Samantha Fish
Is Samantha Fish killing with kindness? The singer/guitarist’s latest album is a winning blend of sweetness and savagery.
This singer/guitarist’s latest album is a winning blend of sweetness and savagery.
Kansas City-born blues rocker Samantha Fish is a bit of an internet sensation these days. A few videos of her live performances – in particular a soulful rendition of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’s I Put A Spell On You and a hellacious version of Black Sabbath’s War Pigs – have blown up on Facebook, sending an army of new fans flying in her direction.
“It’s amazing,” the singer/guitarist says of the online attention she’s been getting. “It’s been interesting to see how one weird cell-phone camera video from four years ago that isn’t even on my radar can somehow get somebody’s attention and circulate the internet.”
Fish’s latest album, Kill Or Be Kind, is loaded with the snarling guitar and mulekick vocals that caused her videos to turn heads. Recorded at Memphis’s Royal Studios, the birthplace of records by artists such as Chuck Berry, Al Green and John Mayer, the album stays true to its name. Balancing fierce, slide guitar-driven crowd pumpers like Bulletproof with quieter soul/R&B tunes such as Dirty, it’s a fun mix of gentleness and aggression.
While Fish has an impressive collection of attention-grabbing unusual guitars – among them a custom Delaney ‘Fish-o-caster’ with a fish-shaped sound hole, a Stogie Box Blues four-string cigar-box guitar and a Bohemian Guitars six-string with a vintage oil can bod – her main guitar on the new album was her trusty Alpine White Gibson SG. A flaw in that instrument made for a moment of serendipity while she was recording the song Love Your Lies, the solo finding her wringing a warbling, tremolo flutter-like sound from a repeated note.
“I have a wonky fret on my guitar,” she explains. “I went up for this bend, and it just sounded so fucking weird! I’m going to have to figure out how to recreate it, but it was just a defect of my guitar. I thought it sounded kind of wicked.”
From her impassioned lead playing to the fired-up whoops she lets out before solos, Fish’s delivery on the record is nearly as energetic as when she’s playing live, and she admits it’s taken her some time to get to this point. “I can hear on some of my earlier recordings where I was stressed, timid and not punching through,” she says. “Go figure – six albums in, I finally relaxed in the studio!”
With a laugh, she adds: “I think I’m going to get it by the time I’m fifty… maybe.”
“I can hear on some of my earlier recordings where I was stressed,
timid and not punching through.”