Home Read Now Hear This: Sam Singer | Where The Rivers Do

Now Hear This: Sam Singer | Where The Rivers Do

The Winnipeg singer-songwriter wades into deep emotional waters on his new LP.

Sam Singer desperately implores you to meet him Where The Rivers Do on his soulfully sombre, endearingly ramshackle indie-folk album — showcasing today on Tinnitist.

Channeling a quarter of a lifetime’s worth of elusive conversation and fruitful observation into 11 romantic and rough-hewn tracks of pensive Prairie sunsets, Where The Rivers Do is a darkly burnished gem that finds the contemplative Winnipeg singer-songwriter and world-weary alt-crooner wading beyond the shores of expectation toward rockier islets of optimism and regret.

Written throughout 2022 during travels to Vancouver and L.A., and at home in Winnipeg, Where The Rivers Do immerses you in a nostalgic yet timeless sonic netherworld inspired by distance and written in the emotional vocabulary of classical folk traditions: Wandering, searching and finding.

“I saw a video of Bob Dylan talking about how he was born very far from his home, and that in his music and his travels, all he was trying to do was to make it back to wherever it was that he came from,” says Singer, who is also an actor. “I found myself at the beginning of my own mini odyssey, going to SXSW for a film I was in. It was a great excuse to visit my aunt in Los Angeles, and to take the time to write this album.

“I had this idea in my head of seeing every person I knew in the collage of my memory, and so I took with me a folder filled with everything anyone has ever written me, old family photos, and anything else I felt needed to be kept close to during this two-month odyssey, if you’ll allow the use of that term,” he adds.

The album title, he says, came about as the result of another personal songwriting trick, asking himself how Leonard Cohen would say something otherwise quotidian. Singer wondered how the legendary Canadian songwriter would invite someone to The Forks, the ancient meeting place of the Red and Assiniboine rivers. With a distinctive croon and backed by a razor-sharp band, Singer blends classic folk and new indie with smouldering heartbreak and junkshop orchestrations, conjuring up a spellbinding sound that positions him near the middle of a Venn diagram featuring Cohen, Tom Waits and Harry Nilsson.

Often referred to as an emerging artist, Singer — who first made his name as a teenager playing house concerts in his native Garden City — has exploded past the muted shadows of that forward-facing label, establishing himself with kinetic, celebratory and passionate gigs wherever his guitar strings take him.

Wider in sound and freer in scope than his 2022 EP From The Hills, Beaten Roads, Down to the Trees, Singer’s second full-length — after 2019’s Don’t Mistake Me For A Lovebird — documents the earth-voiced storyteller finding his strength in colourfully composed numbers, including the steely, cathartic opener The Deal; the rose-eyed Born in June; the steamed-up Mirror In The Sunrise; and the twilit love letter he calls Eve Of The Morning.

Lead singles Two Trees (a greyscale waltz in which Singer admittedly goes “full klezmer”) and So, It Is (a jaunty recollection of sun-faded interactions) set the energetic extremes, with Singer’s band driving the rhythms up and down the greenery of his lyrical range.

Recorded in July 2023 at Micah Erenberg’s Secret Beach studio in Matlock, Manitoba, the picaresque album came together in a single lakeside day, thanks in large part to the instrumental capabilities of Singer’s band, a supporting cast without whom no album would exist at all.  Percussionist Ben Stokes (JayWood, Lev Snowe, Julien’s Daughter) is steady as they come. Bassist Sam Fournier is the ultimate accompanist. Pianist Holly Stratton plays with magic. Dan Russell’s pedal steel is perfectly deployed. Nathan Krahn’s cello is hauntingly present. And Gage Salnikowski’s violin arrives like a crescent moon on the horizon.

Co-starring Erenberg’s production and Riley Hill’s engineering, and built around Singer’s central character — a dash of Cohen, a pinch of Jonathan Richman, a smidgeon of Tre Burt, and a half-dozen cupfuls of Salisbury House coffee — the pieces all connect, the freight of the lyrical train always proportional to Singer’s heartfelt, soul-wrenching groove.

Get lost in this album, inspired by ancient papers, written under naked skies, along the lonely tracks and fields of glass that line the golden roads to somewhere past and present.”