After a knock-out set and encore with his three-piece band, Sam Amidon weaved back through the tables of the sold-out Club Passim and took up his acoustic guitar once more. He sang a tender song, then jumped into into a proficient but utterly uncalled for guitar solo. And he sang along, hitting all the notes on the edge of his range in a voice that’d fit right in with the muppets. It felt a little like a way of saying there’d be no third encore. After a little too long, he returned to the song singing, once more, beautifully.
It was not the first moment of mischief or absurdity that night. He’d taken a solo that was similar in spirit on his fiddle, bowing the side of it rather than the strings. He’d pause before making more egregious, squeaky, creaking noises. The pauses were just long enough for us to think it was over. Through it, he held the same blank-eyed, straight-faced expression he had the whole night. Partly because he resembles Elijah Wood (and therefore Frodo), he always look well-meaning and innocent. That’s part of what makes his musical stunts funny.
Then there were the strange tales of his stage banter. He explained in a dry but affable tone that Bruno Mars wasn’t able to back him up on drums that night because he was called off on a tour with Jimi Hendrix’s band. While telling a story of taking a bottle of wine up into the mountains and watching the silhouettes of trees morph into “familiar countenances,” he suddenly remembered that ISIS and Bonnie Rait had appeared to him in a dream the night before (“different sections of the same overall dream”).
His Kaufman-esque sense of humor makes for great stage presence, as does his stillness, good posture and tranquil expression. But I think these goofy moments are there not just for personality (and laughs), but to make up for an element of his studio output that doesn’t completely survive the translation to live music––Sam Amidon has an avant-garde side.
He also rolls with avant-garde crowd, namely the other folks on Icelandic label/collective Bedroom Community. Amidon’s latest record, Lily-O, is the third to be produced by experimental musician Valgeir Sigurðsson. Postmodern composer Nico Muhly did the orchestral arrangements on I See the Sign. A number of odd sounds and experimental performances crop up in Amidon’s recordings––they’re what make his work so re-listenable.
The eerie and spacious synthesizers lurking in the background of Lily-O make the songs shine. These are what I missed from Amidon’s live set, but at least he didn’t play anything pre-recorded as a substitute. That would have come at the cost of the performance’s intimacy, which I felt most when he sang a cappella and something in the ventilation system started whirring above my head. There’s something cool about a sold-out show quiet enough to compete with the little noises a building makes.
Much of the avant-garde side of his music was preserved in ways other than nonsensical solos and strange fictions between songs. For instance, the clicky, syncopated drum part in “Walkin’ Boss” was still there. Bassist Ty Gibbons and drummer Ray Rizzo brought considerable talent, making good-feeling backbones of grooves that weren’t the simplest or most natural choices for the songs. The band played the smoothest live fade-out I’ve ever heard. This was one of the show’s great musical moments and another funny one––Sam kept the audience singing their response part after the band had stopped calling.
Anyway I’m really not one to complain when the live show sounds varies considerably from the studio recording. Often it means the musician respects and takes seriously both presentations of their songs. It was a treat to hear Amidon sing a fairly traditional arrangement of the jaunty old folk song “Groundhog” at the show, and then hear the ghostliness in “Groundhog Variations” when I took the album home. A windy sound in the back of the mix and the icy and dissonant playing of jazz guitarist Bill Frisell erases the song’s original cultural context, framing it in sounds that aren’t rural but futuristic and eerie.
That creepy backdrop brings out how weird the words always were. “Groundhog grease all over her chin.” Stop. Gross. “Granny… swore she’d eat them groundhog brain.” Granny––don’t. It makes sense that he told us in an interview that what often appeals to him in a song he takes on is “a combination of the alien and mysterious with the comforting and familiar.” That’s “Groundhog Variations.” He added alien and mysterious sounds to bring out a side of the song that was always in there. Amidon was brought up in a community of New England folk musicians and he’d hear the old traditionals he sings now playing on the stereo and sung in his home and the homes of family friends. One imagines him hearing the “Groundhog” lyrics as a kid and not knowing what to make of them––he recreates that freaked-out and fascinated perspective for his audience. He makes the song new.
Neil Young also dug up the weird side of familiar songs with the crunchy power of Crazy Horse on Americana––just listen to what he has to say about the lyrics of “She’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain” (highlight: “OK, we’re going to kill a big red rooster now because Christ is coming back. What does that mean?”). On that album as all through Sam Amidon, it’s never just an old tune in new clothes for the sake of novelty. These aren’t the half-assed and not-that-punk renditions of top-40 songs on a “Pop goes Punk” compilation. It’s new music growing out of old music and new feelings in old music. It sounds authentically rooted and organic because Amidon’s process is as natural and personal as possible.
Sam Amidon doesn’t set out to rearrange old folk songs. As he told NPR, he’ll write a guitar part and then “realize that some melody that has been bonking around in there in my brain, you know, will fit over what I’ve written on the guitar.” The parts he write happen to work as accompaniments to folk songs he grew up hearing. It’s like his deepest and most unconscious understanding of what music is were set in his brain by the ubiquity of these tunes when he was a kid. If that’s the case, then what’s true for everybody is especially true for Sam Amidon: the music he makes is the result of the life he’s lived. It’s what makes his playing of traditionals so original and idiosyncratic. And his avante-garde collaborators and alien synthesizers are just tools to bring out that his music, when at its best, is stretched between two worlds.
Amidon’s version of “Bright Sunny South” is authentically rooted but completely new. The band’s performance of the song was the highlight of the show for me. A song typically associated with going off to fight for the Confederacy is just about the last thing that ought to tug on my yankee liberal heartstrings. But that’s how good it is. The guitar part, which, true to his process, is the heart of the song sounds more than just vulnerable. It sounds awestruck. That’s how he really captures some of the power of the experience. I’ve never been called off to war, but I bet it’s mind-altering.
Amidon got it all across while singing with a voice that’s really somewhat stoic. He didn’t really exaggerate any lyrics or put much emotional spin on any lines. He just stood there, stared off, and played. The music did the work.