Sam Moss began his musical career recording elaborate fingerpicked guitar instrumentals, though has since developed into a fully fledged singer songwriter, adding a gentle lyricism that matches perfectly the patterns he paints with a guitar. I’ve been a fan ever since I heard the haunting banjo song ‘Rotary’ from his 2012 album Neighbours, and his last album, 2016’s Fable, was yet another step in his evolution as a musician.
Now Moss is back with a new record. Titled Neon, it’s a beautiful collection of songs that sees a songwriter working with an intrinsic sense of self-confidence. By recruiting the help of Justine Bowe, Benjamin Burns, Daniel Radin, Michael Siegel and Rachel Sumner, Moss is able to create rich and affecting songs that skirt the edges of folk, rock and country, and which never lose sight of the personal themes at their heart. As Moss describes
“I wrote many of them in and around Somerville, Massachusetts, where I live, and some in further away places, where I was out, looking back toward home. They come from the sensation of home. The feeling of rootedness… I find joy in them. Some might qualify as ‘sad’ songs but I do not hear them that way. I hope they offer a spectrum of feeling. I hope they give off a small amount of light.”
The title track transplants an authentic folk atmosphere into an urban setting. Opening with sparse guitar and Moss’s signature vocals, which deliver lines about wandering around a city at night, the song grows in intensity with gathering percussion and vocal harmonies from Bowe.
‘Flowers’ has a sinuous quality, the guitars and vocals twining together like curls of smoke, conjuring an atmosphere of nostalgia and longing. It’s a song about being at a distance from another person, of falling out touch and being connected only by potentially unrequited thoughts and reminiscence.
“So tell me the colors of your wall
Won’t you paint a picture of your room
Are your street lamps humming, did they burn out again?
Are the flowers in your neighborhood in bloom?”
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It’s just one of many tracks that highlights Moss’s writing skills, his lines careful and composed and understatedly poetic. These are mostly gentle songs, but songs that are imbued with real feeling, rife with doubt and hope and longing.
Take for example ‘Slow’, a song about pining for home, the guitar charged with a certain gothic energy and propelled by Burns’s percussion as Moss sings, “I don’t belong in this room today / I belong a few state lines away.” Even the sense of conviction on ‘Allies’ reveals itself to be a mere illusion, the fleeting encounter at its heart the basis of much wistful yearning, Moss’s guitar supported with hushed harmonies and Radin’s quiet piano.
‘Shoulder’ is as much about its negative space as the song itself, conjuring the image of an empty room acting as a screen upon which thoughts and feelings are projected bright and clear. And ‘Snap’ is equally restrained, stripped back to little more than voice and guitar, an illustration of the devastating simplicity achieved by those at the top of their craft.
Final track ‘Here Again’ is one of the album’s least delicate moments, ending not quite on positivity but at least a bittersweet sense of acceptance. It’s a song about passing time, about growing older, about home, Moss detailing changes not just in the landscape around him but also in his bank account and the lines on his face. The final verse ends with a quiet sense of joy, as Moss sings
“I traced your hand on the dance floor
As the lines drew heavier on my face
In the fear of what i was asking for
To the melody you hummed, we swayed”
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Neon is out now on Lost Honey Records, and available via the Sam Moss Bandcamp page.