Samantha Crain Issue #39

Great Pretender

By Katie Hasty
Published: March 1st, 2009 | 3:29pm

There are a few truths that Samantha Crain finds irrelevant to her budding musical career: she’s part Choctaw Indian, she’s only 22 years old, and she hails from the tiny town of Shawnee, Oklahoma (population: 20,000). Instead, the emerging songwriter would rather focus on her favorite lies.

“I’ve always exaggerated truths, always had a vivid imagination,” she admits. Crain’s beautiful embellishments are precisely what made magical her 2008 debut EP for Ramseur, The Confiscation; each of the five songs were short stories put together as a suite, and then set to music. The storytelling continues on her forthcoming full-length Songs in the Night, due April 28.

“When I got into college, I realized that I could communicate things through music better than I could through just creative writing. I didn’t finish school but made music my full-time job,” she recounts. “So I treat it like my job. I write every day because it’s my responsibility, my nine-to-five. It’s not my way of escaping the real world, it’s my way of fitting into it.”

Crain was predisposed to such an occupation even prior to hitting the real world. Her dad, sister, brother, uncles, and aunts are, or were, all involved in music to some degree. She picked up a guitar around age 18 and started opening for larger touring acts coming through Oklahoma. When she began touring at 19, she received some good advice from the Chicago band, Berry.

“The lead singer Joey [Lemon] produced some of my first songs ... he said; ‘making music is all about not being ashamed of what comes out of you, or to have pretenses about what your music should sound like. There are still unique ideas in music to be had,’ and I could sound like whatever I wanted to sound like. For that to be the first thing I heard [as a musician], it was really pivotal,” Crain says. “Us Oklahoma artists, we like to keep in our borders. We like things that come from Oklahoma, like Woody Guthrie, Starlight Mints, the Flaming Lips ... but I have the freedom to be what I want.”

With organic arrangements and the delicate, loose contributions of Crain’s band, the Midnight Shivers (Jacob Edwards, Andrew Tanz, and Stephen Sebastian), Songs in the Night is a worthy channel for all that freedom. Crain’s humming alto creeps over swinging acoustic guitar on tracks like “Banafish Revolution” and waltzing “Calm Down,” and boldly rocks on the title track and “Devils in Boston.” The warm, almost analog production quality was honed at Echo Mountain Studios, a spacious church in Asheville, North Carolina, with producer Danny Kadar (Grizzly Bear, My Morning Jacket, and Ramseur label-mates the Avett Brothers). The effort was recorded in five days and mixed in just as many.

“We wanted to do it fast. It would be so easy for us to get so nitpicky over it and it could turn into something it wasn’t supposed to be at all. The stories are intentional, but whatever comes out isn’t always.”