Sam Barber’s sophomore album Broken View is, in fact, broken in many ways. It primarily consists of nonspecific lyrics, predictable four-chord progressions, and ill-defined chorus melodies that consistently seem to move in a single downward direction.
But Sam Barber is playing by a set of rules for this album that are fairly unique for the country genre. Hours before the album’s release, Mr. Barber wrote on social media:
“I know where it came from. You can decide what it means.”
A cynical reader might classify this as a self-conscious way for an untrained musician to pass off vague storytelling and undisciplined songwriting as an intentional artistic choice.
The French impressionist Edgar Degas once said something very similar to this pre-release social media caption: “Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.” And if we choose to agree with the words of a great master and accept the intention of Sam Barber, then this album is a success.
Broken View, as defined by its author and backed up by everything from its album art to its final song, is an impressionist work whose elements empower the listener to interpret the stories and extrapolate meaning.
There are no fine brush strokes, and the songs are far from photo-realistic. Instead, the musical colors bleed into one another, tension builds over time, and brief moments of lyrical clarity invite the listener’s participation and ultimately lead to a deeper emotional experience.
The album’s opening line is a great example:
Achy hands, I wake up to find
This ain’t a one-way frozen street, we’re on borrowed time
These are vivid, specific, narratively-oriented lyrics that suggest more than they describe: bleary eyes, cold mornings, the particular exhaustion of someone who looks like he may have survived a winter or two.
But the narrative never fully arrives. It’s a vignette. A single moment of clarity before the curtains are redrawn and the colors bleed back together. Expectation meets restraint, and the listener faces a choice: disengage, or search for something in the gaps. Those who choose to opt in become participants and are rewarded with something more personal than a conventional song could offer.
The album art is, fittingly, an impressionist photograph. Do you see a snapshot of a prairie landscape as seen from a moving vehicle or two windswept figures? For better or worse, the picture is up to interpretation by the viewer.
The same is true of every song on this album. What’s remarkable is that, despite the nonspecific lyrics and unconventional structure, Sam Barber always manages to convey the feeling, wherever it came from, directly to the listener. “Just a Kid” is the clearest example of how.
The lyrics don’t tell a coherent story, the melody is unmemorable, and the opening chord progression is unremarkable.
It’s the macro view that intrigues. As the song continues, tension grows. We move up a melodic staircase, and the production expands. Nearly two minutes pass, and just like that, it fades. Supposedly, we’ve arrived at the second verse, but it’s unclear how we got there. Does this song have a chorus? What was all that tension leading to?
Maybe that’s exactly the point.
“Just a Kid” is not a song about a specific moment or a specific person. It’s a song about what it feels like to be young and to have these incredibly intense emotions that lack direction. To not know what you want, only that you have this overwhelming urge to want something. Being ‘just a kid’ feels like chaos, noise, and blurriness.
Debussy invented musical impressionism for exactly this reason. His compositions didn’t follow the rules of conventional tension and resolution. They created an atmosphere, evoked feeling, and they trusted the listener to interpolate the story within the space he left open. Sam Barber is doing the same thing. An undefined melody and an unresolved chorus aren’t failures of craft. They are the craft.
“The More I Hope” succeeds in a similar paradoxical way. The technical elements are ham-fisted: the chorus melody is flat, the guitar strum pattern uninspired, and the song is structured like a mid-album track on a mid-2010s Mumford & Sons record. Up close, the brushwork looks juvenile, even amateurish. But this track finds power in the extra-musical qualities. The fuzzy guitar tone and Barber’s passionate delivery are a pleasure to listen to.
The decision to continuously build tension and withhold resolution achieves a similar effect to that of “Borrowed Time”. It works. The message of this song is that the more you hope and build tension inside yourself, the less you find satisfying resolution.
Like getting behind the wheel after smoking a joint, this album will occasionally snap the listener into a sudden moment of clarity and ask, “Have I looked out the front windshield once in the last twenty minutes?”
The effect is an enveloping trance, not boredom.
Broken View will not be for everyone. There will be listeners who squint their ears, search for the hook, wait for the payoff, and walk away empty-handed. All told, that is a valid response.
But for those willing to step back, participate, and bring something of themselves to the listening experience, this album will find a place inside you that more technically accomplished records might never reach.
