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Sam Weber is our latest First Signs of Love (FSOL) featured artist. FSOL is about those moments when you find a new artist to love, and you can’t get enough! Discover more from our archive.
Introducing Sam Weber
Sam Weber is a singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist based in Los Angeles. His artistry, combined with his captivating voice and presence, feels otherworldly as if he belongs to another dimension but is spending time here among us mere mortals “for lack of better things to do.”
Clear and Plain
Weber also acts as a producer and is responsible for creating an album called Clear and Plain (co-produced with Mal Hauser) which is almost depressingly good. I use the word ”depressing” because all great art when profoundly felt, does come with an emotional burden – no matter how brilliantly it highlights one’s life and changes it for the better.
”Clear and Plain” will be a soundtrack of the time, or a phase in life, when one hears it for the first time. As such it will always be part of the listener and although it can be played over and over again, it will leave a void behind – albums like this don’t happen often. In the mainstream scene, this would be saluted with fifteen Grammies and Canadian-born Weber would get his own talk show. In reality, where profoundly great musicianship and songwriting is a dying breed of artistry, Sam Weber brings it back to life in a way you’ll never forget hearing.
From High Fidelity to Rufus Wainwright
Ever seen the movie ”High Fidelity” (2000)? There’s a sequence where the record store owner and his two ”music snob” employees discover Vince & Justin. Barry (Jack Black) is crumbling, facing an existential crisis as their music is ”so fucking good”. I am kind of doing the same, holding my forehead unable to believe what I am hearing as Weber’s ”Clear and Plain” is tuning my brain to a frequency it has only been about a dozen times before. Over the course of my own history, where the present time’s musical discovery is not just subjectively great and without a straightforward comparison but is objectively fundamentally fantastic, has only happened to me a handful of times.
Sometimes ”Clear and Plain” reminds me of two Gershwin-prize winner’s early solo work – Paul Simon and Carole King. Weber’s personal experiences made universal, sound a bit like Jeff Buckley here and there, especially in the phrasing on some high notes but clearly in a manner where Weber is not aiming at sounding like Buckley, it just kind of seems to happen naturally. As comforting as for example the 3rd track, gorgeous ”Void” is for the audience to cry with and within, it is easy to forget the album is someone else’s art, music and stories. Weber has the exceptional ability – like gold dust – to sound like he’s singing just for me, from a space called eternity and I was granted the privilege to hear it.
His presence lingers throughout this 38-minute 15-second-long masterpiece like he is there, with the listener, not singing from an ivory tower to his Instagram followers. References to fine art (Cezanne-fans Picasso and Matisse feature on the first track ”Tamarindo Sunsets”) mingle within social media-infused verbs, and in ”Silent Film” the purity and singing technique is close to Rufus Wainwright on ”Release the Stars” (2007).
A composer and a musician
Not settling for triads (basic chords), Weber should be noted as a composer as much as a songwriter or musician – he uses interesting compositions resulting in just the ”right” mood for each song. Neil Young may be the closest comparison ”within the genre” who has the same ability to sound always on pitch, reflect and mimic the right emotion – and always be right – even during the kind of tricky intervals. Weber’s album feels the same as if hearing ”Harvest Moon” the first time. The time and place will persist unchanged, no matter how many moments or years pass. When he harmonizes himself on ”Building a Bridge”, it has the same ”Hallelujah!”-quality as some great gospel songs. Artistically the last song grows to incredible heights… until the album, the experience, is over.
The ”Clear and Plain” album name is consistent with its production style but not ”plain” as in boring – it’s put together including everything necessary, but nothing more. That choice gives room for Weber’s flawless vocals to rise to the skies and paint them with expressive images of hope, and life itself as a theme with a brush made of solid 24-carat gold.
Great artists have the power to distinguish what is ”interesting” in little, ordinary details and come up with understandable stories about them to others. Acting lyrically almost as if Weber would be trying to point out how much beauty there is in being a bit lost, his work is something worth owning and cherishing, not just streaming.
”Mainstream should be as good as Sam Weber. “Clear and Plain” is a reference album and will act as one to a new generation of musicians to come – if we’re lucky.”
Discover more from Sam Weber
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Words Leena Mertanen
 featured artist. FSOL is about those moments when you find a new artist to love.){kind=link}