#sam amidon

[dustedmagazine]

Ye Vagabonds — All Tied Together (River Lea)

Photo by Rich Gilligan

“You put words to the song/I’ll keep singing after you’re gone” is a phrase that acknowledges the ephemeral fragility of life and art, while also tracing a continuing thread that links generation after generation of creativity. Songwriters may pass, musicians may lay down their instruments, but the force of human connection through music flows onward, disheveled and lovely through the years and decades and centuries.  

A band of Irish brothers threads the needle between spare, contemporary songwriting and reeling traditional stomps. The two, Diarmuid and Brían Mac Gloinn, alternate ruminative confessionals and Celtic barn-raisers, their songs etched with melancholy but also lit up from inside with the joy of communal music making. They’re grounded in the past, but facing the current moment; there are eerie threads of electronic sound tucked into the nicotine-stained warmth of the old songs.

“Sitric Road,” for instance, is pared to essentials, just a laconic strum of guitar and a soft burnished voice. It moves easily, casually, without an ounce of strain, a little vibrato in the hearty vocal mid-range, a fluttering sensitivity in the higher registers. The title refers to a neighborhood of Dublin found north of the Liffey, one which still has Nordic street names dating back to the Vikings’ occupation and traditional venues that have hardly changed since electricity. It’s gentrifying now, like most of Dublin, pushing out the bohemian element, and the song recounts the precariousness and joy of a life in art. “You had it all but never learned to fall/Living hand to mouth and still the richest of them all,” sings one or the other Mac Gloinn.

The other single, “The Flood,” is beefier, fleshed out with fiddle and guitars and drums beating out a reeling dance-like rhythm. “Ay-ay-ay, watch the water rise,” sings the whole crew. It’s a buoyant chorus that celebrates music and friendship amid catastrophe, people dancing barefoot on concrete floors as the water pours in. “There was a time we kept each other floating/all tied together and bobbing up and down/not for a time we could hold back the flood, but the old river rolls and swallowed our tale,” sings, again, an unspecified Mac Gloinn (no credits).

All Tied Together is a very Irish record in its morose lilt, its stunted but colorful characters, its way of whirling joy and despair together without losing either’s distinct character. The band captures a richness of sound from collaborators including Shazad Ismaily, Sam Amidon and a roster of Irish players, yet the songs remain fragile and evanescent. It echoes traditional sounds without being bound them and is natural and lifelike as breathing. Well done.

Jennifer Kelly

[good--merits-accumulated]

writing poetry today! this happens not so often these days so I'm glad it happened on a Sunday morning when I don't have to be anywhere. I was listening to Prodigal Son (the Sam Amidon version) and was struck by it lyrically... particularly the "I believe I'll go back home", the repetition and simplicity of it. I liked that and couldn't help but map it onto my own experience even though it isn't that of the prodigal son exactly, and so I ended up somehow with this Prodigal Son parody sitting typed out in front of me. I don't believe I can ever go back home, or if I do it won't be home anymore. this is not always a bad thing - but it's interesting. and worth exploring in writing as most things are!

[hopemushrooms]

This is so so good! Brass covers of Sacred Harp songs! And Sam Amidon!

[mon-nid]

[quinnnnnns-world]

‘ask the elephant..’

I’M SAT

[musicollage]

Sam Amidon — Salt River. 2025 : River Lea.

— 

Sam Amidon has spent most of his career carefully deconstructing and reimagining (mostly) traditional folk songs. He always keeps one foot rooted to the folk scene of the 1970s, which his parents were a part of, while the other foot dances coyly with experimental, jazz fusion, and indie rock collaborators. An adept player on banjo, guitar, and fiddle, and with a plaintive, entrancing voice, Amidon carries himself with a purposeful vision of folk music as both a living tradition and something more progressively on the outer edges of musical expression than is typically understood. The resulting music is always good, and quite often revelatory.

As is his wont, on his latest album, Salt River, Amidon charted the course of the record alongside a few sympathetic and deeply adventurous collaborators that can test the possibilities and capacities of the source material. In this case, that’s percussionist Philippe Melanson and saxophonist/multi-instrumentalist Sam Gendel, the latter of whom is also credited as the album’s producer.

Gendel, who has collaborated numerous times with Amidon over the years, is a more than welcome foil here, thanks to his iconoclastic approach to jazz music. His musical impact on Salt River is both prominent and slippery, often utilizing his synthesizer as much as traditional winds or strings, but his irascible sensibilities often define the proceedings.

While several of the album’s songs are relatively straightforward—the graceful guitar picking on the opening “Oldenfjord,” the pastoral swirl of “Three Five” (a take on the traditional “Old Churchyard”)—many are decidedly more mischievous. Over the course of the album’s middle section, the trio gives Lou Reed’s “Big Sky” an art-rock deconstruction, and the fiddle tune “Tavern” gets played over a drum and synth loop and quickly spirals into psychedelia. Even more traditional numbers, like the story-song ballad "Golden Willow Tree" and the shape-singing standard "I'm On My Journey Home," get woozy and made strange by Melanson and Gendel's subversive contributions.

For all of the esoteric impulses on display, the key to the record is likely the trio’s rambling take on Ornette Coleman’s “Friends and Neighbors.” It’s originally a simple vocal chant attached to the free jazz giant’s typically avant-garde explorations. Amidon and company’s version captures the friendly and freewheeling vibe of the sessions, where adept, mutable players are trading songs both old and new, strange and familiar. They are less concerned with what’s folk or jazz, electronic or acoustic, than what they can offer to the song, and to each other in the process.

And maybe, Amidon seems to be offering, that’s what folk music is all about in the first place. — Kyle Petersen 

— 

Sam Amidon’s Salt River is a deep, highly individualistic title, released on River Lea Records, the music-releasing folk wing of the Rough Trade camp, which continues their digging into the more esoteric and groundbreaking corners of the modern scene with real purpose. To that end, Sam Amidon feels like a perfect fit for their vision, what with his keen ear for a long untapped tune and questing spirit infecting him with an obsessive drive to find a place for this musical buried treasure in the modern landscape. It has been said that he tries to recontextualise folk music in order to understand what it means to sing folk music today. If that is true, then Salt River is the most fully realised solo release of his career, for moulded into these grooves are raw acoustic textures married to avant-garde found-sound and electronics, alongside a deliciously eclectic range of material that takes in both folk tunes connected to shape note singing in the 1700s and material by some of the twentieth centuries most visionary (and legendary) artisans. At the centre of it all is Sam, his acoustic guitar and that ravenous head hungry for audio stimulation and awash with songs and tunes long embedded in his mind decades ago.

The Salt River project was brought to life when Sam pulled in two close musical associates to work as a trio. He has been a huge admirer of saxophonist and producer Sam Gendel thanks to his endeavours in the field of electronic music, and percussionist Philippe Melanson joined the sessions at Gendel’s home in Los Angeles. The three worked up material with minimal forward planning, preferring instead to jam around the laptop and work the music up from whatever spark of inspiration should happen to enter the room on the day. The first song that they actually played together as a trio was the lead single, I’m On My Journey Home. It is a genuinely mesmerising track, a modernist re-working of a song first noted in the 1700s which came to Sam’s attention via a field recording of early 20th century vocal group The Denson Quartet. Sam describes the track as having a “loose swing that I had not heard in other shape note singing recordings,” something which is authentically captured in the acapella closing moments of the track. Before that, however, it is a shimmering heavy roller of a song, all drone-like smoky mysticism that I would favourably compare to the sound of Lankum.

The magic in this album is subtle and, like many great records over the years, has a habit of revealing more and more hidden layers of sonic wonder and beauty with each listen. At times, Sam’s love of Jazz music comes through, and this is a spirit that prevails throughout; you can feel the loose, adventurous nature of the players. and even more remarkable, considering the extensive use of electronic sound and modernist drum pad and laptop-type tools in use, the whole piece feels like a live in the studio recording, which by and large it was. That aforementioned love of Jazz can be heard, for example, with the weaving, urgent saxophone patterns that play out on Tavern, a tune that is based around the traditional American fiddle tune Salt River. Three Five is also a piece worked up from the skeleton of the traditional hymn Old Churchyard, but this time, the conveyor belt guitar figure is elevated by an oncoming storm of synthesiser washes and careful, dramatic percussion splashes.

Arguably, the headline-grabbing pieces are the ones that casual observers may assume to have very little to do with folk. Yoko Ono’s Ask the Elephant is a classically childlike piece with a deeper message challenging us to look outside the boxes we build ourselves into and embrace the world with innocence and wonder. Friends And Neighbours is an Ornette Coleman piece, a groundbreaking outsider Jazz giant from the classic Bop era whose influence on Amidon can be heard in waves throughout the album, but this one was actually a song Coleman wrote. It was the title track of a live album recorded in Ornette’s Prince Street loft space in 1970, and that ’rambunctious party mood’ is also captured here. Then it plays out with some notes-between-the-notes riffing far more recognisably Ornette. Then there is Lou Reed’s Big Sky, once a fist-pumping rocker that closed out Reed’s Ecstasy album but brilliantly re-imagined here by Sam as a simple, slightly forlorn folk ballad. In fact, so thoroughly does he deconstruct it that it almost feels like an entirely different song. But right there in a flash is the essence of Sam Amidon. Always alive to the possibilities within music, looking for ways to cook up an exciting new flavour, searching for connections where no obvious pathways can be seen. Salt River is deep, but it will not give you the full kaleidoscopic experience if you only dip your toes in the water; this one demands a deep dive followed by a long lingering emersion and, best of all, when you climb out, you may just find yourself hungry to explore different music of varying shapes and colours. With a range like this, Sam Amidon can open so many doors. Eclectic is an easily applied word, but here we have an artist releasing a groundbreaking, spirited and adventurous album that is genuinely worthy of the description. — Danny Neill  

— 

Sam Amidon is a busy man: when he’s not covering Bon Iver’s “Sable” EP in full at its London launch at Justin Vernon’s own request, he’s off coaching award season heavyweight actors Josh O’Connor and Paul Mescal on how to sing for their forthcoming film, or he’s collaborating with choreographer Michael Keegan Dolan on his new stage work “Nobodaddy”. So, it would be reasonable to think that he’s decided to put out “Salt River”, a collection of covers and reimagined traditional folk songs, partly for the ease of the thing, but for the Vermont-born, London based, singer-songwriter, this is far more than a simple covers album. With “Salt River”, Amidon teamed with saxophonist and producer Sam Gendel to finally realise part of a decades-long quest to reframe just what it means to sing folk songs and make folk music.

As openings go, Amidon’s take on the instrumental ‘Oldenfjord’, originally by Grey Larsen, is nothing flashy, but it’s quietly captivating and shows how Amidon is unashamed about embracing a traditional folk sound, and he embraces it just as enthusiastically on the traditional hymn ‘Three Five’ before switching gears with a Lou Reed cover. “Big sky, holding up the stars / Big sky, holding Venus and Mars / Big sky, catch you in a jar / But it can’t hold us down anymore,” Amidon sings gently against the dull melody of a synthesizer on his take on Reed’s ‘Big Sky’; even with the synth, it’s clearly roots music in nature, a departure from the bombastic, punk spirit of the original, but it adds a layer of mysticism, making the song feel less blindly hopeful and more questioning for the future.

The aforementioned synthesizer pops up again on ‘Tavern’, an instrumental piece composed by Amidon and Gendel that incorporates the album’s namesake traditional American fiddle tune, but this time the synth gives a more expected 80s sound before it’s mixed smoothly with violin and then transitions into something resembling off-beat jazz when a saxophone is added in. ‘Golden Willow Tree’ is a sprawling traditional seven and half minute tale of maritime strife as a captain, having trouble with his ship, turns to a cabin boy for help, only to betray him and refuse to save him once the boy has done what was asked of him. ‘On My Journey Home’ finds Amidon looking towards the Promised Land as he echoes the traditional “I’m bound for Canaan’s land to see” against a rearrangement of the original 1859 composition.

The two-minute ‘Ask the Elephant’, a reimagining of a Yoko Ono song, feels like an interlude to rest and recharge, giving us time to take stock and as Amidon goes spoken word and gives us philosophical questions and answers like, “Ask the elephant, why are you so big? / You’re small. I just look big to you.” A take on Ornette Coleman’s ‘Friends and Neighbours’ has a sweet, naive hopefulness about it that’s only enhanced by the lo-fi production style.“This album is a campfire, but the campfire is around Sam Gendel’s synthesizer,” said Amidon about the making of “Salt River”, a sentence that sums up neatly how he managed to take things that were mostly born long before he was and turn them into something of his own without losing any of their warmth or meaning. Folk music has resonated strongly in hearts and minds for centuries, and if “Salt River” is anything to go by, with Amidon’s continued help the future looks bright for it to keep on doing so for many more. — Helen Jones

[gabrielkahane]

A Brief History of Magnificent Bird

In the aftermath of a year off the internet, I’ve become low-key obsessed with Lewis Hyde’s book The Gift, in which he argues that the movement of a gift—or a work of art—from one individual to another helps to define the community in which the gift or artwork circulates.

Today, my fifth album, Magnificent Bird, is released into the world, and it is, for me, most fundamentally, an expression of my community. There are no hired guns: only musicians whom I cherish as much for their humanity and friendship as I do for their artistry. So I thought it would be appropriate to mark the unveiling of this project with a little history & chronology of a dozen-and-a-half musical relationships that have made this record possible.

1989 - At our respective homes in Rochester, New York, Ted Poor and I play boogie-woogie duets: me on piano, Ted on drums. We’re also on the same Little League team; he often plays first-base, I’m over at shortstop for a quick 6-3 on a ground ball to the left side of the infield. Twenty-five years later, he plays drums in The Ambassador, my first piece for the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Ted was so incredibly generous on this project, recording 3,287 versions of “Hot Pink Raingear” before we arrived at the approach heard on the album. His sense of rhythm lights a room, and he is my oldest friend — not just on this LP, but in life.

2006 - The Nickel Creek bus drops Chris Thile (as well as Sean and Sara Watkins) at my parents’ house in Santa Rosa, California. We start playing music at around 1am. Fifteen years, hundreds of cups of coffee, and dozens of alcohol-fueled arguments about the “correct” approach to rhythm in the music of J.S. Bach later, Chris is one of my closest friends, and also a hero. We all know what a monster, once-in-a-generation talent he is. What is maybe less apparent is the insane work ethic that undergirds his seemingly effortless command of his instrument, an ethic I got to witness up close while opening some 60 shows for Punch Brothers. The only person whose approach to rhythm is as continually mind-boggling as Ted Poor’s is Chris’, hence the mando-drums on “To Be American.”

2007 - I meet Alex Sopp through her new music ensemble, yMusic. I will forever be spoiled by the fact that she’s the first flutist I work with: her tone singing, her sense of phrase totally intuitive and poetic. Over the course of fifteen years, we share with each other many, many, many photographs of our cats. Her collaborative spirit was evident in her work on this album: for “Hot Pink Raingear,” I asked if she could play a synth riff on some “messed up whistles and flutes,” and she sent back, thirty-six hours later, fourteen different tracks of various antique wind instruments. I wish I had kept all of it for you to hear, but sometimes less is more.

2008 (part one) - I hear Elizabeth Ziman sing at a tiny cafe in Park Slope, Brooklyn. I am instantly in love with her voice and songwriting. I would happily listen to her sing tax returns or technical manuals or the transcripts of municipal water supply hearings; she is magic. Somehow, after an almost fifteen year friendship, this is the first time we’ve worked together on record; her singing on “Sit Shiva” is, for me, what makes the song.

2008 (part two) - Outside a rural elementary school in Switzerland, I am approached by a young man, who, seeing my banjo case, announces that he “plays folk music, too.” It’s Paul Kowert, who that autumn would join Punch Brothers as its bassist. Years later, we travel around the country while I’m opening for his band, playing chess over coffee, getting lost on long walks in unfamiliar cities, talking endlessly about music. He is a one of the most supremely gifted bass players of our time.

2009 - Holcombe Waller and I are set up on a West Coast co-bill tour by a friend who warns me that Holcombe is extremely flamboyant. I write to Holcombe, and in a postscript, mention—sort of in jest, sort of not—that I’m 18% gay. He writes back, “I’ve worked with less.” A friendship is born. Need help understanding obscure financial instruments or fledgling cryptocurrencies? Ask Holcombe. Need a quick tutorial on the history of energy policy in the Northwest? Ask Holcombe. Need the most sublime falsetto (but also booming bass-baritone) you’ve ever heard? Ask Holcombe. Happily, we now live less than a mile from one another in Northeast Portland. Holcombe, can I borrow some sugar??

2010 (part one) - I’m playing a gig in upstate New York accompanied by a string quartet. At soundcheck, one of the violinists mentions that she “writes a little music, too.” Next thing I know, that kind and quiet musician—Caroline Shaw—has won the Pulitzer Prize. Over the years, we email with eccentric frequency about Lunchables (can’t remember how that one started), and have occasionally appeared together in concert. What I admire most about Caroline is the absolute honesty of her music. Many of us work for years building up artifice, then tearing it down. Not Caro: she knows, and seems always to have known, who she is. When I first heard her overdubs for the record, I cried.

2010 (part two) - Casey Foubert and I have known each other for a few years when he begins to mix my second album, Where are the Arms. Working on that record reveals to me the uncanny depth of Casey’s musical knowledge, spanning, as it does, obscure 60’s piano-driven folk-pop to free jazz. One of the most versatile and multivalent artists I’ve ever encountered, Casey is the only musician who has played on all of my records (with the exception of Book of Travelers, which is just me). He’s also a profoundly curious person, and a super generous spirit. He now lives with his family in rural Illinois, and I love that there’s a bit of that energy on this album.

2011 - It’s a dark and dreary evening in Peterborough, NH, when I find myself sitting at the piano in a little cabin, singing standards with a young woman named Amelia Meath. We keep in touch here and there, and then a few years later, I hear a band called Sylvan Esso and think, that voice sounds familiar! Over the last few years, Amelia and I have had long, deep phone calls about everything from literature to TikTok to systemic racism to the music biz. She encouraged me, while we were working on “Linda & Stuart,” to embrace the cognitive dissonance between the cheerful groove and the sense of grief that pervades the lyric.

2014 (part one) - Driving from the Denver Airport, Chris Morrissey tells me that he does a great BBC newscaster impression. I immediately try to one-up him. (Mine is better.) Every year on his birthday, to commemorate my small victory of superior British dialect, I leave Chris a three-minute voicemail in a preposterous BBC voice. Chris is a complete musician, and a complete human. One of the things that drew me to him when we first met was how emotionally available he was. So glad he’s on this joint.

2014 (part two) - A recording studio in New Jersey. yMusic has a new cellist on the session. We get through one take of my arrangement of Beck’s “Mutilation Rag,” for the Song Reader album, and Gabriel Cabezas, maybe 22 years old, says, without a trace of attitude or ostentation, “oh, this is a twelve-tone row, right?” What a punk! One memorable night years later ends drunkenly at my house, where we cook both carbonara and cacio e pepe after a long conversation about how the best pasta sauces are emulsified using the cooking water.

2014 (part three) - I’m not sure that the classroom at the fancy private school in Laguna Beach, California, was where I first met Joseph Lorge, but it sticks out in my memory for some reason. He’s there with a friend of his, a songwriter, who performs two beautiful songs as part of a master class that I was giving. By 2017, Joseph has become indispensable to my process as a studio artist. He records and mixes Book of Travelers, and acts as mix engineer and house psychologist during this project. He is tall and shy, quietly hilarious, with a heart of gold. His ears and imagination are astonishing; without him, this record would not exist.

2015 - In the lobby of the newly opened Ordway Theatre in St. Paul, Minnesota, I am accosted by a blonde man with a cheerful face and intense eyes. “I have a question to ask you,” he says, betraying the slightest hint of a Northern European accent. “On your song ‘Charming Disease,’ from your album Where are the Arms, is it three clarinets or one claviola that appear suddenly in the second verse?” This was Pekka Kuusisto, a true magician of the violin, and one of my dearest friends. I have fond memories from 2019 (“the before times”) of walking down to the water—his house in Finland sits against the Baltic Sea—in nothing but towels, freezing our asses off before retreating to the warmth of his wood sauna, which I guess is what Finns do in February? When his violin enters halfway through the tune, I feel the chill of that numinous, Scandinavian wind insinuate itself into the harmonic field.

2016 (part one) - St. Paul, again! Sam Amidon and I have known each other for a decade by this point, but it’s over burritos at Chipotle that we bond for real, talking about our shared love of Herman Melville and obscure jazz records. If I’m reading a great book, Sam is often the first person I want to tell. In a world brimming with highly individualized voices, Sam’s artistry—from his singing voice to his banjo and fiddle playing—stands out for its idiosyncrasies and emotional depth.

2016 (part two) - On a tour bus somewhere in Montana, Andrew Bird and I get to talking about how folk and orchestral music can coexist. A few years later, we work closely on Time Is A Crooked Bow, a cycle I orchestrated comprising six of his songs. Getting to hear him sing every night was a real master class. Andrew has magnetic rock star energy, but he is also a kind, gentle, quiet and deeply thoughtful soul. And no one plucks the violin quite the way he does. When I wrote the riff he plays on “To Be American,” I knew it had to be him.

2017 - From time to time, I head uptown to hear the NY Philharmonic. One evening, I’m hypnotized by a sound—serene, expressive, otherworldly— emanating from from the principal clarinet chair. Eventually I muster the nerve to write to Anthony McGill and tell him what I huge fan I am. It’s thrilling when he tells me that he knows my music and would love to do something together. And now, at last, we have.

2019 - Nathalie Joachim sends me mixes of her album Fanm D’ayiti. It is so damn gorgeous. We’ve been casual acquaintances for five years at this point, but now I am *a fan*. Over the course of the pandemic, we talk more frequently, counseling each other about the various challenges of being an artist in these confounding times. She joins the Creative Alliance with the Oregon Symphony, where I serve as Creative Chair. This June, the Oregon Symphony will present the world premiere of an orchestral song cycle drawn from Nathalie’s album that made such an impression. The combination of Nathalie & Alex on the title track, along with Holcombe’s vocal feature, has me feeling that my cup truly runneth over.

Appendix A:

Tony Berg is a joyous contrarian whom I’ve known for a dozen years, during which time he has shown me only generosity of spirit, resources, and wisdom. He co-produced Book of Travelers (which we recorded at his old home studio in LA), and was an indispensable early sounding board for the songs on this album. And now he’s got a dog named Bing-Bong. How about that?

Having said all that, may I remind you that tour begins on Monday?

The workings of the music business are murkier than ever, but the bottom line is that even an art-house oasis like Nonesuch can’t afford to keep putting out interesting music if no one is paying for it. I’m so grateful to all of you for your continued support, and hope you’ll consider picking up a copy of the record in one format or another if you’ve not yet done so.

All my best, and hope to see you at a gig in the next few months,

Gabriel

[nonesuchrecords]

Chris Thile was on BBC Radio 4's Front Row to perform some Bach and music from his 2021 solo album, Laysongs, and to talk with presenter Luke Jones about the album and more. You can hear the episode here.

Thile kicks off a tour of the UK and Ireland with Sam Amidon in Bristol tonight, followed by shows in Coventry, London, Manchester, Glasgow, and Dublin. Details/tickets here.