Samia comes back blunt, raw, and vulnerable on 'Honey'
January 27, 2023
Samia Finnerty has been searching for a hobby. Lately, she has been sharing videos of herself mimicking Fiona Apple interview monologues on her Instagram story. In one highlight video, the singer-songwriter sits on her bed with a laptop playing an interview in front of her; she and Apple say in unison, “I’m not shy. I just don’t speak if I don't have anything to say. That’s what tact is.”
However, the 26-year-old artist, who goes by her first name, actually is a bit shy. Her sophomore album quickly approaching release is a nauseating thought, and for good reason. Emotions are on full display on the new autobiographical piece of work, Honey.
In September, Samia released the first dose of the album by singing, “I've never felt so unworthy of loving / I hope you marry the girl from your hometown / And I'll f***ing kill her, and I'll f***ing freak out” on the slow burning lead single, “Kill Her Freak Out.” What seems to be a song about despising an ex-partner’s new love isn’t completely about jealousy. “It's more about withholding feelings and trying to be perfect and easy for someone and then sort of, over time, exploding,” the singer explains over Zoom from her home in Nashville.
Over the past two years, Los Angeles-born Samia has appreciated a less-chaotic environment in Tennessee. After living in New York City since her teenage years, she can now enjoy the luxuries of a backyard and walking her dog, Milk, down the street without crowds of people everywhere.
Samia wrote “Kill Her Freak Out” while assembling her debut album, The Baby – which was recorded in Minneapolis and released in 2020. “It felt like closing a chapter and also beginning another one because I think writing that song helped me enter the phase of my life that I wrote all the rest of the songs [on Honey].”
Unlike on The Baby, Samia’s words are blunt this time. Experimenting with plain-put lyrics, her new writing style doesn’t skirt around thoughts or recite fluffy diction to give songs mysterious, vague meanings. “I've always incorporated a lot of details,” she says. “I used to sort of write in code a lot of the time, and I did that less on this record.” She admits it’s easier for her to withhold thoughts that could be off-putting to others, and writing is a cathartic, meditative practice. “It sort of started as a way to communicate feelings I was too scared to say directly to people in conversation.”
The vulnerability on Honey may not have materialized without Caleb Wright, a Minneapolis collaborator who produced all of the songs and co-wrote about half of them. “It was a pretty 50/50 effort on this record between Caleb and I,” the singer says. “[Wright’s] really one of the few people who can force me to be honest without trying… So he helped me expedite the process of getting to the truth.”
From the beginning, Wright minimized the complexity of the musical production to secure attention on the lyrics. “I just really wanted to make [the songs] feel as deep as they felt to me when she just played them for me on guitar. She would play some songs for me sometimes and I'd be like, ‘What the f*ck am I supposed to do? Why don't we just do that?’” Wright says. Bare-bones instrumentals are the backdrop for descriptions of fears and desires that many people would never let leave their lips. There’s plenty of space for Samia’s words, and it’s enough for listeners to find themselves there, too.
Samia and Wright were fans of each other’s work before they met at a friend's Fourth of July get-together. Wright is the founder of Samia’s favorite (now-retired) band, the Happy Children. He also produced The Baby, along with Jake Luppen and Nathan Stocker of Hippo Campus. When Samia approached Wright again, they didn’t have a formal plan to create a whole album together. A “let's get together and write and see what happens” proposal led them to record in North Carolina.
The majority of Honey’s production took place in Nick Sandborn and Amelia Meath’s North Carolina studio, nicknamed “Betty’s,” in the middle of the woods. Samia had opened for the duo, who make up electro-pop act Sylvan Esso, on tour in September of 2021, and Wright had previously worked with their management community. “We went once just to write and hang, and then it became our favorite place,” Samia says. “So we just kept going back.”
Though secluded, the studio usually had people around. Wright refers to the space as a revolving door of community. Samia and Wright were peripherally familiar with Sylvan Esso’s clan, but each time a new face appeared in the window, they were starstruck. Despite this, Samia always felt free of judgment.
“It's just such a nurturing environment. And they have the whole extended universe of people who are all some of my favorite writers and musicians… it's just so familial,” she says, with gratitude in her voice. “They've done an incredible job of creating the environment that they want to live in and create in, and [it’s] so generous of them to share it with other people.”
On the last night in the studio, they wrote “Amelia,” named after Meath. “It’s about everyone who worked on the record and all my friends. It's probably the only purely happy song I've ever written. It's just about feeling so filled up by the people around me and so inspired by them.”
Unlike “Amelia,” most of the songs on Honey were constructed around grueling emotional processes. The two-minute “Pink Balloon” took about seven months to complete. When writing, Samia was constantly concerned, ethically, with the practice of sharing details of someone else’s life, trying to balance “what feels like exploitation and what feels like understanding” when describing another person’s affliction.
”I think that's the thing I've struggled with in songwriting the most, is that you can't tell the full story because you're just telling it from one perspective.” That viewpoint has to be balanced with the feeling of “knowing someone so well that you can't be angry with them, even when you feel hurt, because you understand why they do everything they do,” the singer says.
Samia and Wright recorded “Pink Balloon” repeatedly without satisfaction. They slowly sculpted the minute details until only one word needed to be changed, or only one line needed to be sung a bit differently for vocal flow to perfectly match the piano. Each night they would go to sleep frustrated.
The moment it finally came together was unforgettable. “That was probably one of the absolute most satisfying moments of my entire life,” Wright says. “It was like this release in every cell in my body.” Samia felt a similar cleansing sensation. “When we got it, we looked at each other, and I just ran out of the booth and we were hugging and crying and laughing hysterically.”
“Pink Balloon'' floats through the questions, “How am I supposed to wanna hear it anymore?” and “How am I supposed to wanna hold it anymore?” to land on a silky bed of keys and ask, “How are you supposed to wanna love me anymore?” Her vocals are sometimes haunting, sometimes celestial, and never compromise.
Samia sees the thesis of Honey as a collaboration with Wright. “So much of this record revolves around conversations that Caleb and I have… And it's so much inspired by his brain too, even the stuff that I wrote. I couldn't have done it without his contributions in every way.”
Moments throughout the album zoom in on the minute details of an emotion and then zoom back out until nothing’s clear anymore. Themes of discourse in Samia’s life circled around global issues and interpersonal conflicts. She felt the need to forgive herself for feeling that personal circumstances held equal weight with communal ones. Wright says conversations in the woods focused heavily on the two’s individual friendships and larger webs of community.
Part of their surrounding community is the artist Papa Mbye. In March of 2022, Mbye stepped onto the First Avenue stage wearing a Samia hoodie to play the venue’s Best New Bands of 2021 show; the clothing choice makes sense now. Samia met Mbye at a show in Minneapolis, and had admired him for years, but was too nervous to initiate collaboration.
Then while writing the indie art pop single, “Mad at Me,” – based upon her poem about getting mad at people for being mad at her – the idea arose to feature another artist. Wright reached out to Mbye. His response? “Duh.”
Mbye, who Wright refers to as an “explosive creative force,” wrote his verse and recorded it himself in Jake Luppen’s home studio in one night. Mbye sat with Samia’s words and consolidated his ideas into a 20-second musical rumination. ”I just tried to recontextualize the whole concept of someone kind of being mad at you, holding things over your head – what that feels like and what that looks like,” he says.
In finished form, the song is a facetious performance of an, “I don’t care that you’re mad at me,” attitude with a smooth synth melody. Samia first performed “Mad At Me” live while opening for Maggie Rogers on her U.K. tour in November of 2022.
“Playing these songs on tour, I’m not the kind of person who can shut off. It all comes flooding back. And it's super evocative for me to sing about stuff, especially seeing people have an emotional reaction to it,” she says. It’s unbelievable to the songwriter that passing thoughts she writes down – sometimes to fight off loneliness by remembering the company of dear friends – can eventually become words others know by heart.
One such friendship, which has lasted many years in many states, is with Minneapolis-based singer-songwriter Raffaella. The two musicians connected about seven years ago when they both lived in New York. The first place Raffaella saw Samia perform was at the Cutting Room, “a very middle-aged bar” near Times Square. She was enamored with how Samia would take any opportunity to sing and could transform the grimiest bars into magical spaces.
In 2022, Samia and Raffaella released an EP together as part of an indie rock band called Peach Fuzz. Raffaella and her partner Luppen provide backing vocals on Honey’s title track, a song Wright refers to as an antidote. Raffaella senses a double meaning from the musically upbeat track that's paired with words alluding to a dark time.
“I wanna go to the beach and I die on the beach… From under here all you can fear is being / Saved and being wakeful,” Samia sings in between the choruses: “It’s all honey, honey.”
“She's very good at finding that balance within language and music when it comes to earnestness and facetiousness… those two things always exist together in real life,” Raffaella says.
Samia isn’t certain how the person she was when she wrote The Baby would perceive the person she is today. “I think I was more concerned with being cool and seeming really, hyperintellectual during that time of my life from a place of insecurity. And so I don't know if that person would be proud of me for shedding that now, or totally judgmental.”
After a pause, she continues, “I'd like to think that version of myself would be proud of my commitment to being myself and honoring who I am at this point in my life.”
Samia’s Honey is out Friday, Jan. 27 via Grand Jury. Samia performs at First Avenue on Saturday, Feb. 18 with Tommy Lefroy and WHY NOT. Tickets
