Samantha Crain photo by Sequoia Ziff
Samantha Crain Honors Interconnectedness With Gumshoe
Oklahoma-based Chocktaw artist Samantha Crain recently released her seventh studio album, Gumshoe, and is currently on a European tour to be followed by an extensive North American tour in June and July. It marks her first solo album since 2021’s I Guess We Live Here Now EP and reflects on ideas of change, resilience, interconnectedness, and more. Gumshoe is an album that feels ethereal at times, as well as warm and inviting, while conveying core ideas that are fine-tuned by careful reflection.
It turns out that the themes and the sounds of Gumshoe are also closely interconnected as Crain, for the first time in a long while, shared in production duties, and also opened up the recording process to a live set-up to accord with the album’s ideas. Embracing the idea that change is something that happens to us all the time, as part of ourselves and our ecosystem, she undertook these modification as an exploratory journey. I spoke with Samantha Crain about writing the songs on Gumshoe, her outlook on touring, and about how the songs reflect her observation of, and connection to, the natural world.
Americana Highways: Do you usually plan albums out ahead of time, or do you gather songs from a wider body of material that you collect over time?
Samantha Crain: This time, I didn’t have a specific theme in mind or any sort of specific idea of, “This is what I’m going through in life, so this is what I am going to write songs about.” It more so happens where I’m writing songs in a specific period of time and they always seem to be connected because I’m writing them relatively close together. I view it as a record of a moment in time, in my life, for me. I feel like a lot of my understanding of records comes after all of the songs are written, and then I have this hindsight view of it. I can see the threads that are binding them together, and that helps me make a clearer decision about how I want the record to be produced, or recorded, or how I want the music videos and the artwork to be. That sort of stuff usually comes after I can see the songs all together and how they relate to each other.
AH: Is songwriting something that you do periodically, from time to time, anyway? How does that usually occur for you?
SC: I feel like I have to definitely set time aside, but I feel like my songwriting usually happens in stages, in bursts. There’s active writing and inactive writing. During the inactive part of writing, that’s usually when I’m touring, or when I’m working on artwork for an album, or music videos for an album, or just living life. Then there’s this active part of songwriting which sort of reveals itself to me when I’m ready. I sort of have this impetus, “I need to write now.” Then I need to carve out time in my life. I feel that the inactive part is done, and now I need to write. With how life is, I do have to make a concerted effort to carve out time for that.
AH: I saw that this album is about a personal change for you that probably has impacted how you see yourself as a songwriter, choosing to settle down more and be part of a community. It’s scary to accept that kind of challenge, I’m sure, to change your view of yourself.
SC: It is terrifying. It’s not only about changing your idea of yourself once, it’s about understanding that you’re changing, literally, all the time. We already live in such an unstable world that I think we, as humans, long for stability in ourselves. But when we realize that we can’t provide that, even for ourselves, that gets into scary territory.
AH: The inability to accept change can have really devastating results, as we often see in the wider world, but for creative people, it really leads to stagnation. But change is a natural thing. Did this philosophy affect how you recorded, or created the sound of this album? Were you more open to change?
SC: With these songs, it’s me exploring collaborating with other people more. In the lyrics, I’m talking about collaborating in a romantic or personal way, but the implications of that, when it comes to recording, or writing, or making a record, is exploring collaboration in that arena as well. Usually, the way that I’ve made records in the past has been very solitary. The writing process, and the demo process, has been solitary. Even into the actual recording process, I’ve always utilized single tracking, and people being in their single sound-proof rooms.
I think I just felt like, “If this is a side of myself that I’m trying to explore and get better at, it would be really weird for me to take these songs that are about community and reciprocity, and relationships with other people, then record it and Produce it in a way that is very solitary.” So we went into the recording process, and I freed myself up as the solo producer, which is what I’ve been doing for a while, and brought in two co-producers to work on this with me. Then, also, in recording the album, we did it all together in a live room.
You’re giving up a bit of control on that, since you don’t have clean tracks that you can manipulate. Everybody’s bleeding into each other’s microphones. There’s a lack of control there. You’re collaborating with the environment, and the engineers, and the sounds outside of the studio, as well as the musicians in the room with you. So I think that the content of the songs definitely had an effect on how we went about recording the album.
AH: That really helps me understand some of the sound qualities of the album, which I really enjoyed. The sound has a softer, more permeable feeling to the edges, which goes in with the blending effect that you’re talking about. I would not have necessarily known that you did it live, though, to listen to it.
SC: Thanks. That probably has a lot to do with the mixing. A lot of time in the mixing process, you’re edging out other sounds, but this time we leaned into the environment noise. I think that adds to the richness of the sounds.
AH: You’ve toured a great deal, and have a big tour coming up. Are you looking forward to it?
SC: In the past, a lot of my time was spent touring. My band, or just me solo, would do 150 shows a year, so we lived on the road touring for ten years. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve held back on touring as I used to just because traveling is harder on your body the older you get. It’s been a while, probably since before the pandemic, since I’ve done a tour this expansive. It will be interesting to see how it goes. I’m nervous, but I’m also excited to tour with a band.
AH: Some of the songs are a little hypnotic and dancey, so I think they’d be great live.
SC: Yeah! I think that quality that you’re mentioning is because I do a lot of writing when I’m walking, so there is this rhythmic element, too. When I’m coming up with lyrics, that happens. Because I’m walking, it’s not a super-fast tempo, so maybe it’s manifesting as a slow dance!
AH: One of the tracks, “B-Attitudes,” seems to have an idea that’s important to the album. It’s a really direct expression of wanting to become part of a place and hold onto it. Is that fair?
SC: Yes, I think so. The original inspiration for that song is less about a physical place and it’s more about the sadness that I feel that just within my lifetime, the ease of getting amongst nature has become harder and harder. I grew up very deeply connected to, and always aware of, the natural world around me. I feel like it’s becoming more and more difficult because of the aggressive behavior of private property lands, and the lack of government funds being used for public, outdoor spaces where I live. I feel like it’s getting more difficult to be outside. I feel like I’m a part of the ecosystem of this planet, so nature is not something to be separate from.
When people separate themselves from nature, they are only understanding a fraction of their own selves. I feel like to be in nature is to learn really important lessons from our animal and plant brothers and sisters. It’s that sort of idea, of feeling like I’m increasingly having to work really hard to keep from being disconnected from my ecosystem, and I’m lamenting my lack of place, I think. Because there is this section of myself that’s becoming harder and harder to connect with.
AH: Can you tell me a little bit about the song “Dragonfly”? It seems like it goes along with some of the things we’ve been discussing, like recognizing a state of change and trying to go along with it.
SC: Even that song goes along with what I’ve been talking about. A dragonfly, in its existence, if you can sit and watch them, and learn about how they exist in the world, there are some real gems of understanding that you can get from that. Without being able to observe certain animals, there are certain lessons about the world that I think you’re missing out on if you can’t be in nature. There are tons of dragonflies out in this field that I walk my dog in. You watch them, and they can fly in every direction. They can go forward, and up, and diagonal, and all of this.
It goes back to that idea of flexibility that I was talking about earlier. There is this ever-changing world around them, and they have no control over it. They are sort of moving with the flow of their environment. Watching that puts you in a place where you’re looking beyond the limitations of our physical selves and thinking about how we can take things as they come, in an intellectual and in a spiritual. It’s understanding that all of the stuff that we are taking in, and all of the stuff that we are learning, are added tools that we can utilize later on in our lives.
I would sit out there and watch them, and to me they symbolized the kind of person who I wanted to be: resilient, and flexible, and living moment-to moment, moving towards potential moments of wisdom or understanding. I just kind of wanted to make this ode to this animal that I think has a really important lesson to teach humans.
AH: I think the sound is like that, too, and feels very positive. Is there a zither or something on it? There’s an interesting sound towards the end.
SC: In the demo that I made, before we went into the studio, there was a pipa, which is a kind of Chinese lute. I’d put that sound on the demo because, in my mind, it was a place-holder for a banjo. That’s what I envisioned it being for the actual recording. But then, we got to the studio, and we didn’t bring a banjo, and there wasn’t one in the studio. We were sitting, talking about what we were going to add to the end of the song instead. I said, “It’s too bad that I don’t have an actual pipa, since that’s what’s on the demo.” The guy who worked at the studio said, “Actually, we have a pipa!” He brought it out, and though none of us play the pipa, we worked out some ideas for it. Our guitarist, Taylor, figured out one solo to play on it!
AH: It’s a very interesting feeling. It reminds me of a window onto a different world, the world of the dragonfly.
SC: In my mind, it was sort of Beatles-esque, like when they started using sitar, like on their Rubber Soul album. I just wanted to introduce something that felt sort of out of place, and surprising, but show how it works anyway. I think the banjo might not have stood out as much as this did, so I’m glad that we ended up going in that direction.
Website: https://www.samanthacrain.com/
Check out our review here: REVIEW: Samantha Crain “Gumshoe”
