Sam Amidon is contemporary folk music’s most knowing interpreter. Assembling field recordings, ancient poetry, oral and instrumental tradition and hymns, his music spans an entire ethos of folk tradition. He grew up in Brattleboro, VT performing traditional Irish music in a family band on his first instrument, the fiddle. He then set his sights on indie rock in the early 2000s, performing and recording in the improvisational free jazz band Stars Like Fleas and supporting singer-songwriter Thomas Bartlett (The Gloaming) on his solo project Doveman. After releasing the defiantly traditional Solo Fiddle (2001), he recorded the immaculately titled But This Chicken Proved Falsehood (2007), Amidon’s first of many full-length collections of folk reworks adorned by his singularly disaffected voice. In a career-spanning collaboration with composer and arranger Nico Muhly, his works have gone from the sparest of arrangements to hall-filling orchestral motifs, but they are often best experienced live and solo, or with a soft percussion.

Amidon’s songs are beautiful, enigmatic, sometimes repetitive, sometimes archetypal, and occasionally esoteric. His interpretations have such gravitas that he has occasionally been asked to interpret his peers, including folk experimentalist Bon Iver. His recordings also sometimes contain reworkings of more newer works, including Yoko Ono and Lou Reed on his latest Salt River.

Amidon is careful not to make his devout reverence for the history of folk and traditional music into a gimmick. Rather, his is a stone in the river of a rich tradition that arrived far earlier, and will continue far after, but is ever so slightly moved and carried forward.

- Liam Prost