Another singer-songwriter that's appeared on my radar screen in the last year or so is Sam Baker - I read about him on the Todd Snider list (Todd fans also post about OKOM - Our Kind of Music), googled Sam's name, listened to a few song samples, read some reviews and was instantly hooked.
Upon further reading, I discovered his fascinating tale (I'm a sucker for stories too) - you can read the full scoop on Sam's website, as well as listen to a radio interview, featuring a few of his songs...
Feb. 9, 2006, 4:30PM
Surviving tragedy makes Sam Baker's songs resonate
By EILEEN MCCLELLAND
Copyright 2006 Houston Chronicle
Austin songwriter Sam Baker grew up in small-town Texas, a place filled with the kinds of stories that live and breathe in his elegantly spare lyrics: A rebellious daughter going home, skinny boys headed to war, a tumultuous marriage suddenly healed.
But in Peru in 1986, on a train to Machu Picchu, Baker lived through a terrifying moment that changed his own story. He was 32, a carpenter, world traveler and Big Bend rafting guide who was touring South America. His seatmates were three other tourists — a German couple and their son — all sitting in tight quarters, their knees nearly touching. Shining Path guerrillas had stowed a bomb in a luggage rack across from him. When a red backpack exploded directly above the woman, the family was killed. In all, eight died, including two Americans, and 40 were wounded.
Baker doesn't understand how he survived. His femoral artery and vein were both cut by shrapnel. "I should have bled out right there," he says. Baker wrote about it in the song Steel on his 2004 debut album, Mercy: "God have mercy / I believe my heart has failed / Smoke rises through a hole in the roof / The dead say fare thee well."
Hearing Baker perform his songs inspired John Wilson of Houston to launch a Web site store, yourtexasmusic.com, dedicated to promoting unsung Texas talent. Wilson, who is promoting Baker's Saturday show at Anderson Fair, says Steel particularly resonates with him when he listens between the lines. "The poetry of those songs is really stunning," Wilson says. "He could have turned out really bitter, but instead he turned it into art."
But before that could happen, Baker had to overcome the shock and injury that shook him to his soul. "For a long time, I had a core-level distrust of every moment," he says. "I think for a number of years ... every room I went into and every car I got into and out of, I subconsciously expected to blow up in a flash, and I would be in that other world. It was terrifying — and there were other parts of it that were remarkably calm."
After an eight-hour emergency surgery in Cuzo, Peru, he endured 17 reconstructive surgeries in Texas, most at Memorial Hermann Hospital in Houston. The slow crawl back to self-sufficiency started with figuring out how to feed himself. "I couldn't walk, my left hand was really chopped up, I was deaf on one side and partially deaf on the other," he says. "I couldn't live a physical life." He had played guitar right-handed before the attack, but the damage forced him to play left-handed. "You wind up doing whatever you have to do," he says.
Baker began writing short stories in an effort to make some sense out of the chaos in his mind. He also re-evaluated his songwriting. "My prior songwriting was pretty boilerplate: 'I love you, you love me, you don't love me.' After (the incident) those songs didn't make as much sense to me. I was a better observer of other people and how they lived their lives."
Baker grew up in Itasca, southwest of Dallas. His mother played hymns on the organ at the Presbyterian church, and his father played recordings of blues legends Lightnin' Hopkins, Brownie McGee and Sonny Terry. Other music he took in as a child included everything from the My Fair Lady soundtrack and Handel's Messiah to Johnny Cash classics.
"It all got kind of mixed up," he says. "I'll hear songs on the radio and be drawn not to the whole song but to a passage or a chord change or a shift in the emotional line of the song." Without doubt he's a songwriter, but he's not convinced he's a musician, despite Mercy's radio play in Europe and his touring schedule in the United States that has gradually begun to fill his calendar.
"I don't think you have to have really good hearing to make music," he says. "But I would never claim to really be a musician. I'm a writer, and the form I've taken is to combine words with melodies. I don't think anyone will ever confuse me with being a musician."
Baker's hearing deficiency can be tricky onstage. His voice, a gravelly twang, isn't always precise. Sometimes he has ringing in his ears. "But there are ways to overcome it doing the live stuff," he says. "I use a visual tuner on stage, and I try to play with a really good monitor, so the sound I get is undistorted. If it's a really quiet place, I can understand what I'm doing. I'm not sure if anyone else can."
Baker is accompanied on the album by singers Joy Lynn White and Jessi Colter, among others.
And Mercy continues to reverberate, its effects spreading slowly but surely like the ripples made by a penny dropped almost silently into a wishing well. In the past year, word-of-mouth buzz, online raves and sheer serendipity have led him to perform beyond his usual range of Austin-area roadhouses. He'll be playing at Gruene Hall on Feb. 23, South by Southwest in Austin in March and the Woody Guthrie Festival in Oklahoma in July.
Wilson says it's anyone's guess what happens next. "There are some songwriters that resonate with you and no one in the world cares, and there are some that resonate with you and everyone in the world cares. Whether he becomes a great performer or a great songwriter talent like Townes [Van Zandt] or Guy Clark, I don't know. That's up to the public to decide."
When Baker became truly dedicated to songwriting in 2000 he began to edit his work relentlessly, throwing out everything he could. It could be an excruciatingly slow process. "There's got to be enough of a frame to hold something, but it doesn't have to have a lot of extra stuff," he says.
Most of his lyrics start with someone who has crossed his path. From there though, almost anything can happen. "Sometimes I take a deep breath and let them go the way they need to go," he says. The material for a second album has been written. Now Baker is struggling to make it a cohesive narrative. "Story's a very important thing," Baker says. "I'm a sucker for stories."
SONG: November by Sam Baker
BOOK: In November by Cynthia Rylant (Author), Jill Kastner (Illustrator)
POEM: Praise Song by Barbara Crooker
the thin sunlight that goes deep in the bones.
Praise the crows chattering in the oak trees;
though they are clothed in night, they do not
despair. Praise what little there's left:
the small boats of milkweed pods, husks, hulls,
shells, the architecture of trees. Praise the meadow
of dried weeds: yarrow, goldenrod, chicory,
the remains of summer. Praise the blue sky
that hasn't cracked yet. Praise the sun slipping down
behind the beechnuts, praise the quilt of leaves
that covers the grass: Scarlet Oak, Sweet Gum,
Sugar Maple. Though darkness gathers, praise our crazy
fallen world; it's all we have, and it's never enough.
QUOTE: "No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees, no fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds - November!" ~ Thomas Hood
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