by Riley Kirk
Photo by Atlas Fielding
What is left to bloom after a small death? That’s what Choctaw singer-songwriter Samantha Crain aims to discover with her upcoming release, Gumshoe. After being in three car crashes in three months, the worst of which leaving her with altered dexterity in her hands, 38-year old-Crain wrote her critically acclaimed 2020 album A Small Death in short bursts of voice memos and notes during her recovery process. Gumshoe is what comes next, but in several ways what has been brewing for longer.
Friday April 11, The Warhol Musuem’s Sound Series welcomed Crain to the Warhol theater stage. Tucked into a hallway, the theater feels like a well-kept secret from the bustling museum patrons. The show is intentionally intimate, highlighting Crain without her band or supporting opener ahead of her full-band summer tour. Crain waits in the museum lobby before her set for her turn to pose in the $7 photo booth, divulging later that she watched a man eating a banana in an ironic Warhol reference.
Alone on the stage with no accompaniment but her guitar and a solo spotlight, Crain is unphased by her solitude. Her stage presence is self-assured in a down-to-earth way– undoubtedly due to her nearly twenty years of touring. She wears purple gauzy pants and a jacket made for her by Jimmy Dean Horn of Running Horse Studio, a native printmaker from Santa Fe tasked with outfitting her band with custom jackets for their upcoming tour.
Teasing her May 2 album release, Crain shares a few unreleased songs, older tried-and-true’s, and fresh singles with an audience that packs the theater seats and spills out into the aisles. One of the older gems is “Elk City”, off of her 2015 release Under Branch & Thorn & Tree. As Crain fiddles with her headstock, she confides in the audience, “I jacked this story and I jacked this tuning.”
She explains that she wrote “Elk City” after a barstool-neighbor on her travels shared their life story with her in the way that barstool-neighbors do. Unable to get the story of human grief and life out of her mind, Crain scribbled down the odds and ends she could remember in her car after leaving the bar. At the time, her guitar was in Hawaiian tuning for 1952 Vincent Black Lightning, a Richard Thompson song she was learning. “Elk City” naturally illustrates the life of a stranger we all know, the person who stayed still while the world kept spinning.
Unlike most touring artists who lean into the whole “Go Steelers” bit and then travel on to Philly and love the Eagles, Crain genuinely remembers Pittsburgh for two things: Mr. Yuk (an iconic poison prevention awareness symbol made by UPMC), and one night years ago at the now-closed Club Cafe. On her 2013 tour, Crain’s van was broken into and numerous instruments were stolen (as well as her drummer’s pants!) the night before her July headliner at Club Cafe. The supporting act and venue workers were able to help provide substitute instruments for all except the guitar Crain would play with, so she walked a block down to Pittsburgh Guitars and bought the cheapest thing they had– a $199 guitar she had to retune every few songs.
After her set, Crain realized that she actually needed that $199 in order to travel to Philadelphia and pick up her lender guitar, so half-jokingly she pitched to the crowd that she would sell her guitar for $199 to anybody who wanted to buy it then and there– and someone did. “Pittsburgh was so friendly to buy my guitar back from me that night,” Crain says on stage almost 12 years later. The way Crain interacts with the audience makes us feel as if we are privy to a secret that only the people in the room are in on; the storytelling in her music translates to the easy, conversational energy of her performance.
The title track to the upcoming album is a light-hearted one: “A couple of years ago, I was writing this love song and I was using all of this detective imagery,” Crain says. “I realized I can make this a song about two detectives that fall in love. It’s kind of goofy,” she warns before strumming the opening chords, the audience humming in appreciation.
The word gumshoe has been in circulation in Crain’s journals since she was a teenager. Originating from her obsession with the television series Where in the World is Carmen San Diego?, gumshoe morphed from a TV reference into a grander, worldly pondering that culminates in a Friday evening at the Warhol theater and ultimately, Crain’s seventh full length release this May.
“The reason I ended up naming my whole album (Gumshoe) is because I feel like I’ve been trying to put into words whatever it is I’m trying to figure out about existing on this mortal coil,” Crain confides in the audience. “So I am a gumshoe, I guess.”
Samantha Crain and her band commence their summer tour May 9 in her home state of Oklahoma. Gumshoe releases on all streaming platforms and on physical media through Real Kind Records May 11.
Riley Kirk is a multimedia creative and journalist. She loves finding inspiration in the DIY scene, music, and this beautiful city. She has published pieces with Grain of Salt Magazine (archived) and the Pittsburgh Independent, all of which you can read from her instagram @noneofusaregoingback.
Want to look at history with a detective’s eye? This month’s articles are published with support from The Frick Pittsburgh for Kara Walker: Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated). As Zach Hunley wrote in Petrichor: “When viewing the work of Kara Walker, you are bearing witness to history and time compounded.” Revisit the past and rethink the present now at the Frick Art Museum.
PETRICHOR 
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