New releases for Feb. 19, 2013: Oklahoma singer-songwriter Samantha Crain debuts new album "Kid Face"
Shawnee singer-songwriter Samantha Crain released today her third full-length album, “Kid Face,” on Ramseur Records.
“Kid Face” is the follow-up to 2010′s “You (Understood),” which received praise from Rolling Stone, SPIN, New York Times and NPR and made my top 10 list for that year.
“Yeah, this is actually the first like fully autobiographical album that I’ve written,” she told The Oklahoman Entertainment Editor Gene Triplett in a recent interview in Oklahoma City’s Plaza District.
“I think before, even if I was dabbling in sort of autobiographical stuff, I always felt the need to kind of color things up with a little bit of fiction here or there, mainly just for my own anxieties about being too personal, probably. But I think, like, the older I’ve gotten, the more comfortable I’ve become with myself and with my own story, that it’s been easier to write more autobiographical stuff.”
She also told Gene how “Kid Face” was produced by John Vanderslice and recorded in about eight days strictly on analog tape – no computers involved whatsoever – a decision that resulted in a warm and organic sound that highlights Crain’s songwriting, vocals and lyrics. They recorded the album at his Tiny Telephone studios in San Francisco, a facility favored by top alternative acts these days.
“From the outside it doesn’t look like much. Kind of like tucked in sort of an industrial area of The Mission in San Francisco. Inside, it’s three different studios, and it’s an all-analog studio. There’s not a computer in the whole building. It’s all run through tape. This is actually the first time that I’ve run completely analog. My first album and my second album, we recorded digitally and then during the mix-down process mixed it onto tape so it still gave it sort of a tape quality,” she told Gene.
“But I think to record it all to tape not only affects the sound of it but it affects sort of your approach to recording, because there can’t be a lot of tape so you have to be prepared as far as the musicians go, as far as what the arrangements of the songs are going to be, and you also have to be all right with things sounding not quite perfect, you know?
