Sam Amidon has announced his new record Willing Brother Knowing, out February 26, 2027 via River Lea Records, a division of Rough Trade Records. The album was recorded and produced by Big Thief drummer James Krivchenia and there is a new track ‘Innisfree’ out today alongside a music video directed by Allyn Quigley. Amidon is currently in the midst of a North American tour supporting Hiss Golden Messenger; all remaining dates can be seen below. Willing Brother Knowing is now available for pre-order via River Lea Records.
Listen to ‘Innisfree’ + Watch the Video
Willing Brother Knowing, Sam Amidon’s ninth album, begs the question: Is there an alternative universe where Jimi Hendrix was a teenager in Vermont, in the 90s, and also was obsessed with Irish fiddling while growing up in a family contra dance band at a time when punk-folk was a thing that the kids would have been into, in addition to shape note singing? Because sure, Willing Brother Knowing is a folk LP. It is made of songs and lyrics drawn from folk traditions. But Willing Brother Knowing is also rock and roll; a rock quilt made from folk fabrics. It makes sense when you consider that Sam Amidon is one of the most in-demand collaborators in indie rock today from collaborations with Bon Iver to The National, Beth Orton, Dijon and more as well as serving as Music Advisor and singing coach for the film The History of Sound, starring Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor.
What makes a Sam Amidon album more than just a collection of songs is the emotion he uses to link all the pieces he has assembled, the ruminative glue. What makes these links work so well is his thoughtful restraint, a restraint that amplifies and distorts and changes particularities into abstractions. Willing Brother Knowing seems to start simply, with a children’s song, ‘Daniel in the Lion’s Den’. As the tune begins, Amidon sings the opening refrain, accompanied by tambourine and a straightforward enough guitar, but then, wait! There are drums! Quiet but serious drums, thanks to James Krivchenia, the drummer for Big Thief who produced and mixed this album. And then, when the fiddle jumps in, something has suddenly shifted. The fiddle is listening to the song and playing along with the guitar and the increasingly insistent drum kit, but really the fiddle is playing alongside the song and even around it. For the fiddle, the song is like a trellis, or a ladder, and by the time things heat up for Daniel, if not the lion (“Now is the needy time,” the Amidon sings, because it is the needy time, and still is, really), the fiddle is on fire.
The second track, ‘Hangman’ comes out of the gate in cut-time, drums steaming forward like a powerful old locomotive with a banjo player for an engineer. This time, Amidon is shredding on an electric guitar, as uilleann pipes (Isaac Alderson) fire ahead like a light blazing in the dark. Old-school synthesizers turn the corners of the song; Amidon’s voice frays with warning and dread and maybe a haggard wisdom.
‘China’ is an old shape note hymn, written in Northfield, Massachusetts, by Timothy Swan, in 1790. Swan might today be astounded by Krivchenia’s 6/8 time signature or by Amidon’s arrangement of his own voice in mesmerizing multiples, but he might also have recognized the vocals, at least, for adding to the sad and beautiful gravity of what becomes a ballad: “Why do we mourn departing friends?” The next track, “Hiram Stamper” takes its name from a famous Kentucky fiddler, but beware: it is not a fiddle tune! It is a composition about fiddle tunes, composed (like most fiddle tunes) in two parts, the first an acoustic piano interpolation of an Appalachian fiddle tune, the second part, an electric performance for a sold-out stadium.
With ‘The Snow it Melts,’ Amidon takes us on a strange dream, through seasons and across oceans, and across times. An electric guitar edges the bridge, and a vocoder chorus chants as Amidon sings through the hypnotic aural haze: “So never say me farewell here, no farewell I’ll receive.” (Amidon was reacquainted with Ann Briggs version of this song while working on the soundtrack for the 2025 film “History of Sound.”) ‘Innisfree,’ Amidon’s setting of the W.B. Yeats poem, is the joyous response to some of the old lyrics mourning elsewhere. He replants the 1889 lyric in a contemporary landscape, Alderson drawing out the stanzas with his pipes, Thomas Bartlett (Doveman) dancing in the song’s inexorable margins. “I will arise and go now,” Amidon sings, as if it’s a song for tomorrow.
Yes, Willing Brother Knowing is an album with fiddle tunes, both Irish and Appalachian, and yes, there are old hymns sometimes sung as folk ballads, like ‘Vineyard,’ and another shape note hymn, ‘Dying Californian,’ a gorgeous meditation on mortality by the Amidon’s Rock Unit: guitars, synths, Krivchenia’s loose and groovy cymbals and slightly restrained snare. But it is the synthesis of these things that shape the album. The album concludes with a blowout, ‘Banjo Rock’ – “James’ and my manifesto!” as Amidon describes it – but its centerpiece is ‘Standing in the Doorway’, with that old blues line “Standing in the doorway crying”. It describes a threshold, a place between places – the infrastructure for crossing from one world to the next. Amidon fashions his own lyrics here, and his fiddle keens through pain before bringing the piece home through two old tunes, one American, one Irish. It’s as if he is using his beginnings to point ahead. Which is maybe what folk music helps us do, or maybe just does.
Sam Amidon
Willing Brother Knowing
Willing Brother Knowing album art // high res download here
Track Listing:
01) Daniel In the Lion’s Den
02) Hangman
03) China
04) Hiram Stamper
05) The Snow It Melts
06) Innisfree
07) A Trip to Athlone / The Lonesome Jig
08) Dying Californian
09) Vineyard
10) Blackjack Groove
11) Standing in the Doorway
12) Banjo Rock
Sam Amidon Online
