Samantha Crain at Baby’s All Right
Last night, Samantha Crain rolled into Brooklyn, N.Y. for the latest set in her sprawling 42-show tour supporting Gumshoe, her recently released seventh studio album. 25 stops in, the celebrated singer-songwriter arrived charged from the rhythm of the road and delivered confident and powerfully embodied treatments of her new material, alongside a few old favorites. In her songs and the commentary between them, Crain radiated the openness and keen, caring view of the world that have earned her acclaim as one of the most affecting storytellers in Americana today.
Crain took the stage at the indie staple Baby’s All Right after an opening set from Nashville-based singer-songwriter Jess Nolan. At stage left with two rotating guitars, she was joined by bassist and co-producer Brine Webb and drummer Billy Reid, whose precise and rugged performances made the new songs hit harder than their recorded versions. Crain matched their intensity, and an energetic crowd, most clearly in her vocals, which made dynamic bounds from soft intimations to full-throated roars as she navigated the range between the freewheeling rock of Gumshoe’s opener “Dragonfly” and its soul-stirring closer “Old Hallicrafter Radio.”
Crain’s nonsequential exploration of the tracklist was peppered with reflections on the songs, including the story of how an unfinished early phone demo of “Neptune Baby” sent on a whim to her friend Sterlin Harjo wound up in an episode of his acclaimed series Reservation Dogs. She opened up further as she introduced “When We Remain,” a standout from her 2020 album A Small Death written in the Choctaw language as she walked her family’s plot of ancestral land for the last time. After her intensely vulnerable solo treatment of this deeply personal song, she welcomed Nolan back to the stage for a duet of “Joey,” meeting in a haunting harmony at the chorus to ask, “Was it ever real? I don’t even feel like that girl anymore.”
The heart-rending depths of Crain’s performance were matched by blissful, exhilarating highs, as on her 2022 Native American Music Award-winning single “Bloomsday.” She beamed from the stage and quipped to the vocally adoring audience throughout her set, finally polling the room for the song to end on when the show was cut short. Before proceeding into the resounding answer of “B-Attitudes,” Gumshoe’s centerpiece and one of her most vivid and moving songs yet, she explained the Choctaw social dance music she’d played as segues. To ward off the stage fright she felt for the first time in her two decades of performing, she needed a “reminder that my family and ancestors are with us.”
While so much of Crain’s music immersively evokes the time when she wrote it, she strives to remain fully present in each new moment. Personal change is a meaningful theme in Gumshoe, and in an interview with Relix before her tour, she expressed that her relationships with some of her newest songs have shifted already. She compared the feeling to an old photograph:
“We’re not necessarily thinking at the moment that we take the picture like, ‘I’m going to remember exactly what I was thinking and feeling in that moment,’” she shared. “We’re going to look at it 20 years later as somebody that’s kind of completely different and has their own memories of what was happening there. So it’s not that important to me to preserve a moment that I’m writing about. It’s more important to me that I can write something that keeps being relevant to me as I move through my life.”
Gumshoe is available everywhere now. Learn more about Crain and find tickets for her ongoing tour at samanthacrain.com.
Read on for the full setlist from Thursday night.
Samantha Crain
Baby’s All Right – Brooklyn, N.Y.
7/17/25
Set: Dragonfly, Trap Door, Gumshoe, Bloomsday, Neptune Baby, Old Hallicrafter Radio, When We Remain*, Joey+, Ridin’ Out The Storm, B-Attitudes
Notes:
* Solo acoustic
+ Duet w/ Jess Nolan
