The Haven Social Club

Doors at 7:30 pm, Show at 9:00 pm
TIckets $20 at the door, or Megatunes & Blackbyrd Myoozik
SOLD OUT

Sam Baker is a hard-hewn grace, transcendentally wrought with grit, brutally chiaroscuroed by a weary deliverance sought in common lives. If the local songwriter’s first album, 2004’s Mercy, grasped for a deeper understanding of the dark tragedies beyond our control – a return to the Peruvian train rent by a bomb that nearly killed him in 1986 – then Pretty World (2007) was its reconciliation, a turn outward with grateful eyes renewed by contemplation. Persistent in Baker’s vision is an empathetic evocation of treading life’s stilled waters, beauty welled in the dirt of daily endurance. His characters, drawn with the insight of Townes Van Zandt and John Prine, toil unglamorously, overlooked save for Baker’s rough, sing-talk psalms giving them fitting voice. Cotton likewise finds its muse on the outskirts: the Mexican immigrant of “Mennonite,” the roadside pleads of “Signs,” the girl, tired and worried yet calmly knowing, in “Not Another Mary.” These tales labor under the heavily shouldered harness of history, Baker’s Texas a parabolic culmination of inescapable genealogies, from the tent revivals of twin tracks “Palestine I” and “Palestine II” to the handcrafted inevitability of “Bridal Chest.” His familiar intertwining of traditional fare roots the tales with inescapable inheritances, the album’s opening strains of “Dixie” breaking upon the title track’s grounded blues as female voices rise against Baker’s hard drawl. Cotton’s biggest shift is the fuller accompaniment that empowers Baker’s ballads, especially Steve Conn’s piano and the electric guitar growl of “Palestine I,” but his poignancy emerges best in the soft lullaby of “Moon” and unshakable loss of “Angel Hair.” Closing with the thematic counterpoint to the toil of “Cotton,” “Snow” finally gestures toward a momentary redemption in patient penitence, a complete, if fleeting, renewal: “First light city streets are white pristine. They are waiting.” – Doug Freeman

Tempting as it may be, don’t just judge Gurf Morlix by the company he
keeps, even if it does provide a fine starting point: eminent musical
artists like Lucinda Williams, Ray Wylie Hubbard, Warren Zevon, Ian
McLagan, Patty Griffin, Robert Earl Keen, Michael Penn, Buddy Miller,
Mary Gauthier, Tom Russell, Jim Lauderdale and Slaid Cleaves, to name
but a few. Instead, listen to Last Exit to Happyland, his fifth solo
album, and understand why his blue-ribbon associations as a producer,
guitarist and multi-instrumentalist have led Morlix to a similar level
of excellence as a singer, songwriter and artist in his own right.

As critic Henry Cabot Beck notes on Amazon.com, “If anybody is still
looking for a candidate to replace Robbie Robertson in The Band, look
no further. Morlix can write, sing, produce, and play nearly every
instrument (mostly stringed) and has a bottomless (albeit muddy) range
of American musical idioms from which to draw.” Through more than four
decades of professional music endeavors, Morlix has distinguished
himself with his innate musicality, exquisite taste, keen creative
instincts, and well-honed ear for not only songwriting but also the
elements that bring songs to their fullest fruition.