Plunge is Sam Evian's 4th studio album, and the debut on his new imprint Flying Cloud Recordings/Thirty Tigers set for release on March 22, 2024. Joined by his closest friends and collaborators (including Liam Kazar, Sean Mullins, El Kempner of Palehound and Adrianne Lenker of Big Thief), the album was tracked live to tape in the early winter months of 2023 over a 10-day period at his quaint Flying Cloud Recording studio tucked away in the Catskills Mountains. With a wide-open recording approach, the result is Evian’s best album to date: a cathartic rock record that melds power pop, iridescent guitar, raucous psychedelia, and Sam’s now sought-after grooves. The music is both fresh and familiar, sonically inspired by his penchant for early 70s production and creatively propelled by the free-spirited process depicted in the Beatles documentary Get Back, as well as his urge to let go. “No-one knew the songs or what the plan was. We kept it loose and fun. This was the spirit of the sessions. No headphones, no playback, minimal overdubs, or bleed. Fast and loose” Evian remarks. Lyrically, Plunge is heavier than previous records, touching on themes surrounding his family, from unearthing past traumas, to celebrating his parents’ creative influence on his life. “Relationships stalling, failing, coming back together,” says Evian. It is an album about love. It’s an homage to true love finding its way home, even if it takes a bit of a beating along the way.

TRACK LISTING

1. Wild Days
2. Jacket
3. Rollin' In
4. Why Does It Take So Long
5. Freakz
6. Wind Blows
7. Runaway
8. Another Way
9. Stay

Sam Evian knew he wanted to leave New York City almost as soon as he arrived, more than a decade ago. An upstart songwriter and producer, he, of course, loved its creative wellspring—the ideas, the instrumentalists, the energy. But he’d grown up in the woods of upstate New York and, later, along the coast on the rather empty eastern end of North Carolina. The city was expensive, anxious, and unsettling, however inspiring it could be.

So in the Summer of 2017, he and his band decamped to a rented house upstate to cut his second album, the magnetic You, Forever. He then realized he could no longer resist the urge; two years ago, Sam and his partner, Hannah Cohen, split from the city, building their refuge in the quiet of a Catskills town. That reflective, relaxing environment inexorably shaped Time to Melt, his third LP and debut for Fat Possum. A glowing set of soulfully psychedelic pop gems, Time to Melt is a testimonial to the life and wisdom to be found when you give yourself the mercy of space.

During the last decade, Sam has become a preeminent collaborator, producing and engineering records for the likes of Big Thief, Cass McCombs, and Widowspeak as Sam Owens, his given name. In their new home, he and Hannah hosted bands like house guests as he helmed their sessions. The coronavirus, though, clamped down on those interactions, largely sealing the couple from their longtime scene.

So Sam tried something new: He sorted through more than 60 instrumental demos he’d recorded in the last two years and began shaping the most enticing of them into songs with help from Hannah and a cadre of long-distance friends—Spencer Tweedy, Chris Bear, Jon Natchez, even strangers who sent him voice memos via Instagram. He took the unexpected time at home to dig deeper into his world of sounds and ideas than ever before, calmly considering our moment of prevailing chaos through a lens of newfound distance.

But the last few years have been purely happy for mostly no one, Sam included. Time to Melt reckons with the weight of our time, even when it sounds largely weightless. Inspired by John Coltrane’s mixture of grace and gravitas and Marvin Gaye’s uncanny ability to turn social issues into personal anthems, Sam strove to give these otherwise-beguiling instrumentals the thoughtfulness and depth these days demand.

With its rubbery bassline and sweeping strings, “Freezee Pops” unfurls like a Summer breeze. It reads, though, like poetic testimony on police brutality, an innocent kid’s life plundered for prison-system profits. And “Knock Knock” taps Sam’s memories of race-andclass violence in the small-town South and his subsequent reckoning with our crumbling American façade, where “we tell ourselves almost anything but the truth.” The song is ultimately a tribute to the perseverance of the vulnerable, who find community and joy in spite of the way centuries of miscreants try to deny it.

There are also songs of utter celebration on Time to Melt, paeans to whatever joy it is we find in life or love. Buttressed by bold baritone sax, lifted by exuberant trumpet, and washed in fluorescent guitars, “Easy to Love” is an exultant ode to finding a new paradise outside of the city, an idyllic setting where you can plant love and literally watch it bloom. “Lonely Days” blows in with a muted brooding, but it’s a feint for Sam’s sweet hymn to a blissful partnership of shared solitude, a true blessing for a year when so many have been alone. “Lonely days are gone,” he repeats, his rhythm shifting just enough in the middle of the sentence to tease dejection and surprise with delight. Sam is so content in the Catskills that the lovely but warped “Sunshine” finds him imagining how heartache must feel, as though it were only ever a hypothetical muse. He sublimates a sense of seasick sadness into a compulsively funky oddity.

At home now near the Ashokan Reservoir with their new rescue dog, Jan, Sam and Hannah mostly listen to music while they cook dinner. That’s the kind of record Sam wanted to make —an album of sounds so pleasant and compelling that you put it on and follow the slipstream. He succeeded; Time to Melt is a waking dream, its intoxicating rhythms and timbral webs as settling, even seductive as an evening glass of wine. But making dinner, or whatever your ritual at day’s end may be, isn’t some idle exercise. It’s a place to unpack the pain and wonder, the suffering and promise of the moment, to reflect on where you have been and what might come next. In 40 striking minutes, or the time it may take you to make that meal, Time to Melt sorts through a year of a life spent in rage and hope, lockdown and love.

TRACK LISTING

1. Freezee Pops
2. Dream Free
3. Time To Melt
4. Knock Knock
5. Arnold's Place
6. Sunshine
7. Never Know
8. Lonely Days
9. Easy To Love
10. 9.99 Free
11. Around It Goes

As it has been said: no matter where you go, there you are. With his new album You, Forever, Sam Evian, the project of New York-based musician, songwriter, and producer Sam Owens, is here to add some eternity to that sentiment.

“This is you, forever,” he says. “It’s about accepting that you are responsible for you, that you’re in charge of your actions. Everything you do affects others and yourself, so, no matter what you choose to do, be there and learn from it.”

It’s a mantra that powers self-starter Owens, a producer and sound engineer by trade who entered the scene with his debut Sam Evian full-length, Premium, in the fall of 2016. The notion takes on a dual meaning that is echoed across You,Forever.

“There’s a ton of romance on the record,” he says. “Maybe it’s all romance.”

You, Foreveris Owens’s first foray into a more soul-baring sensibility and places the artist directly in the sightlines and heartlines of his listeners. The album (as well as 2017’s “Need You,” a collaboration with the multi-hyphenate musician Chris Cohen) was written on the heels of his experience touring Premiumwith his band and was recorded across the latter half of last year. The tours—which included opening shows for bands like Whitney, Teenage Fanclub, Luna, Nick Hakim and Lucius—taught him much about feel and interaction. Further fueled by a desire to escape from the glow of screens and to embrace a sense of limitation, he quickly developed a new set of instrumental songs written for a band rather than just himself and recorded them on a Tascam four-track cassette recorder in his parents’ house in North Carolina.

“Just like most people, my recording studio day job had me staring at a computer eight hours a day,” he says. “I just needed to get away from the glowing rectangle. The only way to do that was to work on tape. The four-track is so limiting; you’re forced to get only the bones of the song down. You can’t do any overdubs, so it was fun to work on that with the experience of the live band behind me. And something about playing my family’s instruments in the garage where I grew up spurred a set of songs that became the new record.”

Inspired by these limiting techniques, Owens borrowed an eight-track reel-to-reel tape recorder from a friend, rented a house in upstate New York, and took his band – Brian Betancourt (bass), Austin Vaughn (drums), Adam Brisbin (guitar), and Hannah Cohen (backup vocals) – there to record the new album in July of 2017. Focusing on instrumental grooves and the vibe he had achieved on the original four-track recordings, Owens found the process so enlightening he decided to up the ante yet again by banning tuning pedals from the house.

“Tuning pedals make it so easy to sound good together, so when you eliminate them it takes everything back to the ’60s, which is when all my favorite records were born,” he says. “It makes everything more questionable, weird, and unruly in a really simple way.”

Dreamy album opener “IDGAF” explores the notion of embracing one’s passions and pursuing one’s goals no matter the impositions in their path. On one hand a subtle stand against the current political climate and on another a call to be responsible, Owens calls it a romantic song that embodies his act of self-mixing his record: “I had to put myself aside and let the music happen.”

“Health Machine” is a crunchy, slow-burning but deliberate stomper glowing with warm electric guitar noodling, saxophone wailing, and Owens’s reverb-laden lyrics that he says detail an abstract version of how he relates to his own physical form. “It’s about the unattainable health that I would like to imagine for myself on tour. The line ‘We slither out on a Tuesday feeling tired and hopeless’ is such a hilarious picture: four people in a minivan slithering out of Atlanta, Georgia, stopping at a CVS and getting a bunch of Zicam. Health is your job if you’re touring as a musician, although it’s a job I don’t do so well.”

“Country” is a fleet, nimble driving song written after Owens and his girlfriend (Hannah Cohen, who also sings throughout the album) took a cross-country road trip and encountered what they perceived to be a dust storm in rural Nevada. “For a hundred miles we didn’t see a person or even a tree, then all of a sudden this giant dust cloud appeared which turned out to be ten cowboys on horses lassoing cows. It was the most real thing I’ve ever seen.” In fact, Owens wrote every song on the album with the act of driving-while-listening in mind, and says many of the lyrics came together following that life-changing road trip—the only time he has ever driven across America without anyone waiting on him to show up for a soundcheck. But despite the allure of the transient life, his heart belongs to one place.

“The record is about romance, and about my love for living in New York and trying to separate myself from any idea I had previously of living in New York,” he says. “I’ve kind of designed my own world there.”

Whether behind the wheel in the dust bowls of America, navigating the bustle of his adopted home, playing festival stages with rock legends, or getting back to basics in his parents’ garage, no matter where Sam Evian goes, there he is…forever.

TRACK LISTING

1. IDGAF
2. Where Did You Go?
3. Health Machine
4. Anybody
5. Apple
6. Country
7. Next To You
8. Summer Day
9. Now I Feel It
10. You, Forever
11. Katie’s Rhodes

Premium is the glistening debut album from New York-based Sam Evian. Sam describes the album as; “an analogue dream in a digital world.” Like flowing water, its cool surface entices and refreshes - then reveals hidden emotional depths. The sound of Premium recalls a sunbaked cassette of Pet Sounds or All Things Must Pass, composed with glowing guitar chords, aching pedal steel, Wurlitzers and iconic 20th-century synths. Inspired by the soulful classic sounds of Jackson Browne, Shuggie Otis, Sly and the Family Stone and The Band, as well as contemporary influences such as Cass McCombs, Broadcast, Cate Le Bon, and Chris Cohen, this is music meant for a close-up experience; spacious, dreamy, fun, and disarmingly open and honest.

The music came together quickly when Sam found himself in what he calls, “a premium set of circumstances.” An engineer and producer as well as in-demand guitarist, Sam befriended the founders of Brooklyn’s Figure 8 Studio, Eli Crews and the enigmatic and inspiring Shahzad Ismaily. After helping them to build and wire the studio, Sam explains how he found himself at the centre of a musical community; “I was surrounded by endlessly talented and fun musicians in a beautiful recording environment that I helped build. I felt confident and happy, so the music came together easily.”

That musical community included the group that recorded Premium. The album’s nine songs reflect the casual, relaxed atmosphere Sam created for himself at Figure 8, gathering his friends to record in o¬ff hours, capturing moments of o¬ffhand inspiration and laughter. There was Austin Vaughn on drums (Here We Go Magic, Luke Temple), a long-time friend from North Carolina School of the Arts, and Brian Betancourt on bass (Hospitality, Here We Go Magic, Luke Temple). They were joined by Michael Coleman on keys, a prolific player and producer, as well as being Figure 8’s studio manager. Pedal steel was provided by Dan Iead (Cass McCombs), and recorded at New York’s legendary Magic Shop studios in the days just before it closed. The tracks were some of the very last recordings in the room that had witnessed sessions by David Bowie, the Ramones, Blondie, Real Estate, Kurt Vile and generations of others. Other guest performers include vocalists Cassandra Jenkins and Hannah Cohen, Shahzad Ismaily, Eddie Barbash (the saxophonist on the Colbert show) and Steve Marion (aka Delicate Steve)

TRACK LISTING

1. Sleep Easy 4:19
2. Cactus 3:31
3. Dark Love 4:47
4. Big Car 3:30
5. Carolina 4:03
6. I Need A Man 3:20
7. Summer Running 3:24
8. Golden Skull 2:40
9. Tear 4:49