Samia on appeasing men and trying to be the perfect idea of a woman

Independent

04-04-2025

Do you know about the strange phenomenon of bovine excision, Samia Finnerty asks. I've never heard of it, I tell her. The 28-year-old singer-songwriter's eyes light up because she's the first person to tell me about the weird extended metaphor she's used for her third album under the artist name Samia, Bloodless. Farmers since the 1970s have found their cattle completely drained of blood, their mouths and genitals removed with surgical precision and the appearance of bioluminescence under their skin. 'Read about it, you totally should,' she encourages me. 'Some of it has been disproven but there are inexplicable elements to it that I felt was a perfect representation of my experience of womanhood.'
These emptied-out cattle sound like a macabre way to explain how as a woman she has embodied something both untouchable, distant and laid out for wondrous display. But it's par for the course for an artist who, since the release of her cult debut album The Baby in 2020, is frequently compared to emotionally deep articulators Mitski and Phoebe Bridgers, the latter of whom she supported on tour back in 2021. In a world oversaturated with guitar-based indie-rock ballads, her distinctively warm and raspy voice stands out. The diaristic metaphors and sunny sonics collide with sombre explorations of heartbreak, personal growth, and everyday healing. Maybe it's simply that she does it better than most; watch her stripped-back Tiny Desk performance for evidence of the bare-bones of quality songwriting.
Today, Finnerty is video-calling from her sofa in Minneapolis where she has recently moved to be closer to friends. Those co-conspirators were not in LA or in Nashville, two cities she spent the last handful of years trying to make home, forcing to make feel right. 'I'm relatively shy and it takes me a moment to make friends,' she says, fully off-duty, barefaced, wearing a brown jumper and dark hair pulled back. 'I just decided this move would increase the quality of my life.'
Finnerty spent her childhood years in Los Angeles and her teenage years in New York, following the careers of her parents: actress Kathy Najimy and actor, comedian and musician Dan Finnerty. She's been disparagingly mentioned as a nepo baby, something she has openly discussed in the past. 'I had the incredible privilege of seeing a lot of people strive for and sacrifice a lot for something that ended up hurting them,' she says of fame. 'If I hadn't gotten to see fame up close, I probably would have really wanted it. It has allowed me to really be surgical about arranging my priorities and deciding what I do want: community, the ability to make the art that I want to make and hopefully share that with like-minded people.' It has also provided material for her music. On one of her earliest tracks, the sad and thoughtful 'Is There Something in the Movies?,' she analyses the showbiz industries at a remove, singing, 'Everyone dies/ But they shouldn't die young/ Anyway, you're invited to set.'
Remember that scene in The Hangover when the wedding singer performs a smooth rendition of 50 Cent's 'Candy Shop'? That was her father. 'I always wanted to be like my dad,' she smiles before describing the musical theatre community in which she was brought up, where everyone was always performing. Then she was introduced to the work of poets like Maya Angelou and Anne Sexton in sixth grade, which changed her life. 'I was trying to marry my upbringing with the jazz hands with poetry, which was my true love, and that's being a singer-songwriter.' Blend a mix of influences that include darker indie rock like Elliott Smith, The National, Daniel Johnson and Nirvana and you'll get something like the cathartic vocals and sarcastically happy indie-rock of The Baby.
It was a popular coming-of-age statement but her second album, Honey, took a more polished turn and positioned Samia as a pop star, as much as a rock star. Was that an odd transition to make? 'Totally and I didn't expect to be perceived for some reason. I didn't expect for it to say something about my identity or what I like,' she says. 'I was just trying shit out. It was a facet of me, what I did there, and it's absolutely a true facet of me, but with The Baby, it was more representative of what I was listening to and the culture I was immersed in.'
Honey was quickly created and released amid a flurry of opportunities as the world opened up post-pandemic. Finnerty was on tour constantly, supporting artists like boygenius member Lucy Dacus and folk-pop TikTok sensation Noah Kahan. For the latest LP, she wanted to take her time and consider every choice carefully. 'I knew what I wanted to say, how I wanted to say it and I wanted to be fastidious in the craftsmanship of it,' she says. 'There was a real north star with this third record and my first record that there wasn't with the second.'
With Bloodless, the north star was basically: men. Finnerty was thinking about how she appears to men and how she's self-edited her personality to suit their projections. 'It's easier to be an idea than a person. In my relationships, when I've felt small and human, that's when I've been disappointing,' she explains. But in longer-term relationships, I say, isn't intimacy impossible without allowing yourself to be known? 'Knowing is supposed to beget connection, which is what we all want – or at least it's what I've always wanted,' she replies. 'I have a desperation to be known but being truly known has caused me to struggle. When you're no longer an idea [to men], you're not in the driver's seat any more. What sacrifices do you have to actually make to be known? What kind of relationship does that actually breed?'
These are the questions asked across the album, where she – the female speaker – keeps appearing like a cipher to be interpreted by the men she sings about. She carves out lyrical silhouettes of herself in a void space: she's dancing like a dead-eyed girl on the title track, then passed out naked in the pool on 'Sacred'. As an idea, it's easy to be adored and abhorred, the album suggests ('You never loved me like you hate me now,' she sings sunnily on 'Sacred').
It's hard to pinpoint why but it feels as though God is implicit across the tracks, which is intentional. 'From a young age I have built my identity and my personality around a set of criteria that I believed – whether through empirical evidence or hearsay or just my own imagination – men would like,' Finnerty explains. 'The way people worship God, I worshipped this deified patchwork imaginary conglomerate man who had basically dictated who I would become as a person.'
While working on Bloodless she was reading work by the gender studies scholar Judith Butler, and was particularly taken with the idea that there is no version of the self that can stand apart from social conditioning. Finnerty is careful how she says this, pausing to get the words right. 'The need to appease boys and men became something essential to my survival really young. Writing this album gave me an acceptance of how I created myself for this conglomerate deity of a man. It helped me forgive myself for that necessity.' Butler's ideas were a comfort too, since she was giving herself a hard time for not being her real self. 'It suddenly didn't seem like such a project to get back to that pure self that doesn't exist,' she says, audibly relieved at the thought. 'Your social conditioning is part of who you are, it's inextricable from who you are and that's fine.'
It's heavy stuff. She doesn't hesitate to speak about it, offering her thoughts openly, but it's clear from the way the ideas develop in conversation that these concepts continue to evolve in real life, an ongoing work in progress. Maybe this move to live near her friends in Minneapolis will serve the larger project of letting herself be vulnerable and known. She agrees, and describes her quiet life there. She has a yard to keep her dog in (a yard is now affordable, which was not the case in LA or Nashville) and her best friend lives across the street. 'I just bop over there and we watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer together and make dinner,' she laughs.
While she's not chasing fame anytime soon, she does dream of working with FKA twigs and Father John Misty; it's indie renegade Fiona Apple's successful anti-career that she wants. 'Fiona Apple carved an entirely unique path of bravery that set up so many opportunities for artists like me to say whatever I wanted and for it to be acceptable,' Finnerty says. There's one part of the full, hilariously long Fiona Apple album title of When the Pawn... that she thinks about a lot. Finnerty recites it to me with reverence like it's a prayer: 'Remember that depth is the greatest of heights and if you know where you stand then you know where to land. If you fall it won't matter 'cause you'll know that you're right.'
'That is the bible to me, as an artist,' she says wisely, having fully left the knotty conceptual part of our conversation for something she's sure about. 'What I'm reaching for is self-certainty. If you can attain self-certainty, then you have the greatest gift. You've made it.'