"T uned every ear towards a tiny lengthening of light": Listening for Weak Hope in John K. Samson's Winter Wheat

Abstract

On his most recent solo album, Winter Wheat (2016), Winnipeg singer-songwriter John K Samson lingers in the liminal space between despair and hope, locating fragile fecundity in the dormant growing season evoked by the album's title Winter Wheat voices series of missed connections, unfinished stories, and interrupted conversations that cycle through many registers of despair before partially resolving into the tenuous hope that, as Samson writes in the title track (borrowing from Miriam Toews' novel A Complicated Kindness), this world is enough, because it has to be Rather than advocating for complacency, Samson's songs perform painful recounting of the past in order to imagine the troubled present as time of tentative potential: though the world is not and has not been good enough as it is, still, to quote the title track, we must salute the ways we tried, [and] find way to rise (Winter Wheat) Though we may not know exactly what survival means (Confessions of Futon Revolutionist, Fallow), to use the words of artist Jenny Holzer that Samson quotes in Winter Wheat's album liner epigraph, listening to, for, and with weak hope in Winter Wheat might model some collaborative way[s] to survive Many narrators on Winter Wheat struggle with central agon that feels very contemporary: when action is likely futile, should we act anyway? According to Samson, the band's name emerged from a few places (see Todd)