Samantha Fish and Jesse Dayton: Death Wish Fulfillment
So what happens when a couple of rough and ready, guitar-slinging singer-songwriters partner with an equally nonconformist producer and spend 10 days recording in Woodstock, N.Y? If the pair is Samantha Fish and Jesse Dayton, and the producer is Jon Spencer, then the answer is Death Wish Blues, one of the more exhilarating, progressive and, frankly, badass blues records in recent memory. It even earned Fish and Dayton a Grammy nomination for Best Contemporary Blues Album of the year along the way.
On a Wednesday afternoon, with just over a week to go before the Grammy ceremony in Los Angeles, Fish is taking advantage of a pause from the duo’s Death Wish Blues tour. Their 200-plus show schedule has essentially filled up the past year, and they’re still adding another round of dates to their spring docket. This brief bit of downtime gives Fish a chance to shop for what she’ll wear to music’s biggest night.
Dayton is sorting the available travel options from the Grammys to Florida, then to his scheduled gig out at sea; he’s slated to appear on the Outlaw Country Cruise departing Miami that same Sunday. He’s told he could arrive on the ship by helicopter if he wants. He and Fish agree that the whole thing is surreal.
Two years earlier, in January of 2022, Fish attended a Dayton performance in New Orleans, accompanied by their mutual manager, Rueben Williams. She’d been a fan of Dayton’s since first seeing the Texas alt-country rocker at Knuckleheads Saloon in her Kansas City hometown a couple of decades ago. Through social media, Fish surveilled Dayton’s eclectic career moves, growing intrigued by his solo work, his stints as an ace sideman sympathetic to outlaws and punks—from Waylon Jennings and Johnny Cash to John Doe and Glen Danzig—and his concurrent contributions to gritty cinema as an auteur and composer.
Dayton is a working-class product of Beaumont, a small, Southeast Texas city between Houston and the Louisiana border. He grew up on George Jones thanks to his grandfather, Chuck Berry because of his dad and The Rolling Stones due to his older siblings—also absorbing the neighboring sounds of zydeco and R&B. He’d eventually leave Beaumont for Austin, and shine, for over three decades, as a slicked-back, denim-black staple of the capital city’s celebrated music community. In 2022, at the age of 56, he entered Austin’s Music Awards Hall of Fame as its youngest inductee at the time.
More than 20 years Dayton’s junior, Fish emerged in the late-2000s as a fiery guitarist and ear-turning singer prone to combustible live performances yet grounded by a staunch Midwestern work ethic. Her songwriting and stagecraft merged into a vibrant, prolific blur, as Fish recorded nearly a dozen records—both studio and live—in the 13 years since her 2009 debut, Live Bait. She rolled one tour into another, hitting any and every bar, club and festival she could book—winning a new batch of supporters night after night.
Throughout her rise, Fish continued to nurture a devoted fanbase, earning her critical success and armfuls of accolades. The Independent Blues Awards dubbed her Artist of the Year in 2016 and handed her its Road Warrior trophy three different times.
“You won’t be able to say I didn’t work hard. I’ve worked my ass off,” says Fish. “I think that’s what it takes.”
Williams saw Fish and Dayton as kindred spirits and proposed a collaborative session. In May of 2022, the two tucked into a funky, little studio in a New Orleans backyard for a get-to-know songwriting weekend. “And we didn’t write a fucking thing,” says Fish. “We hadn’t really touched earth yet with what this was.”
By the third day, Williams’ patience was thinning. Fish and Dayton shifted the plan. Instead of new material, they would record three songs. Dayton suggested “Brand New Cadillac”—which was popularized by The Clash—and Magic Sam’s “Feelin’ Good” while Fish offered “I’ll Be Here in the Morning” by Townes Van Zandt.
“Right then, I knew it was going to work,” says Dayton.
Williams shared the three tracks with Rounder Records, the Nashville-based label that carried Fish’s last two studio albums. Rounder liked what it heard and signed-on to release the songs as an EP, dubbed The Stardust Sessions. Williams then suggested Fish and Dayton make a proper record in upstate New York, with Spencer as producer. Three months later, they headed to Woodstock.
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An oft-praised dark prince of the ‘90s NYC music underground, Spencer drew national attention with The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion—a punky, yet reverent trio scorching the scene with a Molotov cocktail of garage-rock and blues. He also revived the overlooked career of a North Mississippi Hill Country Blues pioneer, R.L. Burnside, taking Burnside on the road with him and exposing the legend to a whole new, 21st-century audience of college kids.
Not unlike in the mid-1960s, when The Yardbirds toured the U.K. with an American blues icon, Sonny Boy Williamson and inspired The Rolling Stones and The Animals, the ripple effect of the Spencer/ Burnside alliance contributed to the rising popularity of The Black Keys and Jack White. Fish and Dayton also felt the wave, particularly when Spencer backed Burnside on the 1996 gem, A Ass Pocket of Whiskey.
“That was such a cult-status record. That brought a lot of people’s attention back to the blues. They created this collision of sounds and styles, and it becomes something very unique,” says Fish. “I wanted to do that with Jesse.”
Fish’s first thought was to adopt a musical costume of sorts and take on a punk-rock persona. Then, the two started writing—sharing ideas over Zoom while Fish was on tour and exchanging voice memos full of lyrical snippets or hummed melodies. Fish realized immediately that no costume was necessary. They were different enough, as individual artists, that their partnership could produce distinctive sounds and songs organically.
“You can start with all of the buzz words you want, but once you start writing songs, that’s when it really takes shape,” Fish says.
They scheduled a session for August at Applehead Recording, a studio and residence on 17 acres of Hudson River Valley farmland once owned by The Band’s Rick Danko. Neither Fish nor Dayton had met Spencer before heading to New York, though they shared some of their acoustic demos with him in advance of the summit. “I did call up Jon [before meeting], and I said, ‘Hey, man, this is an opportunity to do something different, and I say we just go for it.’ We talked about R.L. and Joe Strummer for about 10 minutes, and I was like, ‘OK, he’s the guy,’” Dayton says.
Dayton arrived in Woodstock fresh off a plane from Australia. Then, he and Fish formally met Spencer and the band he’d assembled to back the pair—Mickey Finn on keyboards, Kendall Wind on bass and Aaron Johnston behind the drum kit. Spencer utilized a cache of vintage gear, and without much more than a simple introduction, quickly set them up as a quintet to record the tracks live-to-analog tape.
“Being out of our comfort zone, we couldn’t ground it so heavily into being a Samantha thing or a Jesse thing,” Fish says. “We were all kind of creating at the same time. There was a lot of magic in the room.”
Owing to a deep mutual respect for each other, Fish and Dayton aspired to cut a “beautifully even” record. The early honeymoon phase, Fish says, led to the two being overly conscious of crowding each other’s creative and expressive space. They cleared their heads on drives into the mountains, in search of the fabled, split-level rental where The Band once jammed, wrote songs and hung out with Bob Dylan in the late 1960s.
“We would just sit there and look at Big Pink and talk about the record,” Dayton says.
They were confident that they had good songs. On several selections, they hooked into a lively, conversational narrative—and, just as often musically, they conjured a subtle, yet perceivable cinematic quality. The first track they recorded was the album’s opener, “Deathwish,” whose lyrics flowed through Dayton after he’d binged on a trio of noir flicks.
“Yes, you can be a rural bumpkin from Beaumont, Texas and be a film nerd,” says Dayton, whose credits include writing and directing 2013’s Zombex, starring Malcolm McDowell, as well as numerous collaborations with shock-horror director and musician Rob Zombie.
Spencer’s agile production winks at the material’s underlying, implicit imagery—emphasizing the groove and layering in guitar parts and effected vocals. The songs strike as compact and hard-hitting, yet still convey a wider sonic panorama. For Fish, some even evoke imagined big-screen action sequences.
“Jon was the perfect producer for this record. He was the third musketeer, as Jesse kept calling him,” Fish says. “He knew we wanted to make something exciting. When you listen to the record, especially with headphones on, you hear all these sounds popping out of different places, and it’s exciting.”
The sessions were long, but efficient, and often brimming with emotional weight. “There were points when we were recording the vocals when we both got choked up,” says Dayton. “Jon would have an aura of atoms buzzing around him when we would go back into [the control room], and he’d be saying, ‘Listen to this.’”
They worked noon-to-midnight shifts and emerged in just 10 days with a completed album. They knew they’d not only made a really good record—one that was uniquely their own—but also one that might challenge their respective audiences. They were suspicious if anyone would “get it,” let alone like it. So, Fish and Dayton did what they’d always done, and hit the road.
Their second show ever as a duo was at the Whisky a Go Go, the famed venue on LA’s Sunset Strip. Modern blues guitar icon Joe Bonamassa showed up to see his friend, Fish while Dayton welcomed his old buddy, punk legend Danzig. “That’s pretty weird,” says Dayton. “Mission accomplished.”
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In May of 2023, Rounder released Death Wish Blues to strong critical acclaim. The duo’s untiring performances brought stellar reviews. Likewise, Fish and Dayton’s live shows enabled them to further flesh out their songs, showcasing their onstage chemistry and fretwork. Again, balance was key.
“The live show is everything. It’s the reason why I play. As we’re making this record in the studio, we’re already talking about how this is going to be as a live experience. Everything has to be able to translate from the studio to the stage,” Fish says. “I’m trying to create something that’s really special. Jesse’s trying to create something that’s really special. That’s the whole point of it.”
Exemplary of this as any is “No Apology,” with Fish’s exquisitely constructed vocal building to a prevailing crescendo. On the album, it is an arresting exhibition of vocal technique and emotional resonance. Live, it evolves into a show-stopping set piece.
“I wanted that one to be a real statement song in my career. I knew it had potential,” Fish says. “And, in a live setting, I’m able to expand on what I did.”
Fish and Dayton will continue expanding their tour together, at least into late May. The two have their own solo dates mixed into their calendars, as well, with a Dayton solo album produced by Shooter Jennings also set for release. His inner outlaw remains his most-trusted voice. “I think we took a big chance doing this record. I think if you’re not pissing off the traditionalists a little bit, you’re not doing anything exciting,” Dayton says.
Certainly, for Fish and Dayton, the reward of Death Wish Blues was more than worth the risk.
“My favorite stuff has always been something that challenges you, and yeah, maybe makes you a little uncomfortable. Good art makes you think and makes you feel something,” Fish says. “Sometimes getting that poke and prod is enough to get you to question how things are. If everything was just a soothing balm, it wouldn’t be exciting. There has to be a rough edge to certain things.”
