Sam Burton remembers the negative reviews. It was early 2023, and he was opening for Weyes Blood in the U.K. and Europe. At a Manchester show, one music blog complimented the singer-songwriter’s deep and earthy voice, drawing comparisons to Glen Campbell and Harry Nilsson. But they dismissed his “naff lumberjack shirt,” were irritated by his lack of onstage banter, and found his folk songs to be quite depressing. “You won’t find much flamboyance on the guitar,” the review read. “And each song is relentless.”
Three years later, Burton can only laugh about it. “I got my ass kicked, for real,” he tells Rolling Stone via a Zoom call in October. “It was so funny. I hadn’t toured that much, and they were just lighting me up. They were like, ‘This guy’s boring! He sucks! Bad guitar player, and blah, blah, blah.’” But instead of taking it to heart, Burton took it as an opportunity to improve his set. The 35-year-old studied guitar, observing solo acoustic performances by Neil Young (particularly his legendary 1971 Massey Hall performance) and Bert Jansch, and began making jokes and chatting with the audience. “I was like, ‘I’m just going to be myself,’” he recalls.
He applied that same advice to his new album Fairweather Friend, out now via Captured Tracks. It’s Burton’s third record, but it’s bound to be his breakthrough — an intimate collection of dazzling folk songs that wrestle with concepts like peace and feeling at home, and the realization that they’re often found within. But getting here wasn’t easy. The Los Angeles songwriter had to overcome several challenges, like getting dropped by his label, ending relationships, financial instability, and even a near-death experience. “I really lost everything trying to pay for this record,” he says. “And I really put everything I had into it.”
As Burton admits, his 2023 album Dear Departed was a flop. He was dropped by Partisan, a decision he felt was mutual. “One of their rules was you can’t make folk music,” he says of the label. “And I was like, ‘I don’t even know what that means.’” He then signed with Captured Tracks, and linked up with his Dear Departed producer Jonathan Wilson (known for his longtime collaboration with Father John Misty) to get to work on his next record. “I was just like, ‘I don’t want to flop again,’” he remembers. “‘I don’t want to put something out that I’m not satisfied with.’” He puts it another way, when describing the Fairweather Friend sessions: “I drove everybody fucking crazy.”
Burton re-recorded the 11 songs several times, even admitting he cut the sparkling title track “in five different studios with five different bands.” The budget this time around was smaller, and money was tight. He had to move out of his house in L.A., staying with friends until he briefly moved back to his family’s home in Utah. “I kind of went broke doing this,” he says.
It was a hectic time for Wilson, who’d just had a baby and was doing construction on his Topanga, California, home. “I love him,” Burton says. “He would have a headlamp on all the time in the studio, and he’d be fixing the sink and doing the floors,” he says. “I’d be like, ‘Hey, can you come in here and put this guitar down?’” In the end, Burton ended up re-recording half the project at his drummer Pierce Gibson’s studio in Echo Park. Unlike Dear Departed, he produced part of the album himself. “That was good for me,” he says. “Because I realized the difference between who I was on both records.”
That difference was big. In 2022, Burton was in a near-fatal car accident, when he was driving his band home from shows around St. George, Utah. A speeding car swerved into his lane to avoid a parked cop car in the other, and Burton hit the brakes, spinning out and hitting the police car. “A lot of miracles happened,” Burton says. “The policeman just happened to be outside of his car and was able to jump over the guardrail, so I didn’t kill a police officer. There was this steel thing in the middle of the van that basically saved our lives, and if we would’ve hit at a different angle, we’d all be dead.”
Though it wasn’t his fault, he had immense guilt afterwards, and experienced panic attacks on the road. He also had a falling out with a bandmate who was in the car at the time of the crash. “He didn’t take it well at all,” he says. “He was upset with me, and so we parted ways. I looked up to him a lot. So when we split, I had to find myself more as an artist, and I had to move on from losing a very dear friend of mine. So it was a very crazy time, and so it just caused a lot of jealousies and grief that transpired into a whole new way of living in L.A.”
That period in L.A. was, at times, packed with tension, reflected in songs like “Picture People” and “After Days Slip Away” (“Never thought I’d be back this way/Feeling like I do today,” he sings on the former). And as a Palestinian-American, he felt anger at L.A. musicians not speaking out about the Israel-Gaza conflict. “They speak up about everything, and no one was talking about it,” he says. “So I was like, ‘There are things that are more important in life.’ Maybe I can’t look to the people around me to always make me feel like home. And I can’t stay resentful. I have to be at peace [within] myself. So the songwriting really helped me with that.”
Singer-songwriter Haylie Davis, who was also in the car accident, sings on Fairweather Friend (Burton produced her recent debut Wandering Star, and appears in her music video for “Country Boy”). “When I heard her songs, I was like, ‘Holy shit. This girl’s a prodigy,’” he says. “I know for a fact she’s going to be a legend one day. She’s so fucking good.”
In addition to Weyes Blood, Burton has opened for artists that include Aldous Harding, Alice Phoebe Lou, Indigo Sparke, and more (he jokes that he’s gotten a lot of these gigs through tarot reading, which he began doing in the pandemic). But with the release of Fairweather Friend, he’s hoping to play some headlining shows — lumberjack shirts and all. “I really want to just go for it,” he says, adding what sounds like an introspective line off Fairweather Friend: “If you just keep opening, you’ll never really crack through.”
