Two years ago, Sam Barber played a headlining gig for the first time. A year ago, he put the finishing touches on his first full-length record. Today, he’s one of the most in-demand artists in a country music landscape suddenly filled with young singer-songwriters with legions of fiercely loyal fans.
Back-to-back days this summer served to cement the rise of the 22-year-old Barber. First came the RIAA certifications on July 31. His 2024 debut album, Restless Mind, earned gold status. One of his singles, “Straight and Narrow,” went double platinum, while another, “Indigo” — released as a duet with Avery Anna — hit platinum. The next day, Barber dropped his follow-up project, a seven-song EP called Music for the Soul, and its first single, “Home Tonight,” already became a staple in Barber’s high-energy live show. Today, he added a new song to Music for the Soul, the Chance Peña collab “Better Than the Floor.”
“You never really know when you release a song until you play it live,” Barber says. “But when you see people’s faces, and see them singing along the day after you release it, you know how it went over — awesome.”
At the moment, there’s not a better term to describe Barber’s body of work. Missouri-born but claiming Montana as his adopted home and inspiration for his fast-growing catalog, Barber has already navigated the country-music bar circuit and now finds himself in the middle of a headlining tour of theaters and rock rooms, like First Avenue in Minneapolis and Cain’s Ballroom in Tulsa, that some artists can spend decades building a big enough fan base to fill. He’s routinely playing to upwards of 2,000 people a night, barely two years after that first headlining show, which took place in Nashville at the Basement, with its capacity of 150.
He’s also writing and releasing new music at a pace to match his growing star power. Restless Mind, released only nine months ago, had 17 tracks. Throwing Music for the Soul on top of that, and it makes 25 new Sam Barber songs in under a year. He wrote or co-wrote all of them.
“I love writing,” he says. “It’s art. It’s painting something. A lot of artists do look at it as a dollar-sign sort of thing, where it doesn’t matter other than trying to make something that people want to hear. I definitely don’t want to do that. When you paint a picture, you’re painting something that you’re gonna want to stare at for a while.”
The easy route with Barber would be to chalk up his career to viral success, and in the most basic terms, that’s true. When he was a civil engineering student at the State Technical College of Missouri in 2021, he started releasing music via TikTok. His mix of covers and originals was strong enough then to land him a spot on American Idol’s Hollywood Week in the show’s 20th season, though he was eliminated before making it in front of the cameras. He found a steady audience online, and in 2022 he released a pair of singles. The response to the first, “Ramblin’ Man,” was enough to catch his attention. “Straight and Narrow” followed, and it changed his life.
“When I started posting videos, I didn’t use social media at all,” Barber recalls. ”But that’s what ultimately led me to where I am.
“I put ‘Ramblin Man’ out just off of my voice memos, and people were actually listening to it. I’d see the numbers start growing and growing. That led to me moving to Montana. I took a huge leap. I had no money, but I knew I wanted to make music. I wanted to just focus on it a hundred percent, and write every day, and that’s what I did. It worked out substantially, and once ‘Straight and Narrow’ blew up, that’s when I knew I can do this forever.”
“Straight and Narrow” blew up organically, and Barber recognizes that it was good fortune. His other platinum single, “Indigo,” however, was a different matter. He and Anna co-wrote the journey through angst, self-doubt, and tests of faith. Barber knew it would resonate.
“I was writing it with Avery, and we got about halfway through before we both went, ‘This could be really cool,’” he says.
Such digital success may make it tempting to stereotype Barber as an overly online Gen-Z kid, but it could not be further from who Barber is at heart. Before music, he would post on social media if his high-school classmates pressured him into it. It was only when he saw firsthand how accessible the platforms made his music that he came around.
“It’s the fastest way to get people to see what you’re making at the moment,” Barber says. “Back in the day, you couldn’t write a verse to a song and have a million people hear it, to see if it was something that may even do well at all. You had to make the song and put it out. Now, you can craft songs based on how people react to it online pretty easily.”
Josh Crutchmer is a journalist and author whose latest books, Never Say Never and Red Dirt Unplugged are available via Back Lounge Publishing.
