At Peace While Observing: The Life of Samantha Crain
By Brian D’Ambrosio
Language quenches Samantha Crain’s flaming fire. An exceptionally potent songwriter, Crain finds that her spirit, affections, desires, and disposition live and reign in language. Her nuanced writing is something that she sees as both a gift and a demand.
Crain was born, raised, and attended school in Shawnee, Oklahoma, east of Oklahoma City, retaining familial and ethnic ties to the Choctaw Nation Reservation, in southeastern Oklahoma, in particular a town called Clayton.
“I spent half of my life there (in Clayton) as well,” said Crain. “When we weren’t in school, we were hanging out with cousins, aunts, uncles, and grandparents, and were between these two places. One was deeply rooted in the tribe there. The other was a normal Midwest town.”
At an early age, Crain, 39, developed a strong sense of reverence for private space and inner solitude.
“For whatever reason, I had to grow up pretty fast,” said Crain. “I was precocious and did not have a lot of friends. My lived experience was different than the people I was around. I tended to be a loner and I didn’t interact with too many people.”
She also was inclined to enjoy quieter pastimes, such as journaling and writing or listening to music, mostly her dad’s records spun at home.
“My dad’s records were a lot of ‘60s, ‘70s folk music,” said Crain. “Neil Young. Bob Dylan. Joni Mitchell. Peter, Paul and Mary. When CDs and Walkmans came along, it became whatever pop music was around at the time. I was influenced by both sides of things, the records at the house, and the pop music on the radio, before the Internet.”
Her father and her uncle played music as a hobby. The prospect of her playing music as a profession first planted in her head when she saw just how much joy it brought to those performing at local DIY music shows, which she first attended around the time that she started driving.
“At these DIY shows in Oklahoma City, there were these people not too much older than me playing songs that they’d written with the guitar. I was always interested in writing poetry and stories in my spare time, and music was another extension of that (interest). In secret, I started teaching myself in my bedroom, from a guitar chords book, and putting poems to chords.”
Crain started to perform at open mic nights in the Oklahoma City area. There was a local art magazine that listed events in its rear classified section. She’d grab a magazine, head straight to its back pages, and circle the open mic happenings. Nights when she didn’t have to work or didn’t have to be at school the following day, she’d drop in at an event, play some covers, and work through a couple of originals, in diverse phases of completion, or incompletion.
“Once I’d had enough songs to play 30 or 45 minutes, I started booking my own tours,” she said. “The early Internet age, there were coffee shops and record stores that you could call or send an email and let them know when you were coming through town and on what day. The vibe was to help the artist out and you didn’t need a fan base to get booked.”
Music became more than just a preoccupation; it became the root and foundation of her life. Beginning with her first record, Kid Face, released in 2013, Crain has delivered us into the authority of her songwriting.
“There was a gigantic sense of creative freedom (making Kid Face) and there were no extra voices in my head,” said Crain. “Just me and friends making songs together in a basement…before you have all of these opinions and others weighing in on your art. There is something really pure about that that you always want to get back to. It is hard to get back to the innocence of pure, childish creativity.”
One of her most haunting songs, “Joey,” a track from the starkly brilliant A Small Death (2020), evokes commanding imagery and the profound pain of someone hurt and neglected by the one they most love. It is one of her most intensely personal songs and also one of her most universal.
“At first, I modeled my songwriting more on literary figures than songwriters,” said Crain. “It was sort of my introduction to writing through poets and fiction writers. I was reading a lot of Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950) and Southern Gothic writers, and modeling a lot of my song lyrics more on literary writers.”
Thus some of her finest songs, such as “Tough for You” and “An Echo” seem imbued with a strong sense of isolation. Though in recent recordings, she has added greater pop sensibilities to the lyrical and musical equations.
“I’ve started studying songwriters I like, which has helped me understand song structure a bit more. I’m at the point where I’ve developed what I feel is my voice within songwriting. There is nothing better than time. The longer you spend on a subject – for me it’s making records and writing songs – there is going to be personal, emotional, and spiritual growth. It’s because of the sheer time dedicated to something.”
Indeed, the continuous practice of music allows Crain to always be learning more and more about her own motivations, intentions, and ambitions.
“I’ve learned there are going to be hard nights and records that people don’t like,” said Crain. “There are going to be nights people don’t show up. But you do it because it’s your purpose in life…I’m not the best at it or special, but I know that this life serves me as much as I serve it. There are good records and bad records. Good days and bad days on tours. It’s not that I’m resilient. I’m devoted to this life that has devoted itself to me.”
Recently, Crain released Gumshoe, its songwriting and sound a mixture of ‘60s folk inspirations, lingering literary influences, and cool structural tinges of pop music. Crain’s smoothness and proficiency as a songwriter on this project and others is predicated on one of her chief personality traits: relentless observation.
“If there is a group of people, I’m on the outskirts listening to other people’s conversations. I’m not anti-social, just prefer to watch or listen and don’t need to do an activity. Give me a chair or a porch and I’ll watch or observe. Sometimes, I’ll make notes in a little notebook.”
Collecting observation is not just fertile earth for songwriting, she explained, but a quiet exercise that helps settle a mind seething with all sorts of extraneous noise.
“People, nature, plants, creeks, conversations – I feel at peace existing within those inspirations…the best thing creatively for me is to be in a peaceful state and able to observe. That’s when my creativity is at its peak. I get disconnected from the creative part of my brain when my anxiety is at a high. I write best when I’m at peace and observing.”
Fresh off of a three-month tour, Crain avowed that the very best nights of it were the ones when her faith in herself was at its utmost and when any remaining self-doubt departed. On those nights, she energetically poured herself into the set, and in response, a reciprocal force, purely and generously transmitted, emerged.
“It’s not applause. It’s not a lot of people coming to the merch table. It’s not people dancing. It’s when we are all tapped into each other at the same time and moments that go beyond the audience-performer and transcend community.”
Find more information here on her website: https://www.samanthacrain.com
Enjoy our review of Gumshoe here: REVIEW: Samantha Crain “Gumshoe”
Music writer Brian D’Ambrosio may reached at dambrosiobrian@hotmail.com
Love these interviews and the narrative form!