Sam Baker has a simple philosophy. "You do what you can with what you've got," says the Austin, Texas-based, singer-songwriter whose work is beginning to make big waves. "And if you start looking at what you don't have, well, you're lost."
An upbeat character whose conversation is punctuated at regular intervals with easy laughter, Baker has reason to count his blessings. In 1986, while he was visiting Peru, a terrorist bomb exploded on the train that was about to take him to the Inca city of Machu Picchu. The German family sitting opposite him and with whom he had been sharing typical tourist chat were all killed. Baker passed out, came to on the operating table and felt sure that he wouldn't survive either.
His recovery was slow. His left femoral artery had been severed and his left hand was, he says, "badly chopped up". Following emergency surgery in Peru, he had to undergo 17 corrective operations back home in Houston. At first he couldn't walk or feed himself and for a long time he expected every room and every car he sat in to blow up.
Eventually, he got back to work. Before the incident he'd been a carpenter and a rafting guide. But he found a job in a bank and in his spare time he began writing short stories to try to make sense of what had happened to him.
"It's a surreal experience, of course, because we're not living in that kind of situation all the time," he says. "One minute everything is normal and safe and I'm speaking to this German kid who's translating for his mum and dad, who are sitting so close our knees are almost touching. Then suddenly this red backpack in the rack above the mum explodes. It blows her head off. The kid is pinned to his seat by shrapnel through his chest and I can't breathe with the force of the explosion. I remember thinking, This is it. I'm not going to make it'."
The long-term physical consequences for Baker were complete deafness in one ear and only 70% hearing in the other, and when he got back to playing the guitar, he had to adapt to playing left-handed.
"I wasn't exactly a virtuoso before. I'd had piano lessons as a kid because my mum played piano and organ in the church, and there was always music in the house," he says. "But I soon gave up music for baseball and football until I was about 19, and then I bought a guitar in a pawn shop and taught myself. That was terrible, though. Your hands hurt and it sounds dreadful." Looking back, the songs he began writing in his 20s were, he says, pretty awful, too.
"They were all that kind of I love you and you don't love me' thing and it wasn't until the year 2000 that I decided to try to get serious," he says.
Writing fiction had given him what he considers his most valuable tool: the ability to pare down words and just accept that sometimes it's necessary to take something he's laboured over for hours, if not days, and "boot it out the door".
The songs on his first album, Mercy, which came out in 2004, were so sparse that even their titles consist of only one word. It's an approach that has worked, though. Radio 2's Bob Harris has just pronounced Baker's second album, Pretty World, one of the albums of the year.
"I'm not trying to capture whole lives in these songs," says Baker. "They're just moments, because you can cover so much in two or three minutes. Something can happen, as I know from that train in Peru, in a flash and you have the basis for a story right there. I often start out with a lot of stuff and start peeling away, and if I can get it so that there's not one phrase that annoys me and where every word carries a lot of implication without sounding false, then I'm happy."
With his hearing difficulties, taking his songs on to the stage hasn't been easy. But with a guitar style that he describes as "three chords and a cloud of dust, but I'm working on getting more expressive", he has persevered. He's due to play his first concerts in Scotland later in the year and says that since live performing is part of the reality of being a singer-songwriter, he can't let physical problems become an obstacle.
"When it's quiet and the onstage sound is good, I'm OK," he says. "At other times, it's like experiencing the Braille equivalent of music.
I know when it feels right through my hands and my vocal cords. In the end, though, if you have something to say, you have to do it and find ways of working round whatever comes along. If it doesn't all fall apart, that's great."
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