Sam Weber

Canada, Los Angeles, Portland: Sam Weber has been a modern cowboy riding into the next sunset. The Pacific Northwest has hosted the songwriter’s most productive chapter: two full-length albums, his sixth and seventh, in the first half of the year. The first, Deus Cowboy, lived a brief life online, disappearing from streaming services just a week after its release. Shape Confused Cowboy Be You — more recognizably “Sam” to his post-Americana audience — still rides as Weber embarks on an ambitious tour that occupies most of 2025.

Ask Sam what Shape Confused Cowboy Be You means and he’ll direct you to the music. And no explanation is needed — you can hear the dimension of his work across his entire catalogue. He crafts dodecahedrons from song that feel progressive enough to live in their own world, yet hold a familiar resonance that places him in the continuum of the greats — a fellow keeper of the flame, Grammy winner Madison Cunningham, will feature two Sam Weber co-compositions on her next album. His long list of collaborators and packed touring schedule says Weber is due for his place in the sun. For now, the brim of a George Strait Signature is providing the shade.

This LP feels like a culmination of Sam’s efforts as much as the harbinger of what’s next. This is no pastoral throwback album. Nor does it pretend to usurp another genre’s legacy with western ornamentation. Songs like “cowboy-3.com” and “back-on-the-ranch.com” suggest that Weber has his eyes on the prairie, but “used001.art,” among other tracks, shows he’s looking inward to see the future:

A shot rings wide and the pressures rise

From a car or a gun a combustion heading somewhere for someone

You better get used to it it’s a strange new world

This album is full of poetics, and is a striking musical statement. Counting Portland folkie Anna Tivel (singing with voice and fiddle) and Dawes drummer Griffin Goldsmith among its personnel, Shape Confused Cowboy Be You is a quiet storm shifting from narrow drum machines to grand sweeping strings. Still, shouldering the load is Weber’s adroit musicianship as a multi-instrumentalist, delivering complex piano chords and wiry guitar lines.