Distance Is A Place: Sammy Volkov’s Weather Report
By Jack Garton
His voice crackles through, announcing clear skies with a chance of heartbreak, and already the line between the physical and emotional worlds begins to blur. I feel that familiar deep suspicion that the weather and our emotions are linked. Does weather come from inside or outside us? Which responds to the other? The answer might seem straightforward, unless you are a witch or a romantic poet, and Sammy Volkov seems to be both.
From the first sung lines, I can feel a kindred musical soul in Volkov. When I was a child, I listened ravenously to my grandparents’ tapes, soaking in the musical language of the 50’s and 60’s. Something about the sincerity of the voices in those old recordings was like a beacon to me. I could tell how much it meant to my grandparents; those songs preserved perfectly in amber the emotions they felt, and still feel, but might not be able to put into words, the music acting as a lightning rod for the turmoil of the heart. Singers sounded like their love song was a matter of life and death. Maybe it was. The voice of Roy Orbison doesn’t sound like its from this world, because while we inhabit the physical, everyday world, he is inhabiting the world of emotions. From the first moment you hear Sammy Volkov sing, you know he is at home in that world too.
When Volkov sings, “we never have met, but why do I cry?” he is saying what anyone who’s had a crush knows: the distance between us, the negative space, is so monumental it feels more real than everything else. That distance is a place, and sometimes I live there.
This song is the sound of that place. It’s a cinematic, magical world that only a song can be. The song’s protagonist is doing what we’re doing: listening to a song and feeling longing. For me, it forms a perfect double image. I can feel the singer’s feelings so clearly because I am in turn feeling them too, every note and inflection of the voice and arrangement brings the music of my past into the present. Or rather, we meet in that third place, that other world. Time collapses and I’m both back then and here now at the same time. Music like this makes me realize the potential of what music can do with the element of time. It need not obey our concept of it as linear; it can stack and swirl and squish it all together at once.
This is the first single of Volkov’s from an upcoming album Be Alright. I can’t wait to hear what the other songs are like. You really must hear his voice for yourself to know what I am talking about. Warm rays of sincerity beam from it, doing to your heart what the sun does to seeds long dormant in the cold ground. More singles will be released throughout the summer, with the full album coming out in November 2022.