Sam Baker - pretty world
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Music CD Cover
Artist: Sam BakerEdition: Music CD
CD Release Date: 2007-08-14
Music Label: BlueLimeStone Records
Soundtracks:
- Juarez
- Orphan
- Slots
- Pretty World
- Odessa
- Sweetly Undone
- Psychic
- Boxes
- Prelude
- Broken Fingers
- Days
- Recessional
Free Music Notes for pretty world
Free Music Review: Superb
Hit: 5 Stars
Baker was riding a train to Machu Picchu in Peru in 1986 when a backpack bomb hidden in the compartment over his head exploded. Seven people died. Baker almost made it eight. The blast destroyed part of his left shoulder, severed the femoral artery in his left leg, punctured his eardrums, and mangled his left (fretting) hand. It took him years to recover. As he did, Baker, who had worked as a boatman and a carpenter, turned to poetry. Eventually, he began playing live, strumming guitar lefthanded.
He's not much of a vocalist, but he's an expressive singer, using emphasis and timing to make the most of a craggy croak that immediately brings to mind John Prine.
Like Prine, Van Zandt and Lucinda Williams, he's a superb storyteller with an economical and effective style. So effective that he doesn't need choruses on all the songs on "Pretty World," his second disc, to draw you into the rhythm. On a couple of cuts, he uses standards -- Stephen Foster's "Hard Times Come Again No More" and "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" -- as preludes and his words match up to the classics.
"Hard Times" opens "Odessa," the tale of a boy who killed a girl rolling his Corvette. He inherits daddy's oil money, never learned to work and never forgot the girl. "He's an old man now; Lives on his dead daddy's place. Never took a wife; he is going to die without a trace. See he loved the girl who was penned in the Vette; Talks to her everyday. Her face was blood and diamonds; he remembers her that way."
The sound is spare with just enough framing from a backing band fronted by Walt Wilkins and augmented by guests including Lloyd Maines (Natalie's dad), Gurf Morlix and Fats Kaplin. Marcia Ramirez offers counterpoint vocals on several cuts.
While songs like the opening "Juarez (A Song to Himself)," "Orphan" and "Slots" are gritty tales about down and outers, there's also a sweetness to Baker. The title cut reflects on the opening of a day, before the sun, before the heat and "before dreams are lost like midnight pearls." "Sweetly Undone" is achingly beautiful. "I watch you at the pool, slowly undress. Spread your towel on St. Agustine, lay down and rest, lay down and rest. Lay down with your top, sweetly undone."
Baker's phrasing in that song is perfect, affecting, brilliant. But then this is a brilliant disc, the best singer/songwriter offering of the year. Baker writes about our fleeting lives in a way rarely heard in popular music with a gift for metaphor and phrasing that resonates long after the final chord.
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