This Choctaw musician couldn't hold her guitar. She recovered, and made a record about it

It all seemed to pile up in one summer for Samantha Crain. 

The Choctaw singer/songwriter was forced to cancel the U.S. leg of her 2017 tour due to flare-ups in her tendinitis and carpal tunnel. Then came the exacerbated mental health issues.  

Then came three car accidents in a three-month span. 

None of these issues, including any of the accidents, were her fault, she said. But she felt defeated — and she thought her music career might be over.

"It sort of just turned into this real spiral of panic attacks and depression and I couldn't play at all," Crain told Unreserved's Rosanna Deerchild. "I was in a really bad sort of way, and just relinquished myself to like, 'well, I guess that part of my life is over,' and it became really depressing."

Crain needed some time to recover. She'd wake up in the morning, and make some coffee and put it in a Thermos before heading out on a long walk. 

The walks were therapeutic, Crain said. It helped her slowly recover, until one day she poured her coffee into a mug instead of a Thermos and decided to open up her guitar case.

She played a song she's known for years, Romulus by Sufjan Stevens. "I put the guitar back and said, 'well, that felt really nice,'" she said.

What followed was what Crain describes as a "period of convalescence," one where she had to relearn many of the things she once knew so well. 

"It's kind of like being a baby again, you're having to start from scratch," she said.

What came out of it was her upcoming record, A Small Death, scheduled for a release in July. It's a personal record, she said — and the first one she produced herself. 

Crain describes herself as a magpie, writing small ideas down whenever they come to her. Much of the writing was drawn from her experiences, but the record isn't necessarily sad, she said. It's more so about how lucky she feels to be on the other side. 

"I don't use songs to process things. I use songs as a cathartic way to move on from things," Crain said. "It's really about the journey that we all go through as humans, which is constantly having to start over again."