Samantha Crain grew up in the small US town of Shawnee listening to her father’s Dylan and Grateful Dead records. When she became intrigued by the notion of writing songs, Crain reworked a series of stories she’d written while taking creative writing classes at university. Fast forward, and Rolling Stone Magazine called her their Must See Act at SXSW festival in 2013.
As it turns out, Crain came to her gift obliquely. “It may seem odd, but wanting to travel preceded my wanting to get good at songwriting and performing,” she confesses. “In fact, I started playing music in order to travel. Living in a small town in Oklahoma, there wasn’t much going on, and I got itchy, so I started going out on the road and playing everywhere that would have me.”
Initially hitting the road as a duo with her roommate, Crain began to satisfy her desperate need for raw material, and her experiences “traveling and meeting people and getting to see different places” began to feed and animate her songwriting, about which she was becoming increasingly passionate. In a sense, then, Crain was following in the footsteps of an earlier Oklahoma-born troubadour, Woody Guthrie.
Counterbalancing Crain’s wanderlust is a rootedness that exerts just as strong a pull. “I’ve lived in other places these last few years, but never for long,” she says. “Coming back home brings me perspective and focus.” These leavening aspects are as integral to the impact of her songs as the experiences that inspired her to write them.
Her latest album, Kid Face, is a revelatory song cycle as expansive as the wide-open spaces of the artist’s native Oklahoma, and as intimate as a conspiratorial whisper. Recorded and mixed in just eight days in the San Francisco studio of producer John Vanderslice (the Mountain Goats, Spoon), this wildly original album stands as the definitive statement thus far from an uncommonly insightful, fearlessly honest young singer/songwriter.
Woody would have been proud.