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