Samantha Crain–Gumshoe
On Gumshoe, Samantha Crain has given us an astonishingly expansive account of yearning. The Oklahoma singer-songwriter is joined by Brine Webb and Taylor Johnson, who both share production duties with Crain, and Matt Kirksey, who plays drums and percussion. These and a full cast of contributors create an atmospheric quality. Or, atmospheric qualities?
The eleven songs on Gumshoe come from different worlds. The album’s opener “Dragonfly,” with a rolling bass and aggressive guitars, sounds at home in a rock club while “Fool’s Paradise” sounds like something out of a dream world.
Always, Crain’s voice is at the heart of things, holding these worlds together.
Among Gumshoe’s visual signatures (especially those stunning album covers made from beads), the music videos for “Dragonfly” and “B-Attitudes” show her singing and sometimes dancing in wide-open plains and the Oklahoma landscape. It could be something of a cliché in a genre so preoccupied with place and its mythologies. But like the best of this cobbled-together genre, Crain reckons.
Gumshoe is littered with references to places real and imagined from Elysian Fields in “Dart” to post-oak trees, gravel roads, and service-road bingo halls in “Ridin’ Out the Storm.” On “B-Attitudes,” she walks by fields owned by the local college and “pretend it’s all mine, the tallgrass and dogwood trees, the weather towers and the concrete canals, sparrows on the ground to feed.”
Lamenting the loss of the commons is no stranger in the history of American music. (Yes, I am thinking of the fourth-and-often-left-out verse of a Woody Guthrie song.) But Crain, who is Choctaw, offers an important sense of the relations woven into place that are unraveled in the American past and the American present.
She takes listeners to her nanny’s house. She makes us see “the stacks of VHS tapes and the freezers full of food, TV guides and cartoon cake pans, chenille bedspreads, beatitudes.” It’s classic Americana, the consumer goods and crafts you might find at a flea market. Because this is a record of love, they never go stale. Crain’s songs look for the weaving.
On “Neptune Baby,” Crain opens her heart. “I don’t want to worry,” she sings, “When I worry I lose all that precious time to love. Loving is my purpose.” And this song introduces a metaphor for loving that is fully realized in the title track. Loving is detective work, the pain-staking process of trying to uncover the hidden life of an other. On these two songs, Crain has added the right amount of saccharine.
But in the “Trap Door–Melatonin” diptych of Gumshoe’s B-side, she asks listeners to live with love’s bitterness.The first panel is a scene of addiction. A lover is at home worried sick while her beloved is “up doing God knows what.” How hard is it to make those we love see themselves the way we do, to make those we love treat themselves the way we would?
The second and much-softer panel is a scene of recovering. And Crain lists the things brought the beloved in rehab—melatonin tablets, mint chocolate chip ice cream, even a copy of The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership. These things set up the charming refrain, “You got it bad, but you got me,” and they do so much more. Crain has turned consumables into vessels of care-taking. She reminds us why cake pans and cross-stitched Scriptures mattered in the first place.
Gumshoe could be one of these things, infinite and accessible. In the final chorus, Crain sings of “an old Hallicrafter radio that haunts me now.” She has given us a haunting record with melodies and meanings that stick around.
So listen and sing along on late-night drives with friends or while you make breakfast with family. Or if you’re sitting alone, let Gumshoe accompany you because it’s something special.
These are songs that will live with you if you let them.
Gumshoe is out May 2 on Real Kind Records. Get your copy here: https://www.samanthacrain.com/
Enjoy our previous coverage here: REVIEW: Samantha Crain “I Guess We Live Here Now” Explores Hometown
The musicians on Gumshoe are Samantha Crain (acoustic guitars, keyboards, percussion, sound design, and vocals), Brine Webb (bass guitar, percussion, keyboards, and vocals), Taylor Johnson (electric guitar, piano, percussion, pipa, sound design, and vocals), Matthew Duckworth Kirksey (drums, sound design, and percussion), Kyle Reid (pedal steel guitar), Penny Pitchlynn (vocals), and Reggie Bishop (piano). Alex Kercheval and Nick Vote arranged the strings, which were performed by Bryson Karrer (violin), Sage Yang (Violin), Kathryn Hershberger (viola), and Yoonhae Swanson (cello). Joshua Silbert arranged the horns, which were performed by Silbert (tenor and baritone saxophone), Sharon Weyser (french horn), Bruce Knepper (trumpet), and Rich Dole (trombone).
Gumshoe was recorded and engineered by Tyler Watkins and Morgan Satterfied at Postal Recordings in Indianapolis, Indiana. It was mixed by Taylor Johnson, Brine Webb, and Samantha Crain at Lunar Manor Recording Studio in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. And it was mastered by Joe Causey at Voyager Mastering.
