Sam Evian Takes a Plunge

The origins of Sam Evian’s new album, Plunge, began on New Year’s Eve 2022. The New York musician had just finished building Flying Cloud Recording, a studio up in the Catskills, in a barn on his property—refurbishing some mid-1970s equipment—and had all of his friends, including Sufjan Stevens, Liam Kazar, Sean Mullins, Phil Weinrobe and Adrianne Lenker out to christen the space. It was, as Evian calls it, a “blowout” with about 40 people cutting it up in the upstate woods, letting off fireworks and taking cold plunges in a nearby creek. “The goal was to do something,” he says. “I didn’t really know if it was going to be fruitful or if it was going to turn into the record that it did, but it was just to gather beautiful friends and gather under the name of starting the year out with a creative endeavor. I’m always scheming, in terms of how to get people in the right place to make something beautiful and document something. I guess it’s kind of my job as a record producer, or whatever.”

“I had just finished renovating this barn, which took a long time and was quite a labor of love,” Evian continues, “and I filled it with a pretty neat little collection of gear. It was this celebration that I was planning. I just finished basically rebuilding the console, which is like working on vintage cars—just looking for old parts and sourcing stuff on eBay and talking to weird people in Eastern Europe. Everything was leading up to the fact that I knew I wanted to do a session of my own in the new space that I had sunk blood, sweat and tears into for the last several years. It’s a great way to start out the new year, a creative project that doesn’t have any expectations.”

For the next 10 days, Evian, Kazar, Mullins, Santiago Mijares, Megan Lui, Hannah Cohen, Weinrobe, Michael Coleman, Zhana Whyche, Casio Coleman, El Kemper and Dan Lead holed up at Flying Cloud and laid down Plunge, which arrives this week as one of the year’s best rock records thus far. It’s mellow and moody, rife with vibrant chords and Evian’s trademark, dreamy vocals delivered on a pillow of time-worn harmonies from Cohen and Lui. The drums sound platinum, the keys are headstrong yet imbued with a whimsical grace. Kazar’s riffage is so distinct and Evian’s four-string has a certain rhythmic mythicality to it that dares to make the sometimes-solemn, straight-backed gravitas of bass-playing go extinct. Sam Evian is a chameleon; a shape-shifter. No record he makes sounds the same, nor do I suspect he would want them to.

In fact, Plunge marks a stunning turn in Sam Evian’s musicality. Gone are the psych-funk dream-pop elements of his last solo album, 2021’s Time to Melt, in favor of big-hearted rock ‘n’ roll. The record pumps out big riffs and face-melting solos, namely in “Why Does It Take So Long,” which features an early contender for the year’s best shred—courtesy of Lenker who, according to Evian, “came by and blessed the session.” The link-up—and Plunge’s general instrumental tapestry—makes sense, given that Evian co-produced, co-engineered and briefly performed on Big Thief’s 2022 masterpiece Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You. You can hear the dazed, freewheeling and kaleidoscopic six-string energy on songs like “Little Things” and “Blue Lightning” all across Plunge, especially on “Wild Days” and “Wind Blows.” Plunge sounds a lifetime separated from Time to Melt, landing somewhere in the same continuum as Evian’s 2018 gem You, Forever.

“That session definitely rubbed off on me, it was really special,” Evian says. “Every session has an effect, and I feel like I learn something new every time I have people—a band or a solo artist—up here to record, because we’re always experimenting. I feel like I’m always sharpening my tools and just continuing to improve—or at least, I’d hope so. I look at [Plunge] as a celebration. It was a gathering; a document of all of these people in a room. And that was the opposite of [Time to Melt], which was COVID in 2020 and me alone experimenting. I look at Plunge like a continuation of [You, Forever]. It’s a similar palette, a return to form for me. I’ve always written music on guitar, and I’ve always loved guitar music and ‘60s British Invasion and ‘70s American Roots and folk rock. That era has always been a home base for me, but I’m definitely inspired by my peers and my friends and my collaborators.”

With a new studio, old friends and no pre-calculated destinations in tow, Evian and his collaborators were able to create a band-in-the-room record that sounds as collective as it does autonomous and intentional. “I call those people in because I love what they do, and the mindset was to accept what they do in the moment and not try to change it or alter it—or try to make it something that was more in my own vision,” he says. “I think, as a result, the record is communal and it does sound like a document of that space that we conjured. Whereas, in the past, I’ve been a little bit more tied to certain ideas I had about arrangements or guitar sounds or parts. I think this one, I purposely played bass on most of it, because I wanted to step into the rhythm section and let people speak out with their instrumental voices in ways that I wouldn’t anticipate. [Plunge] has everyone’s imprint in there; it’s got a lot of cool DNA.”

Sam Evian’s transition from guitar to bass was a fruitful one, and he recorded his vocals live for all of Plunge—thanks to some terse guidance from Lenker, especially on “Why Does It Take So Long.” “It was the first night, and Adrianne was here and I had been talking to her all the night before about the vision I had and bringing people up,” Evian says. “She has this really quiet and direct way of telling you the truth that you need to hear, and she was like, ‘Well, if you’re gonna play bass, you should be singing live.’ We’re in the studio and tape’s getting ready to reel up and we had been rehearsing under the idea that I would put down a scratch vocal and go back and re-record the vocal later, but Adrianne was like, ‘No, you sound great. You need to do it this way.’ I had to commit in the moment, because when Adrianne tells you to do something, you don’t not do it.” In turn, Evian ran his vocals through a guitar amp in the room and let loose—and it worked. There was one caveat to the decision, though. “The agreement was ‘All right, I’ll sing it fully live and we’ll commit to this in the moment, but [Adrianne], you gotta do a guitar solo at the end,’” Evian continues. And that she did.

Bass guitar has become Evian’s main instrument over the years—so much so that he calls it “the producer’s instrument.” “It guides the tempo, the feel,” he says. “It has melodic and rhythmic information, and it’s a secret way to guide a band into sounding a certain way.” On some of the records that have come to life at Flying Cloud over the last few years—like Kazar’s Due North, Windowspeak’s Plum and Cohen’s Welcome Home—Evian has been playing bass because it’s “the nature of the work” that he’s doing at the studio. Before making the transition from the axe he used on Premium through Time to Melt, he picked up some tricks from his longtime bassist Brian Betancourt and used them as stepping stones when jumping into the space of Plunge. “It’s a great way to sit back and listen and see how the band’s feeling and know, immediately, if something’s not working—because you’re the foundation of the house,” Evian adds.

When I’m on Zoom with Evian, he’s at Flying Cloud “tying up some loose ends” by “shaking out the cobwebs” on his guitar the day before embarking on a UK and France tour. After spending so much time playing bass, his appreciation for the instrument he cut his teeth on has only continued to grow. “I’ve become more and more devoted to playing as rhythmically as possible,” Evian says. “And I think that comes from bass-playing. Your goal is to define the feel, and a guitar can do that in a way, too, but with the bass, you just get so accustomed to listening in a different way and really fitting in with the drummer and making the rhythm section glue.” Evian takes a lot of inspiration from John Lennon’s rhythm guitar-playing—as evidenced by the Get Back-style influence of Plunge’s making—and has grown to appreciate the former Beatles’ techniques more and more the further he gets away from slide or lead performances. “I’m just trying to make everything feel good,” he adds. “A lot of people say it doesn’t matter what you do with your fretting hand, it only matters what you do with your strumming hand and where you put the notes.”

Merely scratching the surface of Plunge’s backstory, Evian titled the record after the cold plunges every day while he was making it—along with his general love of the word and what it connotes. While TikTok creators have been making it a habit of doing cold plunges every day for muscle recovery and mood balance, Evian’s relationship to the freezing dives stems from his struggling relationship with alcohol. “Sometimes I have a tough time not drinking,” he says, “and I did it to try and curb my alcohol intake. I felt like doing something that was extreme would be a good substitute. I had read a bit about the mental benefits that you get from it and, of course, with alcohol, I’m just treating myself for symptoms of depression. The cold plunge, it was an off-chance I took. I was like, ‘I’m just gonna try it’ and it was super effective. It’s a chemical shift for your brain and your body.” While he was cold-plunging, Evian quit drinking for a couple of months, quit craving alcohol and saw a distinct mental clarity and uptick in energy. In a lot of ways, it helped him curb the seasonal depression that, while making Plunge, was always lingering.

The album is Sam Evian’s most personal yet, as he cycles through singing from his, his mother’s and his father’s perspectives. His parents, late in their marriage, started to drift apart and, at one point, separated—only to recently return to one another in a home in Woodstock. Plunge is, at its softened core, a meditation on leaving. But it’s also a meditation on coming back. “It’s a Friday night in a different skin, baby,” he sings on “Rollin’ In”; “You’re carrying all the weight of the world,” he waxes on “Stay.” “Put it all by you, let it down, I want you to know that you’re safe here. I want you to stay here, by my side.” Taking the music he and his father—who has survived cancer twice—listened to ages ago, like Todd Rundgren and Harry Nillson, there’s an emotional backbone met by a warm harbor of safety in familiar influences. Plunge is the type of record that Evian couldn’t have made six or seven years ago—and he knows it, too.

“I’m growing as a person,” he says. “My emotional intelligence is growing—hopefully—and I’m trying to be even more present with the material that I’m presenting. And I take it for granted even less than I did then. I think it’s unique to where I am now and what I’m able to write about. And I just hope that, as I continue the practice of songcraft, I can keep digging deeper into the well, of course.”

Plunge is a unique entry in the contemporary rock ‘n’ roll canon, largely because it sounds indelibly like a Sam Evian record while also boasting subconscious winks at mid-1970s rock radio—landing somewhere between something the Eagles might have sold a few-million copies of and a Big Pink outtake. Evian is scared of being a revivalist, though, not wanting to lean too far into that space just because he adores guitars and largely works on analog recording equipment. Take a song like “Jacket,” for instance: It’s primed to be pouring out of car speakers all summer based on Kazar’s devilishly handsome opening riff alone. It has Sgt. Pepper’s-era “la-la-la-la”s that never quite feel like facsimiles, and that’s thanks to Evian’s ability to inject a freewheeling hypnosis into the recording space. Vintage equipment be damned, Plunge is one of the first modern albums that so effortlessly sounds like a 2024 project while wearing its influences on its sleeve. There’s a strut of confidence from Evian and his band working overtime here, proving that trust and clarity is timeless. Listening to Plunge, the idea that rock ‘n’ roll is dead has never felt more dated.

“I love guitar music and I always will, and Plunge is a statement that, if it’s dead, then that’s fine. I’m still gonna make it and enjoy it,” Evian says. “And I’m sure there might be a niche of people that would get in that boat with me. The idea of something being dead, it’s funny—because it feels like things are recycled more than ever now. And proclaiming the end of something is just the same as proclaiming the beginning. The internet is a wild space, and the only thing that’s scary to me is not the end of a genre or a type of instrument. It’s just A.I.”

Evian isn’t the only artist fearing what A.I. might turn the contemporary musical landscape into five to 10 years down the line, and conversations around the ethics of it will only ramp up as using it becomes more and more accessible to folks across the board. But artificial intelligence could never replicate what he and his friends are doing on Plunge. Whether it’s the raw, jangled mercy of “Wild Days” or the off-kilter melody (provided by Casio Coleman’s Hammerspinet locked in with Kazar’s bluesy smoke) of “Runaway,” Plunge sounds like it was made without a computer even in spitting distance. And, when putting together an ensemble or making a record, Evian—like the producer he is—prefers to take on the role of the weakest link and surround himself with outstanding people who, every step of the way, are inspiring him to, coincidentally, take a plunge into someplace new with his playing.

“I love these people so much. They’re not only my colleagues, but they’re my best friends and I have so much respect for their art and what they do with their lives and music,” he says. “I just want to lift these people up and make more work with them and help them make their own work. Continuing that by, at the top of the year, getting them up here to do that was just a way of continuing our creative relationship. And it was really fulfilling. And, of course, there were tedious moments, where it’s like, ‘Oh, I don’t think we quite have this year. Let’s rework it.’ But I feel so lucky to know them and get to spend time with them. I’m at this point in my life where, if someone gave me a magic wand, I know exactly what to do with it.”

Matt Mitchell reports as Paste‘s music editor from their home in Columbus, Ohio.