Samia is Impossible

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THERE’S SOMETHING ABOUT THE halcyon days early on in a relationship, when you and your paramour don’t know that much about each other, except that you want to spend all your time together. Around every corner is a mystery—What was their childhood like? Did they go to camp as a kid? Do they get along with their family? What were they like in college?—and those question marks keep us coming back for more. We’re curious creatures by nature. As a chronic oversharer, I was never able to keep the mystery alive for long with a new partner. I’m a heart-on-my-sleeve kind of gal from a family in which no one would think to utter the letters “TMI,” but I always envied those who were able to shroud themselves in ambiguity, existing as a bewitching enigma. Singer-songwriter Samia Finnerty (known mononymously as Samia—emphasis on the first syllable), on the other hand, finds that she’s kept people at arms’ length in relationships, “trying to be barely there so I could be bigger in this other way and giving as little of myself as possible, and then being sort of terrified of being actually known, because it limited my options.”

I first listened to Samia’s music about five years ago, when former Paste editor Steven Edelstone urged me to listen to her indie-rock single “Fit N Full.” Bouncing, sunny guitar and road trip-ready percussion lured me in with their bright catchiness, though underneath the anthemic trappings Samia skewered the empty promises of dieting culture (“Apple cider vinegar and kale / I’m fit and full as ever” and “Only getting hotter as I sweat”). When she released her debut album The Baby in 2020, on which “Fit N Full” appears, I distinctly remember being so bowled over by it that I had to start the record over the moment the final song ended. Part of the appeal was her songwriting—beyond the summery melodies, gently strummed guitar, and lucid pop sensibilities, her lyrics were both deeply evocative and cryptic. I was left with the same feeling that plagues me after a particularly affecting David Lynch film—there was rich meaning there that I didn’t fully get, which inevitably meant I wanted to go back for more.

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Samia calls this writing style of hers “Rumpelstiltskin” because “it feels like a bridge troll is asking you to solve three riddles.” It’s an approach she largely abandoned on her 2023 sophomore record, Honey, which features a more straightforward, diaristic tack. For example, the lyrics of “Kill Her Freak Out” are arrestingly direct, voicing Samia’s worst impulses: “I’ve never felt so unworthy of loving / I hope you marry the girl from your hometown / And I’ll fucking kill her / And I’ll fucking freak out.” Gone was the read-between-the-lines wit of The Baby; Honey was about leaving everything on the table, even if it was thorny and hard to look at.

“I sort of used to have this idea that you have to give everything away in order to be a good, honest artist,” Samia tells me over Zoom. However, her new album Bloodless sees her returning to her sphinx-like ways while channeling the alt-country sound dominating indie music these days (she’s no bandwagoner, though—The Baby has some lovely country-tinged moments). “That’s how I started [writing] and how I made my first record, and I found a lot of solace in coming back to it. It just feels like the most cathartic way for me to write,” she says. Her lyrics often begin as poems, a medium she first fell in love with at age 12. “I had a really good teacher in the sixth grade who introduced me to all my favorite poets and songwriters, too, and the first person to be like, ‘You can do this. [Poetry] might be the thing that you have good instincts in.’ He totally changed my life.”

And, funnily enough, Samia’s abstruse lyrics again play into this notion of keeping her cards close to her chest in order to be the most enticing version of herself possible. “Sometimes writing in code can be a way to keep people out there and not have to fully reveal or be completely vulnerable, which I used to be sort of embarrassed about. But I think, especially around this album, I started to accept it and be excited about it,” she says, later elaborating: “I like it better this way. I can leave certain things up to interpretation and then keep the meanings for myself. And I don’t have to get on stage and absolutely spill my guts in the most direct possible way.”

In early 2023, Samia started writing the album that would later become Bloodless, with this notion that “it’s easier to be an idea than a person” as her conceptual “north star.” Notably, she doesn’t place a value judgment on the choice to exist more in someone else’s imagination than the actual. “The less you give away of your humanness, the bigger you can be in someone else’s mind. Your reality, your humanness, kind of shrinks your possibilities, and that can be both infuriating and also really empowering. [The album is] sort of grappling with the truth of that,” she shares.

On Bloodless’ second track “Bovine Excision,” Samia confesses “I wanna be untouchable” over honeyed acoustic guitar from longtime collaborator and Hippo Campus member Jake Luppen. As the song unfurls, the guitars growing more insistent, she doubles down on her desire to be someone whose being defies reality. “I wanna be impossible,” she sings, her lyrics later blooming in full gothic: “And drained, drained bloodless.” The Sarah Ritter-directed music video for “Bovine Excision” opens with with eerie night vision shots from the perspective of someone running in the woods, before switching to a relatively serene—but still ever-so-slightly unsettling—cabin in the South Carolina woods where Samia lounges, her surroundings ornamented with a deer skull and seashell wind chimes.

“We had just watched Blair Witch, and we were talking about this idea of oscillating between being the monster, the killer, the villain, and the final girl, which is something that I’d been thinking about in writing a lot, with this idea that the less you give of yourself, the more you can become,” Samia tells me. She’s only recently gotten into horror films—her favorite is Robert Eggers’ The VVitch—and this song (as well as the rest of the album) sends the spine tingling with its haunting atmosphere. As for the setting of the “Bovine Excision” video, the South Carolina swamp was something of a no-brainer for Samia: “I have this character called Kiki Swamp, I can’t even believe I’m talking about it, but I developed this character so that I could, like, not be embarrassed about writing about certain things, or writing with a certain tone, because she’s more confident than I am, and she lives in a swamp, so we had to get ourselves to the swamp.”

THE ALBUM ITSELF WAS RECORDED between Durham, North Carolina and Minneapolis, Minnesota, where Samia lives. “I’m pretty shy, so I only feel comfortable to really write with a very small group of people that I trust a lot, and they live between here and in Durham, North Carolina,” she explains. Caleb Wright, who co-produced Bloodless and The Baby with Luppen (as well as Honey with Rostam Batmanglij), is a Minneapolis native, but lives in Durham, while the rest of Samia’s creative co-conspirators are in the Midwest like her. When in North Carolina, she and her friends work out of Sylvan Esso’s recording studio Betty’s, which is suitably tucked away in the woods.

“They’ll cook you home cooked vegan meals, and you walk through the woods and everyone’s doing yoga. It’s a beautiful, nice environment,” Samia gushes. “And then when we’re [in Minneapolis], we’re holed up in this studio with no windows that we never leave. So it’s a really different feeling, and it’s freezing cold, so I think I need a little bit of that for my creativity. I need a little bit of discomfort and cold, and there has to be something that feels insurmountable to overcome. And so I kind of give myself North Carolina as a treat when we’ve accomplished something, because it’s too comfortable.”

Besides Wright and Luppen, Samia worked on Bloodless with her best friend Raffaella Meloni—who also happens to be the reason why she moved to Minneapolis after stints in Los Angeles, Nashville, and New York. “I’ve been coming here to make music for seven years, so it’s become my favorite place,” Samia says, adding, “I’m a Minneapolis poser. I’ve been pretending to be here for forever. So I thought, ‘Oh, just do it.’” Her first album even has a tribute to her adopted home before she made it official—the plinking indie pop number “Minnesota.” Her love for the state seems to have just dropped in her lap as she sings on the chorus with lackadaisical surprise, “I guess I’m going to Minnesota, huh?”

Meloni and Samia may live in Minneapolis now, but the pair first met in college in New York. Their friendship inspired the album’s penultimate track, the casually effervescent “North Poles,” which they wrote together with Ludden and Wright. The hyperspecificity of the lyrics brings the song to life—“Sliding door squeaking / While I’m pouring your tea in / While you’re cutting a blue pill in half for me”—but it’s gut-wrenching lines like “When you see yourself in someone / How can you look at them” that stay with you long after the final note has dissipated.

“It was really emotional,” Samia says of writing “North Poles” with Meloni. “I don’t think she knew when we were writing it that I was thinking of her… I sat with it for a couple months and sent it back to her, and it was so glaringly obvious [that it’s about her]. It’s so easy for me to listen to because I can hear her in it, and I think we wrote that line together—‘When you see yourself in someone, how can you look at them’—and I feel like we were able to nail something in writing about friendship there that like I’ve never been able to touch before. It’s just so special to do that with her.”

Samia’s favorite tracks on Bloodless are the swaying, subtly twangy “Hole in the Frame” and sparse, acoustic “Proof.” “They were two of the last songs I wrote for [the album], and by that point, I knew what I was trying to say fully. I think it takes writing everything to put a finger on it, and that’s when I could see the whole thing,” she says. “Hole in the Frame” takes its name from the hole that Sid Vicious punched in the wall of Cain’s Ballroom in Tulsa—which has since been commemorated with a frame around it. That act of honoring a lacuna felt like a direct analogue to Samia’s thesis behind Bloodless—that sort of metaphor is irresistible to the poetic mind. And the reality of keeping a sense of remove in relationships bubbles to the surface in “Proof” as she accuses, “You don’t know me bitch.” She’s also ready for those walls to come down, even if she’s not ready to dismantle them herself: “I wished for you to read my mind / I wanted you to come and find / Me waiting in the foyer for you.”

The feather-light indie rock song “Sacred,” meanwhile, was a difficult one for Samia to write. “I was really trying to make it not sound whiny and then I sort of just had to accept the whininess of it,” she says with a laugh. “But I ended up getting the lyrics to a place where I was like, ‘Okay, this feels like taking a little bit of culpability. Like, a tiny, tiny bit of culpability.’” I think her misgivings about whininess are unfounded, in part because of how much I love the searing refrain “But you never loved me like you hate me now.”

Metaphors and thematic detours aside, Bloodless is ultimately an album in which Samia reckons with her sense of self, which for a long time she built around a theoretical, ideal man. “I noticed a parallel between my relationship with this abstract idea of men that I developed at a young age, and people’s relationship with God who grew up in organized religion.” (Although she wasn’t raised religious, Samia describes herself as a “seeker.”) “And for me, it was creating this figment man to tell me what to do, so in this convoluted way I could make decisions without bearing the responsibility for the decisions. And I just realized at a certain point I’d built a personality around characteristics that I believed men would like, which I don’t think is a very unique story,” Samia recounts, and as someone who tried to be a “guys’ girl” for a while, I can definitely second that final sentiment. Samia used to feel ashamed that elements of her identity she shaped to appeal to this imaginary man, but she’s since confronted the nitty gritty reality of her personhood, partly through the lens of feminist scholar Judith Butler’s writing.

“I was reading a lot of Judith Butler, who’s got this theory that there’s no ‘I’ apart from your social conditioning, so that was really helpful… It’s not like I’m excavating or searching for some me that exists in a vacuum. I am just this conglomerate of all of my experiences and conditioning and so forth,” she explains. Over the course of Bloodless, Samia goes from idealizing this distant, enticingly ethereal version of herself—or even an insect displayed and admired from afar in the gentle alt-country track “Fair Game” (“Even up in a shadowbox the blood’s mine or the blood’s lost”)—to embracing the vulnerability and messiness that comes with self-acceptance. When I ask her what this self-acceptance looks like, she responds, “I think it’s accepting that there’s no absolute self to get back to. It’s not like there’s some pure version of you that exists underneath everything you’ve learned to do for others, or that you’ve done out of fear or that’s rubbed off on you. I spent a lot of time being so ashamed of those parts of me, the things that have just stuck to me that I felt like I couldn’t remove. And yeah, so it’s just looking at it as this barnacle, you know, conglomerate thing in the face without being like, ‘Where are you?’”

Samia invokes this sentiment on the final Bloodless track, “Pants.” The repeated line “Wanna see what’s under these Levis? I got nothing under these Levi’s” may initially sound like a come-on, but it’s really a reminder that under the masks we wear, there’s nothing. The mask is us—and that’s nothing to be embarrassed about. After all, as she sings in the album’s lullaby-like final moments, “Maybe you start living the moment you stop feeling so dumb.”

Clare Martin is a writer and cemetery enthusiast. She works in a library in Dublin, which involves less shushing than you’d think.

COVER STORY | Samia is Impossible

In our latest Digital Cover Story, we catch up with the Minnesota singer-songwriter about accepting the reality of her personhood, drawing from Judith Butler, folk horror, and poetry, and her third album, Bloodless.