When we previewed Samantha Crain’s new album Under Branch & Thorn & Tree, we wrote about how the record aimed to give voices to those too used to being silenced. “You and I tell the stories the TV won’t release” she sings on lead single ‘Outside The Pale’, “they keep us in the wild, under branch and thorn and tree”. In our interview back in June, Crain expanded upon this idea, telling how she believes music can and should play a role in societal issues:
“Music has the power to change minds and to nudge humanity down a different path… I feel like most music just wants to follow the mass around asking what they like and what they want from them. There are bigger things going on, music and art needs to direct attention towards those injustices”
As you might expect from such lofty intentions, Under Branch & Thorn & Tree is an ambitious, far-reaching album, a collection of songs that sound fresh and new yet somehow timeless, as if Crain and her genre-defying style is merely a conduit for stories that have played out for as long as people have lived.
The record opens with ‘Killer’, a misleadingly buoyant track, with it’s jabbing drums and off-kilter synths, born out of a grim truth. The African-American community is suffering at the hands of the police and others. Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray, Sandra Bland, Raynette Turner, Samuel Dubose… the list has grown since I started this review’s first draft. While the media is alight with opinions and suggestions and politics, Crain heads for the heart of the matter, challenging not only the events but the surrounding coverage and politics, stripping back the details so that the only important fact remains: People are being murdered and it is not right. Thus, the song, and accompanying video with Evan Horsley as a kid cop, serves the twin purpose of increasing awareness amongst the privileged and urging the disadvantaged to persevere in the hope of a just, equal society.”They say the worst is over, Crain sings, “the lowest reached / But it’s such a long road, keep marching!”
‘Kathleen’ is more of a traditional folk sound, albeit sung with a rare confidence, the verses streaming forth in little rivers:
“A grumble at the telephone
A whispered cuss at the break of dawn
A hardened heart wasn’t in the game plan
But there was a golden braid and an open ear
A funny joke and a lack of fear
The clock out of work
The joy of Kathleen”
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‘Elk City’ is perhaps the finest piece of classic folk storytelling I’ve heard this year, Crain’s whispery, warbly vocals spinning the yarn of a 17 year old girl who left home on her boyfriend’s coal wagon chasing promises of fortune. But of course, this is a folk song, and things don’t go exactly to plan. The boyfriend leaves unannounced when “boom turned to bust”, leaving our heroine to become with-child after a night with the washing machine repairman, a night Crain describes brilliantly, “Well that night turned into 9 months / Sitting on my ass / Waiting for a baby / My first and my last”. But hope is not lost as the song ends on a surprisingly (and stirringly) happy note which sees the baby grow up and go to college and beat her mama out of Elk City. These lines convey the hope that many of Crain’s songs contain, not a rosy happy-ever-after fairytale but a bullish refusal to give in to Life’s cruel games, illuminating, like all the best folk songs, an inextinguishable human spirit that unites us all.
Next we get the melodic march of ‘Outside the Pale’, and then ‘You or the Mystery’, a stark and foreboding track that serves as a kind of obituary for a recently deceased neighbour, a man the narrator does not know. “He looked like a sad man”, Crain sings. “Slammed all the doors / never drew up his curtains / He was small and pale on his porch.” The song has a plain, matter-of-fact style that is reminiscent of so much of my favourite American literature, detailing the simple and oddly elegant lives of those in small towns.
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‘When You Come Back’ is a slow and sad country song, a jilted lover’s message to the man who left her for another gal, “When you come to the bar could you not bring her? / I don’t want to see you with another lover”. The voice is vulnerable but not beaten, fiercely fragile and ready to rebuild – as is so beautifully captured in the last verse:
“When you come back could you bring my heart?
Its kinda hard livin since you took it so far
I know you broke it but I got spare parts
So when you come back could you bring my heart?”
‘Big Rock’ is a twangy and crunchy slice of rock, the closest thing the album has to runaway good-time country. The narrator here is celebrating their isolation and misfortune, making something out of the hand they’ve been dealt. “I’m stuck on a rock for the longest time…even though I’m all alone the view’s alright”. ‘All In’ is a steady and melodic folk song, while ‘If I Had a Dollar’ sways as if floating up from a jukebox in a smoky twilit bar-room, surrounded by men nursing cool bottles and glasses and a sense of injustice. ‘Moving Day’ is a slow and subtle finale where the titular event feels like the consequence of a long history, the culmination of love and loss and passing time. The character here is wistful and sincere, as if aware that relationships are brittle and unpredictable, or else feeling any present pain insignificant in the face of all the good they once shared.
Crain excels in her ability to grant humanity to all of her characters, leaving us with a strange mixture of pity and joy rising in our chests upon recognising someone as similar to ourselves. Therefore she is the ideal person to write nuance and life into groups usually denied it. These are songs played like inner thoughts or secret diary entries of persons not usually able to or justified in expressing their true sentiments, people who are not as tough as they let on, but tougher than they think in the middle of the night. A selection of underdogs living the lives they have been given, not pining for more or complaining at a cosmic injustice. Quiet, noble people in the trenches of everyday life, those with the broadest shoulders and smallest voices and a hard, buried sense of pride who treat hardship like a member of the family.
Under Branch & Thorn & Tree is out now on Full Time Hobby. You can buy it here (US) and here (Europe). Check out our interview with Samantha here.