Bio - kashena Sampson
Already celebrated by Rolling Stone for "evoking the best of Seventies folk," Kashena Sampson turns a new page with her third record, Ghost Of Me. It's a psychedelic folk-rock album that pulls up her Americana roots and digs deep beneath the surface, uncovering the darker indie sounds that once provided the soundtrack to Kashena's childhood. Laced with electric guitar, reverb, and synthesizer, Ghost Of Me offers a new backdrop for the songwriting and otherworldly singing of an East Nashville luminary who's never sounded more authentic.
"Stuck in the same place, same routine," Sampson sings during the album's title track, before a swell of gorgeous, nocturnal noise — full of swooning keyboards and atmospheric guitars, like a long-lost Roy Orbison classic reborn for a film noir soundtrack — darkens the sky and alters the weather. This is, in fact, anything but the same routine. Sampson may have earned comparisons to Stevie Nicks with records like 2017's Wild Heart and 2021's Time Machine, but here, she sounds like her own witchy woman.
Sampson recorded Ghost Of Me with producer Jon Estes, drummer Tom Myers, and guitarist B.L. Reed. She'd already worked with Estes on her previous records, creating an Americana sound that nodded to her Nashville surroundings while still exploring new territory. This time, though, she wanted to move in a different direction, exploring textures that blurred the lines between genre and generation. "I wanted to incorporate more rock influences I grew up listening to," she says. "My first two records were full of Americana and country songs, because that's what I was surrounded by in Nashville, but I grew up listening to Beck, Bjork, the Violent Femmes, Nirvana, and the Pixies."
Sampson grew up on the move, too, living abroad with her family before traveling the world by boat — a gig that found her paying her dues as a cruise ship singer — as a young adult. That diverse upbringing is mirrored on Ghost Of Me. "Heartache" is a haunting, nocturnal blast of 1980s pop/rock, with stacked vocal harmonies and icy guitars. ("We recorded that song three different times, until it sounded industrial and dark," she remembers. "It just needed a certain feeling. I was telling the band, 'Think about vampires.'") "Phases" pairs a meaty, muscular verse with a psychedelic chorus that finds Sampson howling at the moon, her voice dissolving into a haze of reverb. "Rear View Mirror," written alongside fellow Nashvillian Caroline Spence, builds its way toward another larger-than-life refrain, accented by crashing cymbals and B.L. Reed's power chords. Then there's "Fucked Up Love," a show-stealing torch song about a relationship gone bad. The track's shoegazing arrangement is more Mazzy Star than Patsy Cline, with Sampson's lyrics charting a course from co-dependency to self-reliance. When she wails "If this is it, I've had enough" during the song's final stretch, you believe her.
"This is an album about ignoring the bullshit and doing what's authentic to me," she explains. "Forget the rat race. Forget the bad relationships. Forget trying to please everybody. I'm tired of doing that. I wanted to do something for myself, and that's what Ghost Of Me became. It's an album for me."
Kashena will release three singles from Ghost Of Me in spring 2025, followed by the full album on June 20th, 2025.