Sam Shaber

Sam Shaber possessed a big, full, robust voice that marked her as one of the stronger female singer/songwriters emerging from the New York folk scene during the 1990s. Observers drew parallels between her work and that of the Indigo Girls, Tracy Chapman, Ani DiFranco, and Phranc, while additional notes linked her to Joni Mitchell. Although certain compositions carried echoes of Mitchell, Shaber delivered greater vocal power and possessed the projection needed to handle R&B material convincingly. She frequently performed her own acoustic guitar accompaniment yet remained rooted in folk-pop, which helped cultivate a modest but devoted audience concentrated in the northeastern United States. Born Samantha Shaber in 1973 to screenwriter David Shaber and artist Alice Shaber, she spent her early years in the New York area before enrolling at Cornell University in the early 1990s and completing a B.A. in cultural anthropology in 1994. As the decade advanced she became a regular presence on the Manhattan club circuit, where live audiences encountered a mature, full-bodied delivery rather than the waif-like approach associated with Jewel or Suzanne Vega. Her first release, the 1997 album In the Bunker, appeared on her own imprint, Brown Chair Records. The follow-up, perfecT, captured live recordings made at various Manhattan venues in 1998 and reached listeners via the same label in 1999. In 2000 she issued the five-song EP Sam*pler on Brown Chair. Two years later she joined the roster of SMG Records, an independent Atlanta-area label headquartered in Decatur, Georgia. That partnership yielded her third full-length album and fourth project overall, Eighty Numbered Streets, which SMG released in July 2002.