#11 - John K. Samson - Winter Wheat

John K. Samson - Winter Wheat

Anti, 2016

This is going to sound corny, but the song “Postdoc Blues” is the reason I decided to fully commit to librarianship as a career. Winter Wheat was released in October of 2016 and I applied to Emporia State’s MLS program that month. There’s a line in that song in particular that struck me and continues to strike me every time I hear it:

So take that laminate out of your wallet and read it

And recommit yourself to the healing of the world

And to the welfare of all creatures upon it

Pursue of practice that will strengthen your heart

Samson noted that this is a paraphrase from a book called Active Hope, and this line is the closest I have ever felt to the universe speaking to me. John K Samson is my sage, and has been since I was 15 years old, and hopefully will continue to be in the coming decades. He’s someone whose chill and sensitive but politically engaged worldview I aspire to emulate (and fail miserably at most of the time). Winter Wheat is a much more cohesive record than his solo debut Provincial, and in a way it feels like the fifth Weakerthans LP (no doubt a byproduct of fellow Weakerthans Jason Tait and Greg Smith contributing to the record). This album was particularly helpful to me in the wake of the 2016 election. It was easy to feel hopeless, and this made me feel if not hopeful, that I could do the best I could not to give up. “We know the world is good enough because it has to be,” he sings on the title track. I kept that one with me, and have done my best to stay positive, which hasn’t always worked but at least the current impeachment hearings feel like some sort of payoff even if nothing will come of them. What’s wonderful about Samson/Weakerthans records is that they are built to sustain you in the invariable 4-5 years between releases.

#30 - John K. Samson - Provincial

John K. Samson - Provincial (2012)

Anti, 2012

The Weakerthans were my gateway drug that led me out of my punk rock exclusivity into indie rock’s warm embrace, and as such, John K. Samson is one of my guys. If not THE guy. He’s easily my favorite songwriter and this point in my life I have been a Weakerthans fan longer than I haven’t. His first solo album isn’t the most cohesive effort--it’s comprised of songs from two 7”s released in 2009 and 2010 with 6 brand new songs--but it’s an album I listened to obsessively. It’s also the album I put on at 4 in the morning when we drove to the hospital so that Jenny could give birth to Rosie. I knew it was an important moment, and the DJ in me had to find the right vibe, and I instinctively put on Provincial and didn’t give it a second thought. I knew it was right. Provincial is as good as everything else he has written (which is pretty much all on the same level which is “beyond extraordinary”) but there is a pair of connected songs in the middle of the album–”When I Write My Master’s Thesis” and “Letter in Icelandic From the Ninette San”--that always stop me in my tracks. Set a hundred years apart, “When I Write My Master’s Thesis” is a punchy pop tune about a grad student struggling to finish his Master’s thesis on the Ninette Sanatorium, and “Letter in the Icelandic from the Ninette San” is a melancholy tale told by a man dying of Tuberculosis in the sanatorium. Finding the little ways these songs connect is great, and it ties to the greater themes of connectedness to people, places, and cats named Virtute that dominate Samson’s songwriting.