Sam Amidon grew up in the 1980s, but his Vermont childhood was “almost like a refuge” from the gaudiest decade. His hippy parents were folk-singer educators who frequently travelled south to work with Sacred Harp shape-note singers. “We were still eating granola and tofu stir fry, growing veggies and having potlucks,” he says. “Nobody had a television. I remember seeing a picture of Michael Jackson on somebody’s notebook, but I had no idea what he sounded like.” The family had one Talking Heads cassette, one Cyndi Lauper cassette and one Bob Dylan cassette, albeit of traditional songs. “The idea of the singer-songwriter model just wasn’t in my life.”

Amidon followed his parents into music, becoming a fiddle prodigy and noted folk singer, releasing acclaimed albums for Nonesuch, and collaborating with jazz guitarist Bill Frisell, multi-instrumentalist Shahzad Ismaily, and folk-pop songwriter Beth Orton, whom he married in 2011. The couple live near the London cafe (incidentally, where Fleabag was filmed) where I meet Amidon in December to discuss his beautiful new album, Salt River, his first for Rough Trade imprint River Lea.

At 43, Amidon is in demand. In October, Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon asked him to debut Vernon’s new music live. He has also been teaching Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor to sing for the forthcoming first world war film The History of Sound. Drinking tea, he is overspilling with enthusiasm and insight – he’s thrilled to learn that British folk legend Shirley Collins lived nearby as a kid – and you can see how his reputation was formed. But true to his childhood, he’s more interested in interpretation than being any sort of musical leading man. “You have to get behind the song,” he says.

Amidon’s thumbprint shows in his cultivation of material, uniting songs from his youth with things he might hear while washing up. Salt River puts traditionals alongside songs by Lou Reed, Yoko Ono and Ornette Coleman. Amidon doesn’t preconceive the theme of an album; these covers happened incidentally. “But when I had the three of them, it felt like they were like the old master folk musicians you learn from,” he says. “Yoko is still here but the other two are not. I’ve always been interested in the rawness of free jazz and the rawness of field recordings and folk music. And they felt very much like their message to humans, these community-type songs about fundamental, simple truths of life – similar to how my parents played music for children and families.”

Amidon’s peaceful, awestruck interpretation of Reed’s Big Sky couldn’t be further from the brawny original. He read the lyrics in a book before having ever heard the song. “They were so beautiful and so connected to nature, and had the form of a repeated refrain in a folk song,” he says. “When I heard his recording, it didn’t have the emotion that I was hearing. It’s a great song, dripping with all his cynicism and punk attitude, but I was like, these lyrics are just too beautiful: what if I gave the song a different musician environment that allows those other parts to come out?”

The album title, referring to the place where the river meets the sea, seems to acknowledge Reed, Coleman and Yoko on the cusp of crossing over. Amidon says it also nods to the contrast of organic and electronic sounds: a gorgeous drone threads through many songs. The brilliant Los Angeles saxophonist Sam Gendel produced the album. “It’s the river of our feelings and community vibes,” he says, “but the salt is the bitterness of that digital sound and not being scared of that.” The effect he sought was half the communal “campfire” of recording in Gendel’s living room, half the “internal feeling of someone walking alone on the mountain singing to keep their own self company”.

The sound also harks back to a particular niche of new-age folk music from Amidon’s childhood, one that he says uncannily recalls the world of playwright Annie Baker’s feature film debut, Janet Planet, set 40 minutes from where he grew up. “There was a show called Music from the Hearts of Space on Vermont Public Radio back then playing all that kind of stuff, and it was like a weird dispatch from another universe. I didn’t know any of the names.”

Having always put the song before the singer, Amidon was pinpointed by Bon Iver’s spotlight-shy Vernon to give his new Sable EP its first live incarnation in October. “It’s very generous of Justin,” says Amidon. “Most people would be very protective of their stuff. He’s always been looking for ways to escape the cliched frontperson thing.”

Amidon is releasing Salt River in the middle of another folk revival, as British collectives Broadside Hacks and Shovel Dance highlight the tradition’s pagan and queer roots. Presumably, renewed interest also prompted The History of Sound, which features Mescal and O’Connor as archivists (and lovers) recording folk songs in New England at the turn of the 20th century. “It was fun to think about how to approach phrasing and vowels to somebody who only has a few weeks to figure out how to do it,” says Amidon.

Folk culture is always proliferating away from the spotlight: is it antithetical that so-called revivals rely on semi-famous faces? “It’s always a tension,” says Amidon. “I’m always happy to see when the folk thing happens again – the more people playing fiddle tunes, the better; more chance I can get to a good tune session. But it is funny: I’m old enough now to have seen it come a couple of times, and each folk revival is its own vision of what folk music is.”

He gives an authoritative summary: “In the 30s, it was Woody Guthrie and the workers’ struggle. In the 60s, ballads gave Dylan this vision that a song didn’t have to be a love song, it could be about something, basically creating the songwriter. In the 70s, my parents’ region was about folk dance, community singing and Sacred Harp music. Then I bought Kurt Cobain singing Where Did You Sleep Last Night, which was the rawness of Lead Belly with the punk attitude and rawness of Kurt’s voice. Then there was the early 2000s new weird Americana thing, which was more connected to the strangeness of field recordings.”

Currently, he sees a lot of Irish music about: “I’m not sure what it means to people, but I enjoy seeing what it comes to mean.” For Amidon, folk is just part of everyday life. In 2022, Orton told the Guardian how Amidon had always given her “the headspace to be creative, to work”, by taking care of their young son (she has an older daughter from a previous relationship). It’s rare not only to hear about men supporting women’s artistic development, but to hear it from their perspective. “Beth’s definitely done that for me many times when I’m on the road, and it’s not an easy balance,” he says.

He cites his parents again. “They’ve been musicians their whole lives, but how they’ve defined that has changed. At one point they’re more into choral arranging, then one’s doing dance calling, the other’s a storyteller. It’s a combination of what they’re interested in and what the world is coming back to them for. And so I don’t think you should feel like being a full-time professional gigging musician is the only valid thing. People get attached to this image but I try not to be, and I try to just do this as long as it’s happening. And if there’s other things you need to do in the meantime, you do them.”

• Salt River is released via River Lea on 24 January