Sam Evian
You, Forever

The sun mingles with the fresh bora in a late September with ghostly outlines. The strong wind becomes almost physical, you can feel it hardening your face. So strong it gives shape to what it encounters along the way, taking on a menacing sound. Here we know well what it means: cover yourself, otherwise, you'll visit the bathroom more often. Or better yet, the season changes, without knocking the expected guest from the east returns. The sunlight becomes softer and the clouds expand, spreading across the sky.

These are rare days, the plants still green, the mountain peaks bare, the bugs haven't yet slipped into the crevices. Outside, it's just right, neither hot nor cold, even people don't complain.

Yet inside something begins to grind, something intangible, I simply call it melancholy, because when autumn knocks, I can't grasp its changes. The magic of an unexpected wind bringing a new language to the plants remains unknown to me.

This is the time of year when I need candid and delicate listening. Music that reconciles me with the drama of surrounding changes. Sam Evian cradles me at his best, he seems to have made the magic of the air that lashes these days his own. He expresses in sounds sensations suspended between joy and sadness, perhaps it's up to us to interpret them according to the colors of the inner season.

You, Forever lasts the time of an intense memory, it accompanies you and while shaping your emotions, it knows how to hurt you gently. Evian is a kid who knows how to navigate through sweet and playful psychedelia but doesn't hide a certain sharpness. Forms of discomfort masked as dreams or perhaps vulnerabilities laid bare.

He draws mainly from the '70s: folks like Jackson Browne but also the rarefied atmospheres of more recent songwriters like Elliott Smith (listen to Apple or Next to You). The title track is very beautiful, with a lesson on how to play a guitar tragically. The album holds up well from beginning to end but the first half I find enchanting.

Thank you Sam Evian for existing for me at this precise time of year, you are like my brother's two sizes too big and faded sweater that kept me warm on these days when the sun started to falter.