Sam Baker (r) and Gurf Morlix are such good pals, they’re willing to brave the Canadian cold together for a good cause.

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Sam Baker and Gurf Morlix
Ironwood Stage & Grill
Ironwood Stage & Grill
Monday, February 15 - Monday, February 15 Tuesday, February 16 - Tuesday, February 16

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As Austin songwriter Sam Baker is driving north on I-35 to watch football with his five siblings for his mom’s 85th birthday celebration, there’s one thing on his mind. “How cold is it up there right now?” At the time of the interview, it’s a balmy (for Albertans in January) -10 C, or, translated into Texan, 15 F.

It’s a fitting question, as Baker and his friend, producer Gurf Morlix (Lucinda Williams, Tom Russell), will travel Alberta on their Toques for Texans tour, where attendees are urged to bring clean new or used toques, scarves and gloves for the touring Texans. The apparel will be donated to homeless people and women’s shelters. Of toques, Baker admits, “I didn’t even know what they are. The hats we wear are to keep our brains from cooking.”

Like those who will benefit from the charity shows, Baker knows about suffering. While travelling by train in Machu Pichu in 1986, a bomb went off, maiming Baker’s hands and bruising his brain while killing the German family he’d been talking to. Gangrene set in, and as he was transported on an emergency airlift, he stood in the gauzy doorway between this life and some other state.

After an agonizing eventual recovery during which he had to learn to talk again, Baker started writing songs at age 50. Due to the damage to his hands, he had to relearn guitar as a newly minted southpaw. His 2004 debut, Mercy, was the inaugural release in what would become a trilogy of albums loosely tied to Baker’s rebirth. “I came to this whole music thing late,” he says with the sounds of the highway humming outside the coffee shop where he has taken a break from driving. “I think all I wanted to say was that line, ‘Everyone is at the mercy of [another one’s dreams.]’ We live and die with each other.”

While he only intended to create one album, Pretty World followed in 2007 with its themes of gratitude, and Cotton explored forgiveness in 2009. The albums are spare, haunting and alluring. Characters stare out from between lines, while songs tangle up lives of welders and preachers, immigrants and gamblers. It’s as if Baker clawed at the doorway of the afterlife and snatched back the visions, emotions and dreams of other souls who once stood in the same doorway.

Of his writing, Baker says: “I don’t know where it’s going to come from. Most songs, I start with something, and then later there’s a lot of chopping wood and carrying water to get the songs in a place where I’m OK with them. Other ones… are almost something I pass through; they needed to be somewhere and I am the vehicle for it.”

Not that Baker’s albums are dark; just the opposite. “How can I look at my world and be filled with pity or feel like a victim just because my hands are wrecked?” he asks. “Especially when there was a beautiful boy who was stone dead right beside me. He’s my baseline; he’s the one that said, ‘Push on.’ The suffering that I have is real, and the suffering that we all have is, too. I had to accept it, and push on for everyone — the dead, the living and the to-be-born. Dead are behind us, the unborn in front, and we are the chosen that get to be alive. There is a hand-off from the dead to the living.”

Interestingly, for someone so intensely injured, Baker never tried to regain control of his world by intellectualizing it, as some would, by learning about the politics involved in the attack. “I was too busy learning how to walk again, how to talk again, how to survive,” he says. Recently, he spent some time with another person who had also been on the bombed train and learned about the people and times. Still, he feels that this particular trilogy is complete, even as he continues to write songs, paint and blend his life into his art. “I got hit in somebody else’s war a long time ago, and having worked through the dying process, I really had to learn how to live.”