing
more need be said. The few times that
Baker does use a chorus, it's to add not
an explanation but yet another striking
image.
There’s no reason you should have
heard of Baker. This is the second album
the Austin artist has released on his own
label with almost no promotion, but
industry insiders such as Lucinda
Williams’ ex-producer Gurf Morlix and
Steve Earle’s former manager John
Lomax recognized his 2004 debut,
“Mercy," as one of the best singer-
songwriter discs of the decade, and
“Pretty World” is nearly as good. Like
his role models Prine and Van Zandt,
Baker doesn’t have much of a voice, but
he husbands his vocal resources
skillfully, hanging them on simple but
catchy melodies and allowing his
producer Walt Wilkins to flesh out the
songs with tasteful chamber-pop
arrangements.
In the opening song, “Juarez," a Texas
frat boy in “a blue suede cowboy hat”
sits in a Mexican whorehouse; the
woman in his lap with “eyes painted like
clay except colder” bitches about getting
old as the frat boy sings Van Zandt’s
“Waiting Around To Die." “Slots”
conjures up a woman in a Reno casino,
a roll of quarters in one hand and a gin
and tonic in the other, singing the gospel
hymns of her long-gone youth as she
drops one coin after another into the
slot. “Odessa” describes a West Texas
kid who inherited his daddy’s oil fortune
but not his daddy’s sense of purpose;
now he sits alone on his daddy’s porch,
thinking of “the girl who was penned in
the ‘Vette,… her face was blood and
diamonds; he remembers her that way."
Baker doesn’t make it easy on the
listener—there are no explanations and
no comforting reassurances. But the
songs do offer the startling recognition of
lives that are as messy and disappointing
as those in the real world—lives that
rarely make it through the simplifying
process of pop culture. What victories
there are—the beautiful woman
sunbathing in “Sweetly Undone” or the
home-made Christmas meal offered in
“Days”—are small victories but all the
more valuable for being within our grasp.
August 2007
Few songwriters can write verses
evocative enough that they need no
explaining in the chorus. Fewer still can
resist explaining things anyway for
listeners who aren’t willing to draw their
own conclusions. Townes Van Zandt
could resist that temptation, and so could
the later Joni Mitchell and the later John
Prine. And on his new album, “Pretty
World,” Sam Baker writes verses so
sharply observed—so taut with tension
between the life his characters want and
the life they actually have—that nothing
more need be said. The few times that
Baker does use a chorus, it's to add not
an explanation but yet another striking
image.
There’s no reason you should have
heard of Baker. This is the second album
the Austin artist has released on his own
label with almost no promotion, but
industry insiders such as Lucinda
Williams’ ex-producer Gurf Morlix and
Steve Earle’s former manager John
Lomax recognized his 2004 debut,
“Mercy," as one of the best singer-
songwriter discs of the decade, and
“Pretty World” is nearly as good. Like
his role models Prine and Van Zandt,
Baker doesn’t have much of a voice, but
he husbands his vocal resources
skillfully, hanging them on simple but
catchy melodies and allowing his
producer Walt Wilkins to flesh out the
songs with tasteful chamber-pop
arrangements.
In the opening song, “Juarez," a Texas
frat boy in “a blue suede cowboy hat”
sits in a Mexican whorehouse; the
woman in his lap with “eyes painted like
clay except colder” bitches about getting
old as the frat boy sings Van Zandt’s
“Waiting Around To Die." “Slots”
conjures up a woman in a Reno casino,
a roll of quarters in one hand and a gin
and tonic in the other, singing the gospel
hymns of her long-gone youth as she
drops one coin after another into the
slot. “Odessa” describes a West Texas
kid who inherited his daddy’s oil fortune
but not his daddy’s sense of purpose;
now he sits alone on his daddy’s porch,
thinking of “the girl who was penned in
the ‘Vette,… her face was blood and
diamonds; he remembers her that way."
Baker doesn’t make it easy on the
listener—there are no explanations and
no comforting reassurances. But the
songs do offer the startling recognition of
lives that are as messy and disappointing
as those in the real world—lives that
rarely make it through the simplifying
process of pop culture. What victories
there are—the beautiful woman
sunbathing in “Sweetly Undone” or the
home-made Christmas meal offered in
“Days”—are small victories but all the
more valuable for being within our grasp.
Senior Contribution Editor
Paste Magazine
Published online November 27, 2007
Paste Magazine
Published online November 27, 2007
| It bothers me that Sam Baker’s Pretty World is my favorite album of the year. Not because it’ s anything less than an amazing record. No, what bothers me is that Baker’s music has been heard by so few that it’s hard to have a conversation about it. Of course, it’s not your fault that you haven’t heard this selfreleased, poorly distributed gem any more than it’s my fault that I haven’t heard the obscure disc that’s your favorite album of the year. This is the inevitable result of the music business’s ongoing decentralization. More and more of us are obsessed with our own private discoveries, and fewer and fewer of us connect with the shared experience that puts the “pop” in pop music. Much has been gained by the withering of music monopolies and the democratization of recording, but something has been lost, too. On one hand, the collapse of the old paradigm—where a few record companies determined what got recorded and what got heard—means that it’s easier for a Texas construction worker to make his own record and for me to stumble across it along some forgotten byway of the Internet. It’s easier for you to discover a Cleveland skatepunk band on MySpace or a bootleg burn of a new rapper from Baltimore. On the other hand, there was a distinct pleasure in sharing the same music—whether it was Elvis Presley, The Beatles, Prince or Nirvana—at the same time with millions of other people. That’s a pleasure that DIY recording, long-tail marketing and cyber-word-of-mouth hasn’t been able to replicate. Baby-boomers like to claim that pop music was better in the ’60s than it was before or since. After 40 years of reviewing records for a living, I would argue that there is more or less the same amount of great music in any given year. The only thing different about the ’60s was that more of that great music was prominent on radio, television and the charts. What has changed, in other words, is not the quantity of terrific music but rather its visibility. And today, as a panicky music industry tries to defend the fortress crumbling around it by making ever more conservative choices, the most interesting music is often (though not always) pushed to the margins while the least interesting is set under the spotlight. Sure, it’s good news that the margins have grown so broad and fertile, but we also need a strong center we can share. Somewhere out there in some dorm room or suburban bungalow or cramped apartment is the person who’s going to figure out how to rebuild that center in this decentralized environment. And that person is going to change the course of pop music forever. |
