Sam Baker

PRETTY WORLD

As Sam Baker follows the lonely howl of the lap steel that opens this record, drawl-singing in
odd intonations, “He wears a blue suede cowboy hat, Got a Juarez woman stretched out on his
lap,
He sings an old song, A song to himself, He sings waiting round to die,” ears of fans of John
Prine and Townes Van Zandt will immediately prick up. The latter, of course, wrote the song
that the character is singing, whilst the singer himself, Baker, sounds unnervingly like Prine at
times. Far from derivative, though, this second album from Baker is utterly invigorating in both
its originality and its poetic authority. Both those traits become all the more affecting once you
learn how hard-won they are. Twenty years ago, a train that Baker was travelling through Peru
in was blown up by terrorists. A boy right beside Baker was killed – Baker himself suffered
serious injury including a crushed hand and brain damage that left him unable to retrieve words
from his memory. Sure, teaching himself to play guitar again – left handed – must have been
difficult. But can you imagine teaching yourself to speak and write again, because you’ve lost
your life-time learned vocabulary?
Perversely, such afflictions have shaped Baker’s extraordinary originality, his drawl
unconventionally measured, his words chosen meticulously, and his stories potent with
experience and a hard-earned love of life. When Baker explores the memory of the accident, and
particularly the boy’s death, on ‘Broken Fingers’, his voice stumbling as if in his own pain, you
can’t help but be shaken: “Forget his eyes, His silhouette, Of course I don’t, Of course I don’t
forget. There are blue eyes, A silhouette, There is a debt, A debt I don’t forget.” Baker has the
courage to place his damaged vocals proudly out front of the arrangements on Pretty World, and
the nous to contrast them with exquisitely gentle country instrumentation – pedal steel,
harmonica and strings – which carries the lion’s share of the melody. With the evocative
instrumental arrangements strong enough to score a film on their own, and Baker’s raw but
elegant imagery filling your noggin, Pretty World is filmic in its narrative.
After you’ve immersed yourself in these compelling sounds and vignettes, most of them tragic,
Baker blinds you with his fundamentally eloquent appreciation for life in ‘Days’, painting a
picture of domestic Christmas bliss in Spanish language over simple, pure guitar notes,
concluding, “These days, How beautiful…” before sighing to a close like a perfect sunset,
revisiting the album’s title-track and message over shimmering pedal steel.
At over fifty years old, fuelled by determination, application, and grace, Sam Baker has delivered
two of the most vital singer-songwriter records of the decade. Do not pass him by.

Buck 2007