By Paul T. Mueller
Sam Baker
For a songwriter whose material tends toward the melancholy, Sam Baker gave quite an uplifting performance in Houston on March 19. The show was the second installment in this year’s “Songs of Lovin’ and Redemption” Lenten music series at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church.
According to the church’s description of the series, which debuted last year, “These artists write and perform songs that relate to their inner journey and we want to share art that has been inspired by encounters with redemption with the community.”
Baker’s story certainly qualifies. As a passenger on a train in Peru in 1986, he was badly wounded when a terrorist bomb exploded in the luggage rack above his seat. During the course of a lengthy recovery and rehabilitation, he began writing poetry as therapy, eventually teaching himself to play guitar and setting his words to music. He’s released four CDs over the course of the past decade.
Baker was accompanied at St. Mark’s by a couple of excellent sidemen – Chip Dolan, also from Austin, on keyboards and accordion, and Nashville-based Tim Lorsch, on violin, cello and mandolin (Lorsch also co-produced Baker’s first three albums). Their skilled and sensitive playing, together with Baker’s intense, almost-monotone delivery and his barely-there guitar, worked beautifully with the fine acoustics of the church’s sanctuary. The result was an atmosphere that bordered on reverent, but also included generous doses of humor from Baker and his collaborators, and plenty of enthusiastic response from the audience of 150 or so.
Two-thirds of the show’s 12 songs came from Baker’s acclaimed fourth album, Say Grace, released last year. Baker’s lyrics are not overtly religious, but many of his songs have an undertone of spirituality that was perfectly suited to a church. Some highlights from the set:
- “Say Grace,” a vivid description of a woman haunted all her life by the pain of her childhood, in which Baker uses small, sharp details to paint a portrait of a desolate existence.
- “Ditch,” in which Baker draws on his background in the construction industry to build a sketch of a man who’s thankful for his life, despite the fact that he literally works in ditches to support a family that includes “a crazy-ass wife” who “thinks she and Taylor Swift were twins at birth.”
- “Isn’t Love Great,” a sweet song about a married couple who happily overlook what the rest of the world might see as flaws: “there is a beautiful woman/she walks with a limp/he calls her his princess/calls her his gimp.”
- “Migrants,” a quietly angry account of the deaths of 14 illegal immigrants trying to cross an unforgiving desert, and how those deaths were reported: “they got twelve lines/in a midwestern paper/on the pages with the ads for shoes/they were migrants/they got twelve lines of news.”
In addition to the newer material (and a good many funny asides, acoustical demonstrations and other diversions) Baker found time to play a few older songs. “Waves,” a bittersweet story about the end of a long marriage, from Baker’s 2004 debut, Mercy, began with what he called a “cinematic intro” by Dolan and Lorsch, on keyboard and violin respectively. It made for an excellent prelude to the beautiful but heartbreaking song.
In “Baseball,” preceded by a similar introduction, Baker interspersed images of everyday life near home – “Another baseball field another pop fly/Another bunch of boys another blue sky/Boys laugh/Boys play” with a simple but telling observation about less innocent things happening elsewhere: “There are soldiers in the way of harm.”
Baker finished the concert with the closing track of Say Grace, the entirely appropriate “Go In Peace.” “Go in peace/go in kindness/go in love/go in faith,” he sang, and what better way to send an appreciative audience home on a beautiful spring night?
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