Timeless, poetic, gentle folk-rock in this eighth solo album by the North Carolina multi-instrumentalist and producer Sam Beam, in warm, tender album with a title that suggests the idea of the impossible yet real, and an earthier, darker, more more tactile companion to his Grammy-nominated 2024 album Light Verse. Both albums were recorded during the same sessions after a year’s-long dry spell, with the same band, at Waystation studio in Laurel Canyon. The cover art, with Beam cast in red light and surrounded by plants, tiny images of animals and insects, and holding a bunch of grapes with sporting a voluminous beard as if some kind of local harvest god, captures the tactile, vivid, physical sensations expressed in these beautiful, delicate songs, such as Roses (“Run into the one you love forever / Laugh into each other’s empty mouth”), the deliciously tender, old-fashioned 70s folk rock vibe of Robin’s Egg (featuring wonderfully warm vocals from Grammy winning indie-folk trio I’m With Her), the Simon & Garkunkel-like Singing Saw, and the swirling multiple sections, violin and rich vocal harmonies of the six-minute odyssey Dates and Dead People. The free-flowing looseness of that track also comes with a jazziness in Defiance, Ohio.
All this is possible with an excellent band comprising David Garza on guitar, Sebastian Steinberg on bass, and Tyler Chester on keyboards, Paul Cartwright on violin, mandolin and other stringed instruments, while Griffin Goldsmith, Beth Goodfellow and Kyle Crane all play drums. Grace Notes, with lovely violin, Paper and Stone, with a tangible feel of late-60s folk, has an theme that comes up more than once: “But for the time we fell in two / You’d be me and I’d be you / One crust of bread could fit in our mouths / You’d breathe in and I’d let it out.” Another gorgeous, but perhaps the standout is former Song of the Day In Your Ocean in which two people become one. Here the lovers are so entwined they physically merge: “Praying for dry ground / Though I only want to drown / When I find myself swimming in your ocean.” Transportive to another, far more beautiful era, with occasional echoes of Cat Stevens in his early 70s golden days, it’s a gorgeous record to escape into. As Beam describes, like the title, it feels “impossible but real”. Out on Sub Pop.
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