Cover by Sara Fowler

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 Swimming—have succeeded in constructing deft and effective settings for rigorously searching songs—reckonings and wrestlings with awe and wonder, dread and despair, fragility and endurance— that manage to expand well beyond the frame of Sam Moss without losing him to the landscape. He can give the uncanny impression that he’s inhabiting his records at some remove, even though it’s his performances of his compositions that are, obviously, the central axis around which they turn. Sam can—Sam does—sing “I held...,” “I heard...,” “I hope...,” “I try...,” “I dance...,” etc., but that I-ness—the songwriter-singer's stock-in-trade, which so often grows tiresome with its cul-de-sac insistence on itself—goes a little fuzzy, slipping off to the periphery while still commanding (but not demanding) attention. If this seems a doubtful virtue, consider how a singer of songs—even a good singer of good songs—can become wearisome company; their I can become, if I may speak for myself in the words of Ed McClanahan, “too many for me.”

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, though I’m also on guard against demeaning his abilities with place-based romanticism. I imagine I hear that, like Emerson, Moss’ “music’s in the hills,” but those 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, the songs are terrific. So are the records. Swimming is his best yet.

- Nathan Salsburg