Sam Carter 1st Oct 2022

Midlands-born guitarist and songwriter Sam Carter has earned a reputation for vivid, narrative-driven songwriting and captivating live performances. He is a highly-regarded instrumentalist, renowned by many as “the finest English-style fingerpicking guitarist of his generation” (Jon Boden). Over the past fifteen years, Sam has made appearances on national TV, won a BBC Folk Award, and has toured the world, sharing stages with some of folk’s leading lights, including Richard Thompson, Eliza Carthy, Martin Simpson and Nancy Kerr.

Sam’s albums and live shows attest to his flair for powerful, keenly observed songwriting and his love for British and American traditional folksong. In 2012 he gave a spell-binding performance on Later… with Jools Holland, playing songs from the shape-note influenced album The No Testament, accompanied by fiddler Sam Sweeney. Sam continues to innovate within the tradition alongside Jim Moray in Folk Award-nominated electro-folk band False Lights, who released their second album Harmonograph to wide acclaim in 2018. 

When Sam envisioned his solo fourth album Home Waters as ‘a search for a sense of belonging and stability in unfamiliar territory’, he couldn’t have known how prescient that would turn out to be. Recorded pre-pandemic in a converted church in rural Northumberland by producer and multi-instrumentalist Ian Stephenson (Kan, Baltic Crossing, Andy May Trio), Sam’s live acoustic guitar and vocals sit at the heart of the album. Many of his performances were left unadorned, while Stephenson’s cinematic string arrangements created the rich emotional landscapes on other tracks. Released during lockdown in May 2020, Home Waters brought solace to many and was heralded as ‘an album full of quiet pleasures by a musician at the top of his game’ (R2 Magazine).