Songwriter Sam Baker's life changed while traveling through Peru by rail in 1986. The guerrilla group Shining Path placed a bomb in the luggage rack above his head, and when the bomb exploded, it killed seven people including the German family with whom Sam was sitting. Sam suffered multiple injuries including brain damage, major injuries to his left hand, and a cut artery. Since the explosion, he has undergone seventeen surgeries. Because his fretting hand was gnarled, he now plays guitar left-handed. He also suffers from tinnitus. Yet after all of this, after looking death pretty much dead in the eye, he is a smiling beacon of song. He stands there on stage beaming like a bodhisattva.
As far as his work goes, Sam Baker's songwriting is informed by life, literature, and the songs of his influences. In "A Song to Himself (Juarez)," the "song to himself" is Townes Van Zandt's "Waiting Around to Die." The song "Feast" contains the phrase "what rough beast," a line from William Butler Yeats' "The Second Coming." When I first heard the recurring line, I thought it a brilliant allusion, for it immediately sent my mind to the final words of the poem. "And what rough beast, its hour coming round at last,/Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born." My song "Byzantium," recorded in Europe with the band Nijak, riffs on the same poem, so it is clearly a poem that touches me deeply. What I like about Sam Baker's treatment of Yeats' line is how he seems to be urging the reader to finish the stanza.
A link to "Feast" as well as commentary can be found here: http://americansongwriter.com/2013/07/song-premiere-sam-baker-feast/
Sam Baker's song "Odessa" is about a rich boy whose life was easy "cause the dark crude flowed." After he killed a girl when he rolled his Corvette, Daddy's money saved him from going to prison. It would have been simple to dismiss the character as callous, superficial, and beyond redemption, yet Baker finishes the song by showing the price the rich young man paid. The song tells about how in the character's later years "He talks to her each day/Her face was blood and diamonds/He remembers her that way."
Sam Baker is a songwriter's songwriter. When I first heard him, he reminded me a lot of John Prine. However, after listening to more of his catalog, I could hear many more influences. There are, for example, elements of Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, and nineteenth century folk ballad. My wife Martina feels that Sam Baker has a kinship with Vic Chesnutt, and, considering the hardships that both men have endured, it became apparent to me that there are parallels.
We had the opportunity to see Sam Baker with Carrie Elkin at the Live Oak in Fort Worth on Friday. The crowd was small, and it seemed that Sam's family from Itasca made up a fair percentage of the audience. While listening to him play, I thought of the line from Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard": "Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,/And waste its sweetness on the desert air." It was a blessing to sit in that proverbial desert listening to Sam and Carrie play. And if another chance arises, I will be there again.
Here is a picture Martina took at the show:
Here is a link to Sam Baker's website:
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