Sam Weber – Everything Comes True
Sonic Unyon Metal – 10 January 2020
A multi-instrumentalist native of North Saanich, British Columbia, Sam Weber’s third album is much informed by his time touring across America and the personal and professional journey it took him on. Case in point, the bluesy slow burn roadhouse groove of Probably Not has him “Driving through America tonight/I’m looking for a pattern in the hashed white line … Should I be glad to live here and simmer in a melting pot/Maybe California will take pity on the dreams I got/Probably not”. Or the softer Simonesque shades of the trombone and trumpet-warmed Promise of the Road where he’s “Headed down to Vernon/Like trying to paint a feeling with these keys/A quick sketch of the road you travelled down many years ago now” has he sets life on the road against a settled relationship as “The answer to life’s questions anywhere I go/Are hidden by the promise of the road”.
Place plays a significant role in the songs, from Los Angeles of Probably Not to a lovely, hushed and atmospheric cover of the McGarrigles’ Talk To Me Of Mendocino (the title here condensed to just the one word) featuring brass, Madison Cunningham on baritone guitar and Rich Hinman on pedal steel.
Or there’s the characters that line the miles, such as the piano-backed, lightly fingerpicked Avenir (named for a typeface), a song about letting go of fear, whom he advises “When the going gets too tough for you/And you know there’s nothing you can do/Find a little shelter from the storm/Or learn to disappear”.
That sense of restlessness mingled with a need for roots is at the heart. On the organ-backed, Band-like soulful Queen of the Money, he’s “a son of a gun when I’m on the run, a tail without a kite” and the Gracelands echoing syncopated rhythms and Tyler Chester’s bass of It’s All Happening has him confess “It’s been a while since I met a girl that I don’t understand/Most of the ones where I come from are too quick to show their hand/This problem that I have, says nothing about them/I get lonely touring and I fall in love again/It’s like a pattern” and how “the business makes me cold”.
Continuing the theme, conjuring thought of Neil Young, Blackout clearly lays out the emotional dichotomy in “Part of me has never tried to leave your side my dear/The other part is always many miles away from here”, as the heart is sacrificed to the artistic quest (“leaving on the regular is what I’ve gotta do/Until I’ve cut the record that I’ve always wanted”) and how “Any time I try and be more than just a friend/It’s all lights out/Like a blackout again”. Likewise on piano ballad Obligated, where Simon meets Newman, anytime seeds are sown they’re never cultivated, cut down before they’re grown, “obligated to let you down”.
On the equally autobiographical closing number, the defiant rather than defeated No, another bubbling rhythm track with a soulful, brassy vibe, while “in need of a friend on the brink of my uncertainty” he confesses to doing the “dance of a runaway with a hardened highway criminal” and that “I was made to heal myself on the road forever, between these towns/Like an EMT turned refugee who the borders turn around”. And yet, as the song progresses, there’s a sense of light at the end of the tunnel as, “having landed in a better place” with friends and love he muses “Maybe all our aspirations really can come true/For those of us who stick around and see our hardships through”.
The title track, written on the piano in his parents’ house, opens the album with its wistful reminiscences of “first few steps and arguments”, the changing of the seasons and troubled times (“Surprise diagnosis; had they caught it soon instead/My Dad might’ve kept a little hair up on his head …pessimism, aneurysm, overwhelming guilt/God imposes sanctions on the people he won’t kill …a pregnancy unwanted is not a blessing in disguise”) that see the road offer a way of escape and avoidance, as “his happiness are lines out on the road”.
Exposed and honest, Weber has regrets but no apologies for who he is, for what drives him, for the heartache in his wake, in the search of making the music in his head. It’s a high price, but this album repays every wounded moment in full.