SAM BURTON

Dear Departed, the second album from Sam Burton, arose from a time of rebirth. In the last few years, Burton basically started over. He temporarily abandoned the life he’d built in Los Angeles, where he’d cut his teeth performing around town and connecting with like-minded musicians. By the end of 2020, everything pointed him back home to Utah, where he stayed for a few months helping a friend rebuild their house. It was a real life metaphor, the literal construction project mirroring the personal growth Burton was experiencing. “It was a return home,” he says. “My inner world really opened up.”

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. 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.

Burton’s smoldering melodies are met again and again with ripples of piano and swells of orchestration It doesn’t sound quite like an album anyone else is making right now, nor does it sound quite like any one identifiable moment of the past. It’s Burton rifling through his own history and music history alike to achieve a singular vision.