Samia only needs the smallest thread to unravel winding truths about everything from womanhood and heartbreak to road trips and songwriting. On the latest episode of Rolling Stone’s Song Shuffle, the musician finds inspiration in everything from FKA Twigs to cattle farms where livestock mysteriously turn up dead. It’s all connected to Samia‘s forthcoming studio album, Bloodless, out April 25.
“I write in riddles like a bridge troll or Rumpelstiltskin,” Samia tells Rolling Stone while shuffling her music library. Her latest single, “Bovine Excision,” is a prime example. “I was really obsessed with this inexplicable phenomenon of cattle mutilations,” she says. “Allegedly, farmers since the Seventies have been finding their cows dead, drained of blood, with their mouths and genitals surgically removed. For some reason, made me think about my experience with womanhood.”
Samia found a similar route towards introspection in Lucinda Williams’ “Joy,” a selection from the “the best heartbreak album,” Car Wheels on a Gravel Road. The 28-year-old first connected with the album while going through a brutal breakup of her own. “We had just started touring,” she recalls, “so there was a lot of time for me in the van to wallow and be full of rage.”
The musician was similarly drawn to the more light-hearted and adventurous accounts of being on the road that A Tribe Called Quest narrates on “I Left My Wallet in El Segundo,” first introduced to her by her sixth-grade poetry teacher. She appreciated the straightforward play-by-play of their botched road trip and how the lyrics left no room for confusion.
Samia regrettably didn’t have the same experience with “Bovine Excision.” She was initially excited about the lyric “I felt the pea, can I eat it?” but found that it wasn’t coming across to listeners as she intended. “It’s really been interpreted as, ‘I felt the pecan, I eat it,’” she explains, “which is disappointing, but has happened to me a lot, and it’s only my fault.”
When asked about which artist she would love to hear cover one of her songs, Samia gushed about FKA Twigs. “Pretty unlikely pairing, but I think it would be so cool,” she says. It likely wouldn’t solve the pea/pecan dilemma, but it would still be a worthwhile reimagining.
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