Music

Restless Mind Album ∙ Country ∙ 2024 Sam Barber It’s a golden age for troubadours. Following the end of the bro-country era, a new generation of story-driven, acoustic-guitar-slinging singer-songwriters wearing their hearts on their sleeves took firm hold of the genre, birthing stars like Zach Bryan and Charles Wesley Godwin. Sam Barber is another formidable voice in this still-emerging canon, as he shows on this sprawling collection of songs written over the course of the 21-year-old’s five-year foray into music. Like Bryan, Barber worked with producer Eddie Spear, whose light but thoughtful touch keeps the ambitious, 28-song project from sounding repetitive. Anchored by Barber’s viral song “Straight and Narrow,”   Restless Mind   is a winding, sometimes surprising journey through dying relationships and dead-end towns, with appropriately spare, rough-hewn production. The record opens with “Man You Raised,” itself beginning with a voicemail from Barber’s mother that sets a ho...