Sammy Decoster
Ten years is a long time to carry a second record around inside a person. Sammy Decoster made one album in 2008, Tucumcari, a road movie sung in French, and then went quiet for close to a decade — not silent, because the whole time we could have found him at the edge of the light, playing guitar in Verone, singing half of Facteur Chevaux, one of the Wellbirds ... Other people's songs ... A man learning what a song needs by raising up other people's ...
Then Sortie 21 — Exit 21 — made in Tucson, Arizona ... of all the places for a man from the north of France, with players from Howe Gelb's circle, the Giant Sand people, who know how to leave room in a song the way the desert leaves room in a landscape ... Woody, old tones, a reviewer wrote ... Folk leaning toward country ... A crooner's voice ... The song sits in B minor, and once every turn the fifth chord goes bright — F sharp major, the old chanson move, the minor key looking up at you for a moment before it falls back home ...
This song sits second-to-last, eleven of twelve, right before a song called Reviens ... Come back ... So the record ends on a request and then a plea, in that order, and this is the request ...
Je veux être à vous ( I want to be yours ) ... But the yours is vous, the formal one, the one we keep for strangers and elders and the people we have not earned yet ... Any French ear hears it at once ... Not I want you, which is a taking ... To be someone's, which is a giving, said with the hat in both hands ...
When Decoster finally steps into the light with his own material, this is what he asks for ... Not to be heard ... To belong to somebody ...