Sam Burton - Dear Departed (Black Vinyl)

"‘Dear Departed’, the second album from Sam Burton, arose from a time of rebirth. In the last few years, Burton basically started over. There’s a freedom in leaving everything behind, and Burton embarked on a wandering phase. He went and stayed at a friends’ family home in a rural region further north in California, where he holed up in a cabin and helped the grandmother farm to earn his keep. He crashed with friends all around Los Angeles, until he found himself a new gig and a new apartment of his own. Along the way, he was writing songs.
‘Dear Departed’ was produced by Jonathan Wilson (Angel Olsen, Father John Misty, Margo Price), and recorded at Wilson’s Topanga Canyon studio with some of the best studio players in LA.
From the production to the performances to Burton’s core compositions, there’s a timelessness across its ten songs. Together with Wilson, Burton is able to achieve a sound that never descends into retro pastiche, but rather becomes an evocative echo, a dream of the past. Like Sam and his band are crammed onto the corner stage of a smoke-filled bar in a long-lost time.
Recalling a modern day Campbell, Orbison, or Nilsson, the album showcases Burton’s inherent knack for mining pure Laurel Canyon AM gold. In scope, the music finds Burton using a far bigger canvas than on his acclaimed 2020 debut, ‘I Can Go With You’, giving the emotions therein a new sense of urgency and intensity."