Sam Baker

Sam Baker comes to McCabe’s Guitar Shop for a solo songwriter set, bringing the spare, unhurried songs and sharply observed characters that define his work. The evening arrives shortly after the release of Survivor, his eighth album and second consecutive record produced by Rodney Crowell. For the album, Crowell selected songs from Baker’s back catalogue and had him rerecord them in a trio format, recasting pieces including “Waves,” “Thursday,” and “Odessa.” At McCabe’s, the performance takes place in the shop’s back-room listening space, where lyrics and acoustic detail are given full attention.

A West Texas songwriter, lyric writer, and visual artist, Baker writes about people at the edges of ordinary life: a ditch digger, a Mennonite welder, a widow returning to the beach. His songwriting draws on literary and musical touchstones including Faulkner, Hemingway, Townes Van Zandt, and Guy Clark. After surviving a 1986 train bombing in Peru and enduring catastrophic injuries and 17 reconstructive surgeries, he taught himself guitar left-handed and upside down while relearning language through writing. His 2024 Crowell-produced album Win Win paired long spoken-word stories with haunting instrumentation. Terry Allen called it “stunning spooky and very beautiful,” while Mary Gauthier described it as “a revelation, storytelling at its finest.”