< >Samantha Crain
Sometimes music is a collision of opposites. Realities clash and coexist, and the tension that results is scary and strange, but undeniably beautiful. Maybe that's why Samantha Crain embodies so many conflicting unities and clashing identities. With a blow-your-hair-back vocal presence that occasionally yields to whisper-soft vulnerability, Crain unites the sounds of confidence and desperation. Lyrics about disaster and despair peacefully coexist with anthems of community and reconciliation. Here are darkness and light; here are life and death.
Language: English
Genre: Acoustic, Folk
Albums
Awards, Nominations & Submissions
| 2011 | Aboriginal Songwriter of the Year | Santa Fe | Nominee |
| 2011 | Best Folk / Acoustic CD | You (Understood) | Nominee |
Biography
Anais Nin said, “Each contact with a human being is so rare, so precious, one should preserve it.” That suggestion is the muse impelling the conception of Samantha Crain’s second LP, You (Understood). Each song on this album rests on a juncture with a person, a real person, and it recounts a particular episode of life with that person. The scenes and the people are not especially unusual or stirring but the idea that the precise installment will never, in all of time, happen again was enough to interest Crain. She is taking a microscope to the simplest of human interactions and feelings, turning them over in her hands, looking at them from all angles, measuring them on all sides, and taking them apart, realizing they really are exceptional but only in the smallest ways. Sometimes music is a collision of opposites. Realities clash and coexist, and the tension that results is scary and strange, but undeniably beautiful. Maybe that's why Samantha Crain embodies so many conflicting unities and clashing identities. With a blow-your-hair-back vocal presence that occasionally yields to whisper-soft vulnerability, Crain unites the sounds of confidence and desperation. Lyrics about disaster and despair peacefully coexist with anthems of community and reconciliation. Here are darkness and light; here are life and death.
These colliding realities stem most notably from Crain's unlikely artistic heritage, which she wears on her sleeve but just as readily transcends. Hailing from Oklahoma, the state that birthed both The Flaming Lips and Woody Guthrie, Samantha Crain writes with both the brazen conviction of the latter and the unflinching creative ambition of the former. Hers is a folk tradition indebted to Radiohead as much as Bob Dylan. Her shadowy arrangements and razor-sharp lyrics blur whatever superficial lines of genre or aesthetic may seem to separate these influences. It seems whatever the ingredients; she has a place for them in her inexplicable artistic recipe.
