Dear Departed [LP]

Dear Departed, the second album from Sam Burton, arose from a time of rebirth. In the last few years, Burton basically started over. He temporarily abandoned the life he’d built in Los Angeles and spent time with friends and family friends in rural Utah and California. After all that time wandering, couch-surfing and writing, Burton emerged with more than enough material for his sophomore outing. He joined up with producer Jonathan Wilson to craft a more intricate, layered sound that recalled the lived-in yet immediate singer-songwriter albums of the ‘60s and ‘70s. Together they achieved a sound that didn’t descend into retro pastiche, but rather became an evocative echo, a dream of the past. In scope, it finds Burton using a far bigger canvas than on his debut, giving the emotions therein a new sense of urgency and intensity. But the album still has an intimacy to it, like Burton and his backing musicians are crammed onto the corner stage of a smoke-filled bar in a long lost time.