Copyright 2007 Sam Baker. All rights reserved.
By Dan Forte
As Published in
Wood and Steel Magazine
Copyright 2007 All Rights Reserved
Sam Baker is sitting in a Mexican restaurant in Austin, Texas, deep in thought.
In profile, the weathered good looks, high cheekbones, gray-streaked, shoulder-
length hair, and most of all his deep-set, penetrating eyes bear a remarkable
resemblance to an Indian head nickel. But he’s not seated sideways for effect or
image; it’s so that he can hear.
In 1986, at age 32, Baker was traveling in Peru when, as he says, “I got in the
middle of somebody else’s war.” A terrorist bomb (the Sendero Luminoso or
“Shining Path” Maoist group) blew up the train he and some friends were riding
on. Several passengers died, including a German boy and his parents, who were
sitting next to Baker. Though he nearly bled to death, Sam survived but suffered
a constellation of injuries and aftereffects—shrapnel in his leg, renal failure, brain
damage, even gangrene.
“Right now, the loudest thing I hear is the ringing in my head,” he says of the
Tinnitus, which will never go away. The other obvious reminder of the blast is
his left hand, the fingers of which are permanently scrunched and twisted.
Fortunately, he has enough dexterity to grip a pick—after re-learning to play
guitar left-handed (fretting with the less-injured right hand)—so that he can sing
and play some of the most vivid, compelling, truly original songs of any artist
working today.
The brain damage he initially suffered affected mainly the part of the brain where
words are stored. Which is ironic, since it’s the stories and images he paints
with words that brought him acclaim—first with his 2004 debut, Mercy, and
now with its 2007 follow-up, Pretty World (both self released). Of forging a
career out of writing and singing his own songs, Baker beams, “To start this at
this age is a real interesting thing. I’m 53—a great age. It’s a fabulous age. Just
to be, as they say, ‘walking the face of the earth’ is a miracle—no matter what
age you are. I’ll take it every day.”
He describes his recovery as “a climb up a steep embankment”—including
numerous surgeries, learning how to walk and talk, and getting parts of his
memory back. “I could remember things in the past; I just couldn’t remember
words. I couldn’t remember the word for ‘chair’; I would have to say, ‘I need
that thing for sitting.’ I couldn’t focus [my attention]. For twenty-something
days, I couldn’t move, couldn’t get out of bed. My hands were blown up, so I
couldn’t do anything with my hands. I couldn’t use my legs. I couldn’t read,
couldn’t hear, and couldn’t think of words.”
He pauses and adds, “It was an interesting time. Very introspective. The only
thing that came in loud enough to really get through that haze or fog or internal
trauma I was dealing with was the raw suffering of others.”
As for words, still, “I have to find them; they don’t just come. I have to go out
and pick them. I’m more like a worker in an . . . orchard. I had to go find that
word ‘orchard.’ Words certainly don’t fly out of the sky and land on my table.”
Just as that searching influences the way he writes, it distinguishes Baker’s vocal
delivery. “I think I have to collect the words, a lot of times. I have to go get
them, and then hold them, and then put them out, and then go get some more. I
don’t think there’s a steady stream coming in; I have to gather them up.
“Like some kind of sheepdog,” he laughs.
As a result, written out, a song like “Juarez” would read:
He wears a blue suede cowboy hat;
Got a Juarez woman stretched out on his lap.
But when Sam sings it, it’s:
He wears a blue
Suede
Cowboy hat;
Got a
Juarez woman stretched out on his lap.
“I write it the way I sing it,” he states. “I never thought of that as something
different or an oddity, but that’s the way I hear it—in that truncated way.”
The accident not only influenced the sound of Sam’s music, but the content of at
least some songs, like “Steel” and “Angels” from Mercy. “I think what I was
trying to do was write my way out of sudden death. We’re in a beautiful quiet
place with people we like—and then the next second, one or both of us is dead
or dying. I think what I was trying to do was write my way into an
understanding of how that can come about and what it meant. The instant of
that—what that meant and how to accommodate that. How to make that more
normal, something that’s not so out of the ordinary, so inexplicable.”
“Broken Fingers”, from Pretty World, is perhaps the most autobiographical (a
“near tangent,” he calls it) and most powerful. “It’s a reminder, I think. You
know, the living owe the dead so much. Mostly everything I walk upon or live
by, a great community has provided. Specifically, it’s about the boy who died
next to me so horrifically. It’s a reminder that the community that I live in and
you live in, it’s pretty broad. It includes all our family, friends, and people who’
ve come before and have done so much and, for whatever reason—generosity,
goodwill, charity—have left so much that makes our lives so much easier. That’s
one of the things I take from that song, but specifically it’s about the boy.”
Forget his eyes,
His silhouette?
Of course I don’t,
Of course I don’t forget.
There are blue eyes,
A silhouette;
There is a debt,
A debt I don’t forget.
Baker grew up in Itasca, Texas, a small, rural town of about 1,200, on the
prairie between Waco and Fort Worth. “There were 35 people in my high
school class—1972. And everybody did everything. Everybody played in the
band; I played football, basketball, baseball. You had to.”
As a kid, Sam heard his father’s records of Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry,
Lightnin’ Hopkins, and Johnny Cash, while his mother listened to Broadway
albums and played piano and organ in the Presbyterian church. “There’d be
Handel’s Messiah, ‘My Fair Lady,’ and Brownie McGhee,” he recalls; “pretty
broad tastes. And so much of that stuff has held up. I can listen right now to
Johnny Cash or Sonny Terry or Lightnin’ Hopkins—or Handel. That stuff was
not time-stamped or perishable; it’s stuff that stands up for a long time.”
He went to college in Denton, north of Dallas, at North Texas State, famed for
its music program. “There were lots of unbelievable musicians at that school. I
took some guitar lessons from a real good jazz player, who taught me music
theory. I loved to play that Gershwin and Fats Waller stuff, and loved to hear
Joe Pass’s playing.”
After college, Sam worked a day job as a bank examiner, but his restless spirit
found him working as a carpenter and a white-water boatman, and just traveling
the world—until those travels led him to Peru and the train explosion.
Following the long, arduous recovery, his goal was “to do one good piece of art”
—which became Mercy. “I really wasn’t much of a writer. I wrote pretty junky
stuff. But at some point—it was in 2000—I decided to learn to write, to learn to
be clear. And it’s hard. It’s hard, hard, hard. I have to take a word and look at
it as it is by itself, from all different angles—shine lights on it at different angles—
and then put it in context and see what that does to shade it. See if it changes.
See how that word shades the pre-word, post-word, the whole phrase, the
whole sentence, and see how it changes the color of what I’m trying to say—
and see if that’s what I want to say. It takes a lot. I am the slowest writer in the
world. You have to reduce. You have to be ruthless. You can’t fall in love with
any line—because they’re all at the mercy of every other line.”
There’s obviously a strong literary element to Baker’s work. “For me,
songwriting starts with literature. I started reading Faulkner’s The Sound And
The Fury again, and I just finished Islands In The Stream by Hemingway
again. How they pace things, how they glue things together, and how they don’t
glue things together—it’s so beautiful, so masterful. I like Hemingway because
he’s tight, Faulkner because he’s not. I’m in awe of how they make the stories
flow so beautifully. And the little bitty pieces of the story all reflect the light of
the narrative. How do they do it? They do it because they’re masters [laughs].
Sometimes Hemingway will throw in a detail that doesn’t fit, but then he’ll come
back. It’s like coming in with a change-up just before the fastball.”
(Other writers, “storytellers,” Baker lists include Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel
Garcia Marques’ One Hundred Years of Solitude, Homer, J.D. Salinger, Isaac
Bashevis Singer, John Updike, Saul Bellow, and early Ken Kesey—whose
Sometimes a Great Notion took its title, Sam points out, from Huddie
Ledbetter’s “Goodnight Irene.”)
Of specific songwriters, he feels, “Stephen Foster’s melodies are so beautiful.
Randy Newman was a pretty influential thing, when Newman started doing that
stuff out of the South. ‘Born is Tuscaloosa, but I’ll die right here in Birmingham.’
Leonard Cohen, because he’s so exact. I like all the anger in that early Dylan
stuff. And I thought Joni Mitchell was a remarkable writer. Guy Clark was a
beautiful singer and a stunning storyteller, but I thought Van Zandt was just a
terrific poet. Intuitive, beautiful, clear. But also Lightnin’ Hopkins. When he
sings about coming in and his kids are crying because they’re hungry, and he
doesn’t have any money to feed them—that’s about as powerful as you can go.
I don’t know that Robert Johnson has influenced me, but when he sings, ‘There’
s a hellhound on my trail,’ you look around and there’s probably a hellhound on
his trail.”
When Baker opened a show for Walt Wilkins, the singer/songwriter told Sam,
“I know what you should sound like.” Sam credits Wilkins and Tim Lorsch with
putting his voice and songs in the proper setting. “Both CDs are terrifically
produced by those guys, but the thing I love most is the combination of the
cello, the pedal steel, and octave violin. The octave violin has more of an oboe
sound, more nasal than the cello.”
Lorsch provides the octave violin (along with standard violin and mandolin),
while Ron DeLaVega plays bass and cello, and Mike Daly supplies pedal steel
and various slide and resophonic guitars, with Lloyd Maines lending a hand on
Pretty World, along with guitarist Gurf Morlix and accordionist Joel Guzman.
Of his own guitar playing, he laughs, “I’m not much of a guitar player at all; you
know that, don’t you?” But he has very specific preferences when it comes to
his Taylor acoustics. “I have two 414s, so I’ll have one as a backup,” he details.
“I like the balanced sound, the neck, and the consistency. It’s a high-quality
instrument that fits my hands, and to my ear it’s just something I like.”
He views minutiae like picks and strings—Clayton plectrums and Martin SP
Phosphor Bronze lights, respectively—as tools, “like knowing what type of skill
saw a carpenter uses.” Though his 414s each have pickguards on both sides of
the soundhole, he points out, “I use factory left-handed models, and put an extra
pickguard on top just because aesthetically it appeals to me more. I like it
visually. And I don’t play cutaways; I just play the standard old style. I don’t
know if it makes any difference, but theoretically I think more resonating space
is better. That’s my instinct.”
He strives for and achieves a realistic acoustic sound onstage “The 414 came
with the Fishman, but I’m using the Aura on top of that. It’s made by Fishman,
too, and it’s a device that takes the sound from a pickup and outputs it in a way
that resembles the unamplified acoustic guitar. Basically, I’m using a 414
through the pickup, into the Aura, and coming out with a 414 on the other side.
I’m not trying to color it; I’m trying to de-color it; I’m trying to take the metallic,
electronic color out of it. It’s a nice round sound. I’m really pleased with the
nice warm sound I’m getting out of this Aura. Those 414s really do sound good
coming through that system.
“I think there are good acoustic-electric sounds,” he goes on; “you just have to
work on it. I’ve been working on it six months now to get my sound right. I’ve
tried a million different things. You start out with a good guitar, reasonably fresh
strings, and a decent pickup, and then have something that takes that electronic
metal-y sound away. I think we’ve all approached it like, ‘What do we add to
give it the sound we want?’ Really, what we need is reduction—to take the
things out we don’t want. Not put the 414 back, but just not cover it up. I just
want a 414 to sound like a 414.”
For somebody who’s gone through the pain and trauma he’s gone through, Sam
Baker has an amazingly positive outlook on life, as though everything’s a gift at
this point. “Everything is a gift at this point,” he declares. “But, see, it’s a gift for
you at this point. It’s not just me; it’s everybody in this restaurant. I went
through the anger and the bitterness—deeply. But that energy didn’t get me
anywhere. It’s toxic. And ultimately, I did come to a point where these days are
beautiful. Because they are so short and so quick to pass. And that’s all we’ve
got—no matter what we hold in our hands, drive around in, put in the bank, or
shower ourselves with.
“All we’ve got is this one breath,” he concludes. “And then, if we’re lucky, we
have the next breath.”
© 2007 Dan Forte; all rights reserved. Originally published by Taylor Guitars
© All lyrics by Sam Baker; BlueLimeStone Publishing, SESAC; used by
permission.
As Published in
Wood and Steel Magazine
Copyright 2007 All Rights Reserved
Sam Baker is sitting in a Mexican restaurant in Austin, Texas, deep in thought.
In profile, the weathered good looks, high cheekbones, gray-streaked, shoulder-
length hair, and most of all his deep-set, penetrating eyes bear a remarkable
resemblance to an Indian head nickel. But he’s not seated sideways for effect or
image; it’s so that he can hear.
In 1986, at age 32, Baker was traveling in Peru when, as he says, “I got in the
middle of somebody else’s war.” A terrorist bomb (the Sendero Luminoso or
“Shining Path” Maoist group) blew up the train he and some friends were riding
on. Several passengers died, including a German boy and his parents, who were
sitting next to Baker. Though he nearly bled to death, Sam survived but suffered
a constellation of injuries and aftereffects—shrapnel in his leg, renal failure, brain
damage, even gangrene.
“Right now, the loudest thing I hear is the ringing in my head,” he says of the
Tinnitus, which will never go away. The other obvious reminder of the blast is
his left hand, the fingers of which are permanently scrunched and twisted.
Fortunately, he has enough dexterity to grip a pick—after re-learning to play
guitar left-handed (fretting with the less-injured right hand)—so that he can sing
and play some of the most vivid, compelling, truly original songs of any artist
working today.
The brain damage he initially suffered affected mainly the part of the brain where
words are stored. Which is ironic, since it’s the stories and images he paints
with words that brought him acclaim—first with his 2004 debut, Mercy, and
now with its 2007 follow-up, Pretty World (both self released). Of forging a
career out of writing and singing his own songs, Baker beams, “To start this at
this age is a real interesting thing. I’m 53—a great age. It’s a fabulous age. Just
to be, as they say, ‘walking the face of the earth’ is a miracle—no matter what
age you are. I’ll take it every day.”
He describes his recovery as “a climb up a steep embankment”—including
numerous surgeries, learning how to walk and talk, and getting parts of his
memory back. “I could remember things in the past; I just couldn’t remember
words. I couldn’t remember the word for ‘chair’; I would have to say, ‘I need
that thing for sitting.’ I couldn’t focus [my attention]. For twenty-something
days, I couldn’t move, couldn’t get out of bed. My hands were blown up, so I
couldn’t do anything with my hands. I couldn’t use my legs. I couldn’t read,
couldn’t hear, and couldn’t think of words.”
He pauses and adds, “It was an interesting time. Very introspective. The only
thing that came in loud enough to really get through that haze or fog or internal
trauma I was dealing with was the raw suffering of others.”
As for words, still, “I have to find them; they don’t just come. I have to go out
and pick them. I’m more like a worker in an . . . orchard. I had to go find that
word ‘orchard.’ Words certainly don’t fly out of the sky and land on my table.”
Just as that searching influences the way he writes, it distinguishes Baker’s vocal
delivery. “I think I have to collect the words, a lot of times. I have to go get
them, and then hold them, and then put them out, and then go get some more. I
don’t think there’s a steady stream coming in; I have to gather them up.
“Like some kind of sheepdog,” he laughs.
As a result, written out, a song like “Juarez” would read:
He wears a blue suede cowboy hat;
Got a Juarez woman stretched out on his lap.
But when Sam sings it, it’s:
He wears a blue
Suede
Cowboy hat;
Got a
Juarez woman stretched out on his lap.
“I write it the way I sing it,” he states. “I never thought of that as something
different or an oddity, but that’s the way I hear it—in that truncated way.”
The accident not only influenced the sound of Sam’s music, but the content of at
least some songs, like “Steel” and “Angels” from Mercy. “I think what I was
trying to do was write my way out of sudden death. We’re in a beautiful quiet
place with people we like—and then the next second, one or both of us is dead
or dying. I think what I was trying to do was write my way into an
understanding of how that can come about and what it meant. The instant of
that—what that meant and how to accommodate that. How to make that more
normal, something that’s not so out of the ordinary, so inexplicable.”
“Broken Fingers”, from Pretty World, is perhaps the most autobiographical (a
“near tangent,” he calls it) and most powerful. “It’s a reminder, I think. You
know, the living owe the dead so much. Mostly everything I walk upon or live
by, a great community has provided. Specifically, it’s about the boy who died
next to me so horrifically. It’s a reminder that the community that I live in and
you live in, it’s pretty broad. It includes all our family, friends, and people who’
ve come before and have done so much and, for whatever reason—generosity,
goodwill, charity—have left so much that makes our lives so much easier. That’s
one of the things I take from that song, but specifically it’s about the boy.”
Forget his eyes,
His silhouette?
Of course I don’t,
Of course I don’t forget.
There are blue eyes,
A silhouette;
There is a debt,
A debt I don’t forget.
Baker grew up in Itasca, Texas, a small, rural town of about 1,200, on the
prairie between Waco and Fort Worth. “There were 35 people in my high
school class—1972. And everybody did everything. Everybody played in the
band; I played football, basketball, baseball. You had to.”
As a kid, Sam heard his father’s records of Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry,
Lightnin’ Hopkins, and Johnny Cash, while his mother listened to Broadway
albums and played piano and organ in the Presbyterian church. “There’d be
Handel’s Messiah, ‘My Fair Lady,’ and Brownie McGhee,” he recalls; “pretty
broad tastes. And so much of that stuff has held up. I can listen right now to
Johnny Cash or Sonny Terry or Lightnin’ Hopkins—or Handel. That stuff was
not time-stamped or perishable; it’s stuff that stands up for a long time.”
He went to college in Denton, north of Dallas, at North Texas State, famed for
its music program. “There were lots of unbelievable musicians at that school. I
took some guitar lessons from a real good jazz player, who taught me music
theory. I loved to play that Gershwin and Fats Waller stuff, and loved to hear
Joe Pass’s playing.”
After college, Sam worked a day job as a bank examiner, but his restless spirit
found him working as a carpenter and a white-water boatman, and just traveling
the world—until those travels led him to Peru and the train explosion.
Following the long, arduous recovery, his goal was “to do one good piece of art”
—which became Mercy. “I really wasn’t much of a writer. I wrote pretty junky
stuff. But at some point—it was in 2000—I decided to learn to write, to learn to
be clear. And it’s hard. It’s hard, hard, hard. I have to take a word and look at
it as it is by itself, from all different angles—shine lights on it at different angles—
and then put it in context and see what that does to shade it. See if it changes.
See how that word shades the pre-word, post-word, the whole phrase, the
whole sentence, and see how it changes the color of what I’m trying to say—
and see if that’s what I want to say. It takes a lot. I am the slowest writer in the
world. You have to reduce. You have to be ruthless. You can’t fall in love with
any line—because they’re all at the mercy of every other line.”
There’s obviously a strong literary element to Baker’s work. “For me,
songwriting starts with literature. I started reading Faulkner’s The Sound And
The Fury again, and I just finished Islands In The Stream by Hemingway
again. How they pace things, how they glue things together, and how they don’t
glue things together—it’s so beautiful, so masterful. I like Hemingway because
he’s tight, Faulkner because he’s not. I’m in awe of how they make the stories
flow so beautifully. And the little bitty pieces of the story all reflect the light of
the narrative. How do they do it? They do it because they’re masters [laughs].
Sometimes Hemingway will throw in a detail that doesn’t fit, but then he’ll come
back. It’s like coming in with a change-up just before the fastball.”
(Other writers, “storytellers,” Baker lists include Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel
Garcia Marques’ One Hundred Years of Solitude, Homer, J.D. Salinger, Isaac
Bashevis Singer, John Updike, Saul Bellow, and early Ken Kesey—whose
Sometimes a Great Notion took its title, Sam points out, from Huddie
Ledbetter’s “Goodnight Irene.”)
Of specific songwriters, he feels, “Stephen Foster’s melodies are so beautiful.
Randy Newman was a pretty influential thing, when Newman started doing that
stuff out of the South. ‘Born is Tuscaloosa, but I’ll die right here in Birmingham.’
Leonard Cohen, because he’s so exact. I like all the anger in that early Dylan
stuff. And I thought Joni Mitchell was a remarkable writer. Guy Clark was a
beautiful singer and a stunning storyteller, but I thought Van Zandt was just a
terrific poet. Intuitive, beautiful, clear. But also Lightnin’ Hopkins. When he
sings about coming in and his kids are crying because they’re hungry, and he
doesn’t have any money to feed them—that’s about as powerful as you can go.
I don’t know that Robert Johnson has influenced me, but when he sings, ‘There’
s a hellhound on my trail,’ you look around and there’s probably a hellhound on
his trail.”
When Baker opened a show for Walt Wilkins, the singer/songwriter told Sam,
“I know what you should sound like.” Sam credits Wilkins and Tim Lorsch with
putting his voice and songs in the proper setting. “Both CDs are terrifically
produced by those guys, but the thing I love most is the combination of the
cello, the pedal steel, and octave violin. The octave violin has more of an oboe
sound, more nasal than the cello.”
Lorsch provides the octave violin (along with standard violin and mandolin),
while Ron DeLaVega plays bass and cello, and Mike Daly supplies pedal steel
and various slide and resophonic guitars, with Lloyd Maines lending a hand on
Pretty World, along with guitarist Gurf Morlix and accordionist Joel Guzman.
Of his own guitar playing, he laughs, “I’m not much of a guitar player at all; you
know that, don’t you?” But he has very specific preferences when it comes to
his Taylor acoustics. “I have two 414s, so I’ll have one as a backup,” he details.
“I like the balanced sound, the neck, and the consistency. It’s a high-quality
instrument that fits my hands, and to my ear it’s just something I like.”
He views minutiae like picks and strings—Clayton plectrums and Martin SP
Phosphor Bronze lights, respectively—as tools, “like knowing what type of skill
saw a carpenter uses.” Though his 414s each have pickguards on both sides of
the soundhole, he points out, “I use factory left-handed models, and put an extra
pickguard on top just because aesthetically it appeals to me more. I like it
visually. And I don’t play cutaways; I just play the standard old style. I don’t
know if it makes any difference, but theoretically I think more resonating space
is better. That’s my instinct.”
He strives for and achieves a realistic acoustic sound onstage “The 414 came
with the Fishman, but I’m using the Aura on top of that. It’s made by Fishman,
too, and it’s a device that takes the sound from a pickup and outputs it in a way
that resembles the unamplified acoustic guitar. Basically, I’m using a 414
through the pickup, into the Aura, and coming out with a 414 on the other side.
I’m not trying to color it; I’m trying to de-color it; I’m trying to take the metallic,
electronic color out of it. It’s a nice round sound. I’m really pleased with the
nice warm sound I’m getting out of this Aura. Those 414s really do sound good
coming through that system.
“I think there are good acoustic-electric sounds,” he goes on; “you just have to
work on it. I’ve been working on it six months now to get my sound right. I’ve
tried a million different things. You start out with a good guitar, reasonably fresh
strings, and a decent pickup, and then have something that takes that electronic
metal-y sound away. I think we’ve all approached it like, ‘What do we add to
give it the sound we want?’ Really, what we need is reduction—to take the
things out we don’t want. Not put the 414 back, but just not cover it up. I just
want a 414 to sound like a 414.”
For somebody who’s gone through the pain and trauma he’s gone through, Sam
Baker has an amazingly positive outlook on life, as though everything’s a gift at
this point. “Everything is a gift at this point,” he declares. “But, see, it’s a gift for
you at this point. It’s not just me; it’s everybody in this restaurant. I went
through the anger and the bitterness—deeply. But that energy didn’t get me
anywhere. It’s toxic. And ultimately, I did come to a point where these days are
beautiful. Because they are so short and so quick to pass. And that’s all we’ve
got—no matter what we hold in our hands, drive around in, put in the bank, or
shower ourselves with.
“All we’ve got is this one breath,” he concludes. “And then, if we’re lucky, we
have the next breath.”
© 2007 Dan Forte; all rights reserved. Originally published by Taylor Guitars
© All lyrics by Sam Baker; BlueLimeStone Publishing, SESAC; used by
permission.
