Acclaimed songwriter Sam Moss has shared, “Wire,” the final single from his upcoming LP Swimming, due out February 7th. “Wire” is a rough textured and weary beauty, featuring wonderful contributions from Isa Burke.
“‘Wire’ is a song about trying to be good while a bit of the dread of the world seeps in. Not a song about a revelatory day, just a song about pacing through a day. Isa Burke, whose electric guitar and harmonies weave throughout the song, really shines here.”
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.”
What do you think of Sam Moss’ “Wire”?
