In Conversation With Colin: Samantha Fish (2)

It’s been a busy two years for blues rock star Samantha Fish, she has topped music charts and played in excess of 150 shows in the last year alone, a lot has happened as Colin Palmer discovered when he caught up with Samantha again, two years after their last chat.

First there was the invitation from Eric Clapton to play at his 2023 Crossroads guitar festival in Los Angeles.

Then there was the summer 2024 slot on Slash’s S.E.R.P.E.N.T. tour, followed by the Experience Hendrix tour, and then she opened for the Rolling Stones in Missouri on the final date of their Hackney Diamonds tour.

This year shows no sign of letting up with the release of Paper Doll, her ninth solo album overall and third for Rounder Records. “There was high energy the entire time and recording was very frenetic,” comments Fish, “just being on the road in the midst of all that lent so much to that energy.”

This is the first time she’s ever used her touring band to make a record; keyboardist Mickey Finn, bassist Ron Johnson, and drummer Jamie Douglass. “It just worked out perfectly because if you looked at our touring schedule last year it was nuts. So we would look at the calendar and see we had two days off in Austin, Texas before heading to Oklahoma City so let’s go into the studio and start working. The best case scenario was to take the band in there and everybody poured their hearts into it.”

Paper Doll is the second Fish album that Bobby Harlow’s produced; the first was 2017’s Chills & Fever. But whereas that album was all covers, the focus this time was on original songs, more than half of them co-written by Harlow with Fish before he was even considered to produce the album.

“I feel like making a record is really a snap shot of where you are in the moment, Bobby and I reconnected last March, I hadn’t seen him in a couple of years other than randomly checking in.” Fish recalls. “He came out to a show I was playing in Detroit at St. Andrew’s Hall, and we had lunch and we kept in touch. As I was starting to write songs for the new record I just wanted to get back in with him because he’s such a talented writer, and so we started co-writing May and June of last year.

“The first song on the record ‘I’m Done Running’ is actually a song I wrote back in 2020, intended for the Faster record but it just didn’t fit the vibe and I threw it in the pile of songs that would never be used. Sometimes you do have to nurture songs a little bit and it can take years, and then sometimes you write a song in thirty minutes and those are favourites because then it’s like inspiration strikes like a lightning bolt and it’s like wow – it feels really great when you can actually have something to hold at the end of the day, and that energy sends me into a trajectory where I have momentum and I can keep writing.”

Describing the sound of the new album Samantha offers this: “To me, every song on this record started with a blues riff, something that was inspired by some north hill country riff and then it just grew and some of the songs went into a different

direction, almost into a rock ‘n’ roll big 1970’s rock band on some of them. I took a lot of what I learned from the Death Wish Blues record with Jesse Dayton and brought a lot of that exciting energy into the sessions, and my guitar solos really have some big moments on this new record and it feels like a big greasy rock ‘n’ roll band, we hit a really good groove together as a band.”