Singer-songwriter Sam Burton signs with Captured Tracks and lines up a third album

Sam Burton has signed to Captured Tracks and detailed his third solo album, Fairweather Friend, his first release for the label, The Line of Best Fit reported on August 5. He shared the lead single, I'm A Stranger, alongside the news, describing it as a song that sits somewhere between nostalgia and alienation.

"There is no home to go back to," Burton said of the track.

Fairweather Friend is Burton's first full-length release since 2023's Dear Departed, and was produced by Jonathan Wilson, known for his work with Father John Misty and Conor Oberst. The album came together after a car accident split up Burton's touring band during and after the pandemic; he then played a series of stripped-down solo tours before spending months in Northern California finishing nearly half the record's songs.

Burton said the record also traces a broader shift: "I think a lot of things were changing, including the way LA used to feel for me when I was young," he said, adding that certain doors felt like they were closing even as the change itself felt like growth.

"I'm really just doing this because I have a compulsion to do it," he added, "and I have found wholeness, or something that felt like wholeness, doing it my whole life."

Burton, a Palestinian-American musician, will tour North America this autumn with Aldous Harding, beginning September 9 in Philadelphia, before joining Widowspeak for a UK and European tour from November 13 in Leeds. Fairweather Friend is an 11-track indie record that includes the title cut and the closer Do You Still Know Your Man, and is due out October 30 on Captured Tracks. You can follow it on the release calendar.