When: 7.30pm on Tuesday 12 September 2023
Where: Gullivers, 109 Oldham Street, Manchester, M4 1LW

We’re delighted to welcome Sam Burton back to Manchester – with guests Chris Brain and James Shakeshaft!

Los Angeles-based singer Sam Burton has shared a new song and video for I Don’t Blame You, taken from his upcoming album Dear Departed (out 14 July via Partisan). Subtle fingerpicking drifts through time and space, ultimately resolving into a cinematic climax of strings, angelic backing vocals, and cymbal crashes – anchored as always by Sam’s velvet-lined vocals. Throughout the song and video, Burton finds beauty in wandering, using the journey itself as a means of self-discovery and rebirth.

Burton says: ‘This song was one that stuck out to me when I was writing the songs for this record. I felt like I found a hypnotic rhythm that transported me and it felt inspired by the landscape that I was staying in. I started to see imagery in my mind and I tried to capture the spirit of it. This song brings me back to that place in Northern California and makes me see the forest and the rivers. I think it’s so important for a writer to have an inner world they can go back to to reconnect with themselves and this song revealed that place to me.’

Dear Departed was produced by Jonathan Wilson (Angel Olsen, Father John Misty, Margo Price), and recorded at Wilson’s Topanga Canyon studio with some of the best studio players in LA. From the production to the performances to Burton’s core compositions, there’s a timelessness across its ten songs. Together with Wilson, Burton is able to achieve a sound that never descends into retro pastiche, but rather becomes an evocative echo, a dream of the past. Like Sam and his band are crammed onto the corner stage of a smoke-filled bar in a long-lost time. Recalling a modern-day Campbell, Orbison or Nilsson, the album showcases Burton’s inherent knack for mining pure Laurel Canyon AM gold. In scope, the music finds Burton using a far bigger canvas than on his acclaimed 2020 debut I Can Go With You, giving the emotions therein a new sense of urgency and intensity. I Don’t Blame You follows previous album highlights Long Way Around and Maria.

Burton has also confirmed a run of headline international dates. Burton will perform at End of the Road Festival in the UK later this summer, and will play a pair of hometown release shows in LA at Gold Diggers. In the last year Burton has toured with Loving, Jose Gonzalez, Weyes Blood and Indigo Sparke.

Main support comes from Chris Brain. Chris Brain emerged out of Leeds’ vibrant folk scene in 2022 with his debut, critically acclaimed and widely distributed album, Bound to Rise, reaching #22 in the UK Folk Charts. His much-anticipated second album (out 6 October), Steady Away, moves inward and takes on a more self-reflective quality, whilst retaining glimmers of soaring figures and pastoral imagery. Brain’s distinctive warm vocal and finger-picked guitar style are sustained alongside expansive strings and delicate piano arrangements, taking shape through evolving and introspective impressions on tenderness, loss, pain and awe in nature.

Opening the show is James Shakeshaft. James Shakeshaft is a musician/songwriter from and working in Leeds. His music channels the drifting melody of John Cale’s Vintage Violence and other influences like the reverb soaked vocals of Lee Hazlewood. With a love of songwriters who are simple and true, James brings this all together in his unique writing style, voice and use of harmony. Over the past few years he’s played steel guitar in New Orleans’ Esther Rose’s band, touring with the likes of Pokey LaFarge as well as performing as a multi-instrumentalist in local bands alongside writing and performing his own material regularly at venues like the Brudenell Social Club. He recently formed ‘The Groupe’ – a band with which to perform his songs featuring Tom Kelly of Eagles and Harry Clowes.

Buy tickets now. 

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