In the lead-up to her 2020 masterpiece A Small Death, Samantha Crain didn’t know if she’d be able to hold a guitar again. A series of car accidents left the Oklahoma singer-songwriter in chronic pain and without full use of her hands, which had been instrumental in crafting her haunting songs from the heartland for more than a decade.
In search of a creative outlet, the lauded roots musician traded her songs for sonnets. Crain says the daily poetry-writing exercise — resulting in the 2021 collection Holisso, the Choctaw word for “book” — carved space for extending a little grace to herself at a time when she was cut off from her usual avenues of expression.
“It was a nice extension of using words in a creative way, and it helped me through a really difficult time in my life,” Crain says. “I wasn’t really able to play instruments, but there were still a lot of things I wanted to express. Being able to learn a new format for lyrics or words during that time was really eye-opening.”
But the power of Crain’s singular music goes beyond her open-hearted lyrics and storytelling. Celebrated in outlets like the New York Times and Rolling Stone, the 36-year-old Choctaw Nation citizen and two-time Native American Music Award winner has built her reputation by blending lyrical insight with gossamer arrangements beneath the room-filling quiver of her commanding and unforgettable voice.
With these crucial elements back in place after rounds of physical and talk therapy, Crain returned to the studio to produce the most compelling work of her career. A Small Death finds the artist at the height of her powers, spinning stories of hope and heartache in a register uniquely her own. The biggest difference this time around: Crain’s hands, their future once in question, were the only ones on the wheel.
“Everything I had done up to that record was so marked with other people’s voices. Collaboration is good, but I think it wasn’t for the sake of collaboration. It was for the sake of my own insecurity in the art I was creating,” she says. “I’ve gained a lot of confidence in my own ideas and my own abilities as a musician and songwriter. A Small Death is one of the only records where I just feel like I put everything on the table and it was exactly how I wanted it to be.”
‘I am a revolving door.’
Front Range concertgoers will get their first glimpse of the newly self-realized artist when Crain takes the stage at Swallow Hill Music in Denver on Oct. 23. The Sunday evening performance will mark her first Colorado show since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
In those years since the world turned upside down, Crain has been busy bringing material from A Small Death and her 2021 follow-up EP (I Guess We Live Here Now) to life onstage. In addition to a European tour and recent performance with a string quartet at the Tower Theater in Oklahoma City, the Native musician has also lent her music to the groundbreaking FX comedy Reservation Dogs, the first American television series to feature an entirely Indigenous cast and crew.
“I’ve known [showrunner] Sterlin [Harjo] since I was a kid, basically. We’ve always tried to collaborate with each other in various ways,” Crain says. “[Reservation Dogs] is a massive show now, and he could use any song he wants. The fact that he still finds meaning in what I’m doing as an aid to his storytelling feels really special to me.”
As Crain’s music continues to find purchase with fellow artists like Harjo and listeners around the world, she is deepening her sense of ownership over the process of crafting it. Since the singer-songwriter began self-producing after the uncertain beginning to A Small Death, Crain says her work as a recording artist has bloomed with a newfound sense of purpose.
“I’ve been thinking about songs more in terms of production, which was not something I was very intentional about earlier in my life. I was fully consumed by getting the words and the song out,” she says. “Now I take a little bit more time to craft things and create a full environment for the song to live in, rather than just spitting something out and letting it exist.”
Considering the long arc of reinvention that has delivered Crain to this moment through the highs and lows of her 17-year career, one line from A Small Death standout “Joey” — featured in a pivotal scene from the emotional pilot episode of Reservation Dogs — feels especially fitting: “A hundred small deaths, a hundred before / I am a revolving door.”
ON THE BILL: Indie 102.3 presents: Samantha Crain. 7 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 23, Swallow Hill Music, Tuft Theatre, 71 E. Yale Ave., Denver. Tickets here.
