“We’re small but mighty,” Samantha Crain said at the beginning of her recent appearance at The Miracle Theater. She adapted like a consummate professional, treating the evening “like a house show,” delivering an intimate performance with lots of audience interaction and stories she doesn’t normally share.
After opening with “Bloomsday” on July 16, Samantha mentioned that three flies had fallen into her glass of wine, so “I’ll be drinking bugs tonight.” Moving on, she talked about how she and Sterlin Harjo, who created the TV series Reservation Dogs, have been friends since she was 16, and she’ll send him her songs to get his opinion. He ended up using what she described as a “half-finished phone recording” of “Joey” on the show.
Watch Samantha Crain perform “Joey” live for Shelter in Place Sessions on YouTube:
Between songs, someone asked Crain about her process. There’s “no rhyme or reason,” to how the songs come, and she described herself as “very unstructured.” On one level, the question of where songs, or any art comes from, has an obvious answer: the artist’s interests, obsessions, emotions, and experiences. The ideas aren’t being beamed into our brains from a cloaked alien spaceship in orbit! But what people are really asking is how we do it, which is another, more mysterious kettle of fish. Someone asked how she’d started writing songs: “I was a teenager with a lot of emotions.” (I once, half-jokingly, remarked to Hayes Carll, “Everyone knows where songs come from: neurodivergence and trauma.”)
Crain shared a new song, prefacing it by staying she’s “still not entirely sure what it’s about.” About a year ago, her longtime partner away, and, a year before that, she lost her father. She said she’d written the song during a period of mania in which she was going around telling everyone she loved them.
Samantha followed that with a song written in Choctaw about seven or eight years ago. She’s making an entire album of songs in that language. She spoke about the process, how she wanted to be in the mindset of the language, rather than translating from English. Crain grew up on the Choctaw reservation in southeast Oklahoma, where he family lived for generations. Unfortunately, they’ve had to sell their land, which has made it difficult to keep the family together.
Introducing another new song, Samantha said she wasn’t sure what this one is about, either. She asked if anyone in the audience has had a concussion, to which I replied, “A few.” She seemed surprised by that, and I said, “I made some interesting choices.” Her concussion story is a lot tamer than mine: She tripped over her dog. Since the accident, she’s had some issues with memory.
Someone asked Samantha about the process of the beaded cover for her album Gumshoe. She described it as a painstaking, obsessive process, because she didn’t have experience with beading.
It turned out someone in the audience had attended college with Samantha — during, as she clarified, her single semester — and they’d taken an anthropology class together. While she had to drop out because of financial issues, she was able to go to what she described as an “artist’s commune” on Martha’s Vineyard.
Watch Samantha Crain perform “Elk City” live for Hauskonzerte on YouTube:
Crain kept the set rolling with “Elk City,” then “Puff County Call Return.” She mentioned how, when she was getting started in her late teens, she would, following Bob Dylan, make up stuff about her biography. (The late writer Harlan Ellison did this, too, and I’ve definitely embellished a few things.) She finished things up with “Santa Fe” and “B-Attitudes.”
This evening was a delight. We got to to hear the stories and the context beyond the songs, which were excellent, in a relaxed, friendly atmosphere.
