Sam Baker and Rodney Crowell teamed up in 2024 to create Win Win, an evocative album of story songs that unfold in spoken-word tales and Baker’s halting and arresting songwriting. Now the Texas iconoclasts re-pair for a follow-up with the upcoming release of Survivor, which pulls some of Baker’s best songs from his catalog filled with a poetry that casts the world in a half-light of harsh beauty and tender mercy. Crowell and Baker rework the tunes into a trio arrangement, adding new textures to Baker’s original sparsely strummed compositions from his revelatory early albums like mercy and pretty world. – Doug Freeman
