What Samantha Crain Did
"Sorry guys, I have to re-tune, it's just not right. I'm missing this low note, and it's just not the same without it. You'll see. It matters to get that low note in there."
Samantha Crain stopped mid-song during her encore at Little Saint in Healdsburg, guitar in hand, unapologetic about claiming the space it takes to do it right. When she started Elk City again from the beginning, that low note hit like a revelation - lush, haunting, sending shivers through the entire room. She was right. It did matter.
This is what it looks like when an artist trusts herself completely.
But this moment of artistic integrity was just the final thread in a masterclass in quantum weavings that she had been wafting all evening. This was much more than a performance — what Samantha did on stage was initiate us all into her process, her methodology, her way of seeing the world with small interludes of connection between songs that pulled us into her portal, her seat at the loom.
Lesson 1: Bring Your Whole Self
The warp — the lengthwise base for any weaving — are Samantha Crain’s poetic lyrics, her songwriting style, her life lessons made audible. Her musical roots were laid early in a house filled with 60s and 70s folk music, where Bob Dylan was among her first open mic covers.
She opened with the driving guitar song Dragonfly off her new album Gumshoe.
Life is a gift to enjoy
Don’t want think about myself anymore
I see all the way around my head
Growing up in Oklahoma, she spent most of the year in non-native settings, she recently told Marc Maron in an interview, but summers were different. The hot months she was enveloped in her culture with extended family on a piece of land that shaped her identity and later inspired songs like When We Remain.
The melancholic song that brought me to her, Joey, was played mid-set, her drummer and bassist leaving her alone on stage, just her and a guitar. I first heard this song when it appeared on Reservation Dogs, sending me on a song-chase until I came to the track like finding a missing piece of my own diary that had been bouncing around on a public bus unattended stop to stop while I frantically searched for it from the outside.
Hearing it live was a tender bird-like thing, her voice overflowing the boundaries of the room to fill every hollow in my body, a soothing ache that might flit away at any moment.
I don't mind if you spill your wine like you used to
I know it's different, but we'll figure it out
Sometimes I feel like my memories never happened
Could you remind me, take me back for a night?
Was it ever real?
I don't even feel like that girl anymore
Was it heavenly?
I don't even see through those eyes anymore
She told Maron on his podcast that the Tlingit people of Alaska gave her an honor name, Shikai Kliksa1. She explained that the Tlingit people believe that colonialism has taken all their culture and stories and stuffed them into a tight fitting box with a big heavy lid. Today, there are people who are coming along and moving and pushing that lid off, little by little, letting the culture seep and breathe out, the stories be told, the culture felt. Shikai Kliksa – it means to push a little bit off the edge.
This concept of pushing the lid off the box — would manifest throughout the evening, Samantha showing me, songwriter to songwriter, how to nudge the unmovable. She sings in Neptune Baby:
I don’t want to worry
When I worry I lose all that precious time to love
Loving is my purpose
I am all around you
Slackening my limbs and wishing I was just the sea
Something that you long for
I’m a boat
I’m a boat
And you are the water
Stories that resist telling—how do you coax them into song? Samantha showed me: with the specifics of your life in word form, your billowing voice, your whole self, nothing held back.
Lesson 2: And Bring Your People With You Too
Between songs, as Samantha would turn to her drummer and tune her guitar, native chanting from social gatherings would sound overhead through the PA. At first, it seemed it was a part of the outward facing “show", along with the beautiful hand-painted jackets with native motifs that a native friend of hers had painted.
But then Samantha revealed the real purpose of those sounds— it wasn't so much for us, the audience— after 18 years of playing music, she confessed, she'd recently started getting stage fright and was terrified about touring for this album.
The social gathering chants were family music, songs sung at cultural centers, weddings, powwows, and coming-together moments. Her workaround to deal with her unexpected late career stage fright was to bring the sonic comfort of her people gathered around her – an aural hug, a musical beta-blocker, she called it.
This moment of vulnerability was when the textile began to take shape, a taut form and pattern. The whole audience was suddenly with her, beside her, backing up and holding a new space for her ancestors and her family, all the unseen people to stand alongside all of us so she could do her work on stage. Pushing a little bit off the edge.
Lesson 3: There's No Word for "You're Welcome" When Care is Expected
The crosswise weft began with an impromptu language lesson — in Choctaw, she explained, there's no direct translation for you're welcome because it's culturally implied that ‘we all do for each other – of course we do.’ The word used colloquially in response to thank you is ome, which simply means ‘okay’.
This reminded me of Robin Wall Kimmerer writing in Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants — that while there are several words for thank you in Potawatomi, there's no word for please — it's simply a cultural given that one is asking respectfully, baked right into the language.
The colonial mindset is everywhere and nowhere — invisible because it's everything. Language is the first and most fundamental tool of colonialism because it shapes how we think about everything else. Once you control the language, you control the conceptual framework.
But what would it mean to live in a culture that assumes no need to say you're welcome or please?
No. Really.
Think about that, because if you do, it will lead you into a rabbit hole so deep and profound it may break your heart open and crush the concepts of your ego that were tentatively holding this reality together on sheer force hustle and will.
To belong to a culture that has no word for you're welcome, no word for please, but plenty of words for thank you, would mean living in a world that assumes your fundamental goodness. It would mean abundance as a baseline, not scarcity. It would mean you don't have to earn your place at the table. It would mean living without the violence of conditional love. No proving your worth. No earning basic kindness. Just the radical assumption of inclusion. It would mean never having to beg for what should be freely given. It would mean a world where your humanity isn't a question mark requiring an answer.
I can only imagine. As a mother, this vision carries a particular ache - the visceral pain of raising children in a world that claims to care for us while the lived experience tells a different story entirely.
Samantha, song weaver, box edge pusher, offered in this simple two minute language lesson, a golden thread in a new textile, an impossible, invisible future wafted with the ancestral wisdom of the past.
At the same time, it was as if she was asking me to pull on a thread in the weaving that my entire current reality has been built upon—this colonized mind passed unchecked generation to generation, a weighty thing. What would happen if I just tugged, a little…
Lesson 4: Language Changes Not Just What You Say, But How You Think
Samantha sang, When We Remain entirely in Choctaw – a song about saying goodbye and thanks to the land where she and her family had grown up. As she explained on Maron's podcast, "the sign of a living language is that... people are making, writing books in the language or …they're writing songs... And so I think everybody that I've come across, they're really starved for wanting new contemporary songs in an indigenous language."
After the song was over, two Choctaw women in the audience who had introduced themselves between songs, "Halito!" in the audience called out from the back, "Thank you Samantha!" In that moment, a filament passed between artist and community, part of the larger weaving taking shape.
But learning to write in Choctaw isn't just about vocabulary. "The further in that you get, the harder it gets because it's not just about learning words and vocabulary. You're basically changing how you think," she explained to Maron.
The difference runs deep. Choctaw is "very verb heavy," she told Maron. "Everything is about movement and change and doing... there's no word for is or are in the language."
This linguistic transformation echoes what Robin Wall Kimmerer discusses Braiding Sweetgrass in her journey through the mind-altering effects of learning her native Potawatomi, especially in the chapter The Grammar of Animacy. English, she writes, "is a noun based language, somehow appropriate to a culture so obsessed with things."
In Potawatomi, the language is 70% verbs (instead of English which is only 30% verbs) and verbs and nouns are separated into tenses by animate and non-animate — and most things that English speakers, or colonized minds, would consider to be non-animate are actually conjugated as animate in Potawatomi.
"A bay is a noun only if water is dead. When a bay is a noun, it is defined by humans, it is trapped between its shores and contained by the word. But the verb wiikwegamaa – to be a bay – releases the water from that bondage and let's it live. "To be a bay" holds the wonder that, for this moment, the living water has decided to shelter itself between these shores, conversing with the cedar roots and a flock of baby mergansers. Because it could do otherwise – to become a stream or an ocean or a waterfall, and there are verbs for that, too. To be a hill, to be a sandy beach, to be a Saturday, all are possible verbs in a world where everything is alive."
When Samantha spoke about writing in Choctaw, you could hear echoes of this same linguistic philosophy. This language framework is beginning to transform her songwriting entirely.
"When I'm writing in English, my go-to is like, me, me, me, me, emo, me, me... And then when I write in Choctaw, it sort of like unlocks this whole other thing, which is: this is what I'm perceiving... it's very much like a more observational way of writing."
Lesson 5: Use Your Tools Without Apology
As a songwriter observing another songwriter, there were sturdy, practical threads woven through her performance too. When someone shouted out a request, she responded with warm statured directness: "Oh no, I'm not taking requests, I stick to my set list completely because I have a bad memory. Not sure if you can see it up here but I actually have a song book with chords and lyrics here to help me along, I don't ever try to wing it."
She offered no pretense about holding everything in her mind like some rock and roll goddess — she was just using smart tools to perform better. It was a lovely permission slip, full memorization of all your songs doesn't have to be a goal. It doesn't somehow make you a better musician or performer to have it all locked in your head; offloading it to a book might be the wiser thing to do if that's how your brain works.
Lesson 6: Sometimes, Share the Thing Half-Baked
She also told the story of writing a song during sound checks on the road, and texting the skeleton to Sterling Harjo, the director at Reservation Dogs as just a voice memo. "This is good, we'll use it this week," came the reply.
"No wait, this song isn't finished," she protested.
"No, it's good, we'll use it."
The episode aired, and people started contacting her — "hey, love the song, where can I get a copy?" — and she had to let them know she was still writing the song.
There's chunks of wisdom in this funny anecdote.
One: being networked in with the right people who believe in your work and will champion you — that matters. Look around. Are there people who really believe in what you're doing?
And two: sometimes just share the thing half-baked. Not usually, but sometimes it's just the heart of the thing that needs to be shared, now— the emotional vortex and truth of the piece is compelling enough that even only in a doughy state people can recognize its beauty. You can play catch up later, molding and shaping it into it’s final form.
Lesson 7: Trust Your Process
By the time we reached that encore moment — Samantha patiently re-tuning, insisting on getting that low note right — the fabric was complete. I had become part of it, we all had — woven in together, never to be taken apart again. The show was not an artifact to observe from a distance, but something we were all now part of.
This is trusting yourself as an artist, embodied.
To believe in your process, even if there are squidgy moments.
In a way, it was better she got the tuning wrong on the first go — it was like getting an spontaneous clinic in open-tuning techniques. We got to experience, in our bodies, how the subtle change in tuning cast a shadowy depth over the lyrics at just the right moment, that one low note blushing a tonal drama that was missing before. And isn’t that worth fighting for?
The shade of the dye that goes into the weaving matters, it will be woven into everything. Choose wisely, make it count.
Don't be pressured to just pick a blue. Pick THE blue.
In every song, every story, every moment of vulnerability on stage, Samantha was living out her Tlingit honor name, Shikai Kliksa – pushing a little bit off the edge of that tightly sealed box, letting culture and tradition breathe again. Her work creates openings not just for other Indigenous artists to step through, but for anyone willing to let their mind and heart be shifted by what spills out when that lid moves, even just a little.
And The Weaving Continues, Thread by Thread
Samantha is part of a larger tapestry of Indigenous artists reclaiming space in contemporary music, art, literature, and culture. Here is a shortlist of some of the indigenous artists who have influenced my work and some folks Samantha herself recommended and turned me on to:
Quinn Christopherson
Quinn Christopherson opened for Samantha at Little Saint. Alaska born and raised, Ahtna Athabascan and Iñupiaq — Quinn took the stage just a guitar, bucket hat, a monochromatic cream shirt, pants and matching white bandana tied like a loose necktie, with a blond mustache to match. The first song, Raedeen, started with a story of siblings making it together:
My little sister, she raised me up
You know, my mom, she checked out
Popping pills turned to pipe
Skin and bones, now she's not around
The audience was collectively holding our breath, watching Quinn’s face twitch as he sang:
Oh I miss you, Rae
I know your kids do too
And those fucking drugs,
they're taking over, and trust me 'cos I've been there too
Lemme tell you something
If you're going down, I'll be right behind ya
I'll start with a drink and it won't take me long, yeah I'll find ya
If it's good enough for you, then it's good enough for me
You're my biggest sister and I can't let you leave
So if you're drowning let me know,
'cos I've never been much of a swimmer
I'll crush pills,
I'll bring a bottle and I'll meet you at the bottom of the river
We'll go together. Like brother, like sister
We'll go together
The song ended like the last beep on a life support machine, the silence deafening.
I was not the only person wiping tears — and then Quinn said through the tail end of the applause, “That is by far the saddest song I got, I thought it would be funny to start there,” giggling into the microphone.
Sheesh. Yes. Okay.
This is the kind of artistic courage that defined the entire evening - the willingness to go to the most tender places and stay there long enough for us to feel it too. Beautifully specific storytelling. Go listen.
Wathéča Radio with Justis Brokenrope
Folk | Psychedelic Rock | Native American | Rock | Country
Samantha mentioned this radio show in her interview with Marc Maron — it’s hosted on NTS Radio — and it’s bananas. It features all native musicians who were mostly passed over in their time, their time now due. An absolute treasure trove, I can’t stop listening — I also decided to became a member of NTS because it’s a billiony-trilliony times more interesting than listening to Spotify. Check it out!!!
From the shownotes: “Justis Brokenrope (Sičháŋǧu Lakȟóta) is a musician and educator currently residing in Bdé Óta Othúŋwe, Mní Sóta (Minneapolis, Minnesota). Wathéča Radio is an offshoot of Wathéča Records, a label and archival project focused on North American indigenous artists who were often overlooked in the canons of rock, folk, and country music.”
🎶 A Few Indigenous Musicians — Old and New 🎶
Authors📚
Robin Wall Krimerer
Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants — this book changed my life. I don’t know what else to tell you.
The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World. This book helped me birth a line in a song and the basis for exploring a gift-based economy for music.
Martín Prechtel
The first book I took in by Martín was The Smell of Rain on Dust: Grief and Praise. This book reoriented my entire understanding of how grief and loss function, and how beauty is the essential human work we do in response. I highly recommend listening if you are able because he is a storyteller. It’s an experience.
Mary Oliver herself says of this book:"beautifully written and wise … he offers stories that are precious and life-sustaining. Read carefully, and listen deeply."
If you like Martín and his teachings, I would recommend taking in his whole series about his life with his horses, starting with The Mare and the Mouse: Stories of My Horses Vol. I. The three part anthology covers over 1000 pages of his life with horses and again, you will be reprogrammed entirely by the end. Listen over read if you can.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
Clarissa is most well known for Women Who Run with the Wolves, but last fall I discovered her Sounds True fireside audio series — starting with The Joyous Body: Myths and Stories of the Wise Woman Archetype. The Joyous Body is about learning to relate to our body as its own animal, its own separate intelligence, our first friend, our constant companion in life. She, like Martín, can tell a story. It’s not an audiobook, it’s a transmission, it gives you the feeling of being around a fire and receiving elder wisdom with love.
Recently, I found out that Martín, Robin and Clarissa are somehow in each other’s circles, which does not surprise me. Their work all has something of each others within it — once you open one box you might find yourself opening another.
Currently Reading
Becoming Little Shell: A Landless Indian's Journey Home by Chris La Tray
We Are The Middle Forever: Indigenous Voices From Turtle Island on the Changing Earth edited by Dahr Jamail and Stan Rushworth
TV & Film
Reservations Dogs — Samantha Crain’s music was featured on the show multiple times, and the soundtrack features a number of other indigenous artists mixed in with both classic and contemporary rock and hip hop.
Fancy Dance — Samantha Crain did the score for this film, featuring Oscar nominated actress Lily Gladstone.
North of North — A newer Netflix show about an native woman unfurling and discovering the hidden roots of her discontent in her tiny Arctic hometown. The show has no tie-in with Samantha’s work, but the soundtrack, again, has a mix of contemporary indigenous artists mixed in with pop, hip hop, rock — worth a listen and the show is very interesting.
You can check out all of Samantha Crain’s beautiful work — her current tour dates, music, videos, merch, and good stuff over at Samantha Crain.com
