Biography

IN HIS DEBUT CD, MERCY, Austin singer-songwriter Sam Baker reveals a poetic genius so straightforward and undemanding it evokes wonder.

Rarely do such plain truths do life — or listeners — justice.

Laced with quiet lamentation, Baker’s lyrics lay bare the lies we live in pursuit of dreams. Mercifully, his songs are anything but morose.

Baker’s music celebrates equally the ugly and the exquisite, the mundane and the mysterious — giving us all a reason to take another look at ourselves and each other.  

Call a truce, call a war
Everyone is a bastard, everyone is whore
Everyone is a saint, everyone is redeemed
Everyone is at the mercy of another one’s dream

Guest vocalists — including Jessi Colter, the inimitable ‘70s outlaw songstress and wife of the late Waylon Jennings — are paired with Baker, whose Dylan-like voice is as dusty as a dirt road in a drought. Elegant arrangements and inspired performances are provided by Texas hill country rising star Walt Wilkins and Nashville session pros Tim Lorsch, Mike Daly, Ron de la Vega, and Mickey Grimm. The result is magic.

Mercy reflects a broad range of influences — from the music of Woody Guthrie and Townes Van Zandt to the novels of Jorge Luis Borges and Leo Tolstoy.

“I liked Tolstoy’s idea of working in the field everyday. Showing up. Making history one row at a time,” Baker says. “That history makes people, as much as people make history. Writing a song is like showing up, one row at a time- that’s all.”

One of six children, Sam Baker grew up in Itasca, a small Texas prairie town southwest of Dallas. He listened to his mother play hymns on the organ at the local Presbyterian church and his father play recordings of blues legends Lighting Hopkins, Brownie McGee and Sonny Terry. More often than not, My Fair Lady, Handel’s Messiah and Johnny Cash would be added to the mix.

“One of the first records I remember hearing is Johnny Cash’s Ride This Train,” Baker says. “Even more than the music, I remember the stories.” Recorded in 1960, Ride This Train defined Cash as one of American’s master storytellers. Like the redoubtable Man in Black, Sam Baker’s truest talent may be his ability to tell stories.

“I came back to writing songs after writing short fiction,” Baker says. “Story is everything, at least to me.”

In fact, Mercy is a novella: a tightly structured collection of songs chronicling the lies we go to bed with and the truths we wake up to — without sentimentality or apology — just a searing intensity.

There are soldiers in the way of harm, a girl holds a baby in a blanket in her arms
A man with a flag leaves for work, a woman pulls a thread from the hem of her skirt
Another Saturday comes and goes, another south wind comes and blows
Another baseball field another pop fly, another bunch of boys another blue sky

Baker’s songs reflect a life lived well and nearly lost—a bomb set off by Peru’s Shining Path killed his seatmates, left him deafened and dying - and left him with the unwavering conviction that every moment counts.

Marla Williams and Andy Ryan- Kenmore, Washington September 2004