Sam Burton

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. First in the cabin retreat, and then carrying them with him from one person’s home to the next. Following his 2020 debut I Can Go With You, Dear Departed is something of a reintroduction after a period of transition and transformation. 

After all that time couch-surfing and writing, Burton emerged with more than enough material for his sophomore outing. He joined up with producer Jonathan Wilson to craft a more intricate, layered sound that recalled the lived-in yet immediate singer-songwriter albums of the ‘60s and ‘70s. Burton was taken with Wilson. “He gets what a songwriter needs,” he reflects. Just as he had with artists like Angel Olsen and Father John Misty, Wilson helped Burton achieve a sound that didn’t descend into retro pastiche, but rather became an evocative echo, a dream of the past. In scope, it finds Burton using a far bigger canvas than on his debut, giving the emotions therein a new sense of urgency and intensity. But the album still has an intimacy to it, like Burton and his backing musicians are crammed onto the corner stage of a smoke-filled bar in a long lost time. 

Dear Departed gives us Burton’s twist on eternal lovelorn themes, carried by his twist on classic songwriting. Even if he himself might approach it skeptically, there’s a poignance to that, the idea of returning to foundational musical forms in order to excavate universal human feelings. Characterizing it as an album wracked with pain and loss, Burton spends many of these songs saying goodbye to a version of himself, a passage of young adulthood, the last strains of innocence. 

In the end Dear Departed is the sound of Burton — maybe a bit wearied, maybe a bit more spiritually attuned, maybe a bit bemused — beginning the ascent.