Next month, Samantha Fish and the New Orleans Cigar Box Guitar Festival present four days of music at two Crescent City Clubs (the fest runs Jan. 15 -18 at The Howlin’ Wolf and Chickie Wah Wah). For Fish, the shows will continue her long tradition of rejecting gimmick in favor of cool, thoughtful art.
Cigar box guitars are exactly what you think they are: electric guitars that use old cigar boxes as the instrument’s body. A lot of people think of them as novelties, funny, little toys that should never be used over a nice Les Paul or Strat. Fish — a blues guitarist, soul singer and writer of songs running from garage rock to old-school r&b to twangy Americana — rejects that idea.
“For me, it’s all about the tone. It’s about how they sound and how I can fit them into a song,” Fish said ahead of her Sunday show at the Sinclair with Nicholas David, whose debut album Fish produced. “I used one on my latest single, ‘Bullet Proof,’ and I have fans who shout out to hear me play it at shows if I forget to put enough of it in my set.”
Fish came rolling out of Kansas City at the dawn of the decade as a guitar phenom. Another blues wunderkind novelty like Johnny Lang or Joe Bonamassa? No, Fish has evolved with each release becoming someone who can write with authority across multiple styles. Oh, so she just adopts a new feel never settling into a sound. Nope, or wait, maybe, is that a bad thing?
On her 2019 offering, “Kill or Be Kind,” she does a little blues and a lot of classic pop songwriting — some of these tunes would be right for Stax, others for Sun Records, others for the modern Nashville scene.
“The last two records I did were super stylized,” she said. “I wanted to do one from the heart, where I just served each song, giving it what it needed. Sometimes a song doesn’t call for a screaming guitar solo so I’m not going to add one.”
“Watch It Die” typifies her approach on “Kill or Be Kind.” For three minutes, the song seems to build an over-the-top solo, pulsing horns frame the verses, pushing toward a crescendo. But then, the song cools down into this minute-long drone with a little slide guitar and organ. It goes understated before slowly building again (and finally crashing into big guitar for the last few bars). Oh, then the next song, “Try Not To Fall in Love With You,” sits in a sweet, mid-tempo groove never trying to get fancy or ostentatious.
“I want to make a piece of art that’s cohesive, a set of songs that work together, but I also don’t want to force those songs into a genre,” she said. “‘Watch It Die’ is a good example of this new approach. You have this hard-driving thing in open C, and maybe you really want it to go into the stratosphere, but (co-writer Patrick Sweany and I) thought we needed something different, an interesting vibe that still makes sense.”
Just to be clear, you’ll hear oodles of screamin’ guitar solos at the Sinclair (and surely some cigar box guitar), but you’ll hear plenty of meticulously constructed songs too.
Samantha Fish, with Nicholas David, at the Sinclair, Cambridge, Sunday. Tickets: $23-$25; sinclaircambridge.com.
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December 20, 2019 at 12:46PM
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For screaming guitars and a cigar box, go Fish - Boston Herald
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