New York-based singer/songwriter Sam Evian has signed to Oxford, Mississippi-based label Fat Possum Records, marking the occasion with a new single/video, “Easy to Love.” Written and recorded in lockdown after Evian and his partner Hannah Cohen ditched New York City to seek seclusion (and recording sessions) upstate, the song is “the first taste” of “that period of creativity,” wink wink, nudge nudge.
The track is aptly titled, an ebullient jam about opting out of the rat race to find peace and fulfillment in nature. Evian’s falsetto vocals and roaring guitars get taken up a notch by Jon Natchez’s (The War On Drugs) baritone sax and Raymond Mason’s trumpet—their celebratory horns amplify the song’s explosion of positive emotion, which resonates particularly well right now as the light at the end of the pandemic tunnel slowly, steadily grows brighter.
“‘Easy To Love’ was the first song I wrote after moving to upstate NY,” Evian recalls in a statement. “It was springtime and it’s very much about peacing out of Brooklyn with my partner Hannah [Cohen] and falling in love with a new space, new life, and lightening the load coming out of grinding in the city for 10 years. Our first spring up here was euphoric. I’ve never witnessed a forest come to life after winter—the electric greens, bird calls, waterfalls … It was the first time in my adult life that I’d felt such a visceral connection to nature.”
Watch the “Easy to Love” video, directed by Luca Venter and shot near Evian’s new home, below.