The first question that Samia asks on her debut album The Baby, released four years ago today, is about the in-between.
How long do you think we can sit here before we have to move?
It’s not until close to halfway through “Pool,” the record’s dreamy, languid opening track, that this question comes up, cutting through a drone and a vulnerable, if not entirely mutually felt, moment with someone at a pool. Swimming, talking; listless, imperfect – until that question comes through, the bass throbbing it into focus. It’s the first of several questions, spoken and unspoken, throughout this album, examining how hard it is to still feel like a baby, having to grow up for the first time. Over the course of the album’s 11 tracks, Samia drops in and out of several moments and relationships, drawing from influences from Fiona Apple to Hippo Campus, and branching off on her own in her layered-yet-composed lyrics. A lot of what The Baby works with is hard to reckon with – these deeply personal uncertainties that have come calling, asking for an answer. Yet Samia uses her imagery and symbols in a way that keeps the record’s questions feeling spacious instead of closing in – still before we have to move on.
Part of what makes The Baby is time and place, but instead of being grounded in it, Samia is most often just passing through. She wasn’t home when an old East Village haunt shut down in “Fit N Full”; an old flame and an old friend are scattered around the world throughout “Big Wheel”; she’s making a trip to a titular Minnesota that’s neither exciting enough to really sink in to it but not off-putting enough to back out of it. Samia holds space and time and metaphor between herself, her subject matter, and her listener. It’s an ode to the room needed to really grow up at this age – hers then and mine now – how transformative it can be to find yourself in a new city and realize that the person you used to be is much further away than you realized. There’s distance all around The Baby, even when Samia isn’t addressing it directly. It’s in the way the intimacy at the beginning of “Pool” gives way to a shoegazey synth swell and a series of questions that don’t have to be answered just yet or will be by the end of her time at the pool.
How long do I have left with my dog?
Before I start forgetting shit?
Until we’re rich and then we’re not and then we’re rich?
How much longer till I’m taller?
How much longer till it’s midnight?
Are my legs gonna last?
Is it too much to ask?
It’s in the way that, on “Big Wheel,” she hides “a passive confession of harbored resentments…in a laundry list of gratitude,” as she described it in a press release when the song dropped as a single. In a soundscape of percussive guitar, airy synths, and a walking-tempo beat, the sweetness of morning coffee and close friends blend with the hole left one that’s pulling away and a lover that left her behind. The song’s gloss keeps it light despite divulging a real loss. It’s a hard situation; it’s an easy listen. Or on “Does Not Heal,” with its detailed opening anecdote of a gnarly scrape from hopping a fence; the imagery is kind of gross – this open, vulnerable wound, Samia’s inflamed skin bruising and swelling around it. This hope that, maybe, it’ll be like that forever, staying tightly tied to that moment when she had a grip on that relationship, that person, that feeling. But it’s told as much by way of the bruise’s galaxy of color as it is the moments of panic about getting tetanus or the pain of the cut; the hope that an injury sticks around as a reminder moves from the literal to the dreamlike by the second verse. The lyric cuts in with the fear that surrounds her but, really, the story is washed in dripping guitar and sweeping horns, pulling it back into nostalgia and hoping, not lingering too long on the rough edge.
This arms’ length that Samia holds the audience at is the magic of The Baby. It allows the album to be confessional and often moving, but also endlessly replayable. It has songs to dance to, songs to drive to, to walk to, to ruminate on. It’s cutting and emotional and exposing, but it’s also just a great listen. As deeply as you may or may not be in the mood to listen, there is always something to hear. After all, as much as she’s a writer, Samia is a performer.
Few reviews of her work, especially The Baby, haven’t mentioned that she’s the daughter of entertainers, actress Kathy Najimy and actor/musician Dan Finnerty. But the evidence of being able to entertain, to keep the story together and on-tone in the way she carries herself, is splashed across this record. Both in its construction and in the stories it tells, the most slicing thread The Baby pulls on is the way that Samia performs herself. “When you sing, we know the reason why / And your body’s just the housing thing / For the song that I’m confounded by,” an unnamed lover tells her plainly on “Winnebago.” It’s one of the clearest-eyed looks at, as she told FLOOD, “trying to admit to all of the times [she’s] cried in the bathroom and come out ready to party.” On “Limbo Bitch,”she does the same thing to fit into a lover’s life, praying the way their parents do, offering herself, dancing “like [she’s] the whore” that this person wants her to be. A bright, driving indie rock instrumental overshadows the bite behind an examination of body image on “Fit N Full,” as Samia teases her audience, promising to stay “generous and vacant.”
The distance of putting on a show, as much as it allows for some space to breathe and to grow, also makes sure that nobody sees the forming of yourself in the shape of everyone who’s wanted you, hoping that keeping it up will make them want you more. In hindsight, with the additions of Samia’s more directly-expressed later work, 2021’s Scout and Honey in 2023, the last line of The Baby looks like a map. Close to the microphone and nearly a cappella, she releases her grip.
You’ve got this and the movies and also my love
You can have it all, baby
I’m giving it up
I’ve lived with and loved this album for most of the four years it’s been out, first listening to it in March 2021 – I was eighteen, walking a familiar route around my hometown. So much of loving this album, for me, has been growing into it and watching songs that I didn’t expect to crystallize and sharpen do just that as I experience and feel it for myself. I’ve bent backwards for boys I’ve wanted to want me; I’ve spent the night with new friends walking around my new city and been a little disappointed when I started to feel the soreness from spending so long in my heels start to ease. I’ve had it in my headphones all this time, running from place to place, learning a lot of the same things that The Baby said first.
Being a fan, too, I’ve gotten to see Samia expand on and change from the ideas in The Baby. The follow-up EP, Scout, in some ways feels like an epilogue to the story, using several of the same symbols – Minnesota, Samia as performer and giver, soft-focus dream rock and harvested voicemails. But on Scout, she opens by arriving at the simple but difficult realization that “when somebody loves you, they take you as you are.” Her song is a resolution and a love letter on “Show Up.” Honey, her proper sophomore effort, is more acoustic, gentler and more open still. Instead of places on The Baby, Honey makes landmarks of people by name – David, Amelia, Muriel, Noah. It expands on the threads tugged on in The Baby; Samia mentioned in one 2023 performance that “Triptych” and “Breathing Song” are about the same situation. “Breathing Song,” without the steady-anxious guitar strum and Francis Bacon reference that drive “Triptych,” is direct, almost startlingly bare. Its continuation isn’t just moving the story along, but deepening the intimacy with her pain and her audience, seeing and understanding them at close range.
But The Baby is the beginning. Its imagery is vivid and its emotion is expressed, even as it’s measured and careful and protective, generously. On the album cover, Samia looks somewhere off camera, starting the conversation with but not to the audience. She’s positioned at the receiver of a red rotary phone, waiting until the needle drops to speak. When she does on this album, Samia – again and again – artfully strikes the balance between keeping it light and sharing her own vulnerabilities, dark and hard and unfinished as they are. Her work’s intimacy and depth over the past four years proves The Baby’s ambition right. Answer the call.
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