"I'm On My Journey Home" Released: October 24, 2024
"Friends and Neighbors" Released: December 12, 2024
"Golden Willow Tree" Released: January 21, 2025
Salt River is the ninth studio album by American singer Sam Amidon. It was released on January 24, 2025, via River Lea Records.[3] It is Amidon's first album release since his 2020 eponymous album, Sam Amidon.
Background
Salt River was produced by American saxophonist Sam Gendel.[2] It features the singles "I'm On My Journey Home",[4] "Friends and Neighbors",[5] and "Golden Willow Tree",[6] which were released on October 24, 2024, December 12, 2024, and January 21, 2025, respectively. Amidon described it as "a campfire, but the campfire is around Sam Gendel's synthesizer".[2]
The Observer rated the album three stars out of five, stating "As a domestic get-together, the album’s enjoyable enough, but actual magic is in short supply,"[7] while music website AllMusic described it as "trippy, bucolic, sophisticated, and simple, like a dream about a folksong."[8]The Skinny added that "Salt River blurs the boundary between tradition and modernity," giving it four stars out of five.[3]Pitchfork gave the album a rating of 7.3 out of 10 and wrote that "overall, this is another fine example of Amidon’s capacious, bracingly simple definition of the genre yoked to him."[1] London-based magazine MusicOMH described Salt River as "another successful example of Amidon drawing on his folk upbringing and creating something very much on his own terms," and gave it a rating of 3.5 out of 5.[9] Will Russell of the Dublin-based magazine, Hot Press, gave a rating of eight out of ten to the album and remarked "vintage effort from US folk merchant."[10]
