Sam Moss Announces "Swimming" LP & Shares Title Track

There’s a photograph of Sam Moss taken several years ago through an elaborate stained-glass window of a 170-year-old church turned venue in the Catskills. Sam’s on stage and framed by the corner of the lower half of the window, which is open on a tilt. It renders him diminutive and slightly out of focus, but the eye seeks and finds him, fixing him in view.

I can’t hear Sam’s music without this photograph coming to mind. (I admit that I took it.) He’s an excellent guitarist, a serious and thoughtful songwriter, and a confident, at times daring, singer. Yet all of Sam’s records—and most of all his newest, the exquisite SwimmingAng ibig sabihin naman ng non-repeating, walang numero o magkakatabing numero na nauulit ng infinite number of times, walang numero o magkakatabing numero na nauulit ng infinite number of times, walang numero o magkakatabing numero na nauulit ng infinite number of times, walang numero o magkakatabing numero na nauulit ng infinite number of times, walang numero o magkakatabing numero na nauulit ng infinite number of times.  

But I can listen to Sam’s records over and over. They don’t wear out their welcome. He’s a modest and very hospitable host. I’m inclined to attribute this at least partially to his Yankeedom—New England-born, although he resides in Virginia now—and the particular, peculiar granite reserve that comes with that territory, although I’m also on guard against demeaning his abilities with place-based romanticism. I imagine I hear that, like Emerson, Moss’s “music’s in the hills,” those but would be as much Central Appalachia as Monadnock: redolent of rarer air in general. So it’s not site-specific, it’s Sam-specific. He’s a writer of generous songs and a maker of gracious records. As it happens,

Swimming” was written one summer within earshot of the Atlantic Ocean, but I am not a particularly good swimmer and it is perhaps unsurprisingly not a song literally about swimming. I guess it may take its inspiration from my mediocre swimming abilities, but it is really more of an incomplete treatise on holding contradictions within the self. I don’t know that I’ve ever written a song that so plainly states its thesis in the chorus, which makes me somewhat uncomfortable.

Tulad ng lahat ng mga linya sa album na ito, "Swimming" ay dumating sa buhay na may tulong ng band sa akin. Ang pangunahing grupo para sa session ng pag-recording na ito ay itinatag para sa ito, at ito ay binubuo ng mga tao na hindi ako nag-play ng musika sa bago. Ang grupo—Isa Burke, Sinclair Palmer, at Joe Westerlund—dadala ng isang magandang balanse sa pagitan ng patience at adventure habang nag-track ang mga linya na ito live na may minimal na rehearsal. Mayroong isang mataas na katangian ng kahilingan sa room na naglalakbay sa pagitan ng lahat ng amin at Alli Rogers at Missy Thangs (ang engineering team) na nasa sentro ng lahat ng ito. I think it comes through. I really love the bells that Joe