Following a tough year, Samantha Savage Smith ruminates on mortality on fourth album

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Throughout 2024, Samantha Savage Smith ran a monthly workshop at High Line Brewing called Solo Sundays.

The year-long series had a few goals. Savage Smith wanted to use the platform to encourage musicians who may not be comfortable standing alone at the microphone with a guitar to find their feet as solo acoustic acts. She also used it to challenge herself, making a point to arrive at each gathering prepared to play a new song, even if some were a touch “undercooked.” Many would eventually make it onto her fourth full-length album, Little Place, released earlier last month.

The final session at High Line was in January 2025. She finished recording the new album less than three months later.

“I thought less about the production in the writing of it and just wrote the songs and let the room tell me how the song was sitting or how to approach the song and then we went and demoed them,” she says. “I wanted to create an environment that was really cosy, and it invited both the audience and the songwriter to get into the songs in all their nakedness.”

Little Place is not a stripped-down record. While those demos may have provided the bedrock for the tracks, the resulting album boasts a layered, sophisticated, indie-pop sound that we’ve come to expect from the songwriter. Savage Smith entered the spotlight at 22 with her remarkable 2011 debut, Tough Cookie, and quickly established herself as a singular talent. Her output since then has perhaps been more sporadic than some of her fans might have hoped, but the quality never wavered. She released her sophomore record, Fine Lines, in 2014. An eight-year gap followed before she finally released Fake Nice. As with most artists, her songwriting evolved, and her skills matured, but there was something about the vulnerability of standing in front of an audience trying out new material at High Line that brought her back to her early days writing in her bedroom.

“Back then it was just an immediate expression of whatever my sad-girl feelings were,” she says. “The way I think about songs now is maybe a little more clinical than it used to be. But I would say, this time around, it was kind of a return to the  approach when I was (young).”

There was a significant lag between finishing the album at the start of 2025 and releasing it at the end of September 2026. Savage Smith has been open about what caused the delay between Fine Lines and Fake Nice, which had to do with a writer’s block that didn’t lift until she was prescribed medication after being diagnosed as bipolar.

This time, the pressure was external. Her father passed away in August after a lengthy battle with advanced dementia. Savage Smith became his primary caregiver. She continued to write songs — she apparently has an album’s worth of new material ready to go — but her responsibilities at home combined with a full-time job made it impossible to focus on launching an album.

“I’d show my dad the mixes of this album,” she says. “It was a nice shared process, because he was a big music buff and musician himself. In any case, whether going through very real heavy things or when I was a 22-year-old and just dealing with heartbreak, it’s still a cathartic process because, like most people, I’m not really good at talking about my feelings. A song is a very good way to get it out, even to just remove yourself from it.”

How all this impacted the tone of the nine songs on Little Place isn’t altogether clear to Savage Smith, who says she tends not to see themes emerge while she is working on music. The haunting title track was chosen as a centrepiece for the album, a reflective ballad that Samantha Smith jokes is about a “mid-life crisis.”

“I don’t really like to say exactly what things are about,” she says. “I like room for interpretation because however someone hears a song is very personal for them in that moment. I’ve had a lot of death in my life, not just my dad but a few other things in the last couple of years. That’s all a checkpoint of our mortality that hits us pretty hard when that happens. But I think it’s ruminating on that wake-up call of ‘wait, where am I at?’ and also being self-aware all of a sudden.”

Recorded with her longtime band, which includes scene veterans such as drummer, multi-instrumentalist and co-producer Chris Dadge, Brock Geiger on bass and Nate Waters on guitar, Little Place features textured production of a broad palette of tasteful guitar, synths and loops to back Savage Smith’s intimate songs and plaintive vocals. It gives a sonic punch to tracks such as openers My Friends and Eyes Wide Shut and album closer, Pupil.

She has already held record launches for Little Place in Alberta and is set to go to British Columbia next week, which may lead to broader touring since her circumstances have changed.

“It’s up in the air, because this is all very fresh in terms of rejigging the plans,” Savage Smith says. “But I am excited. That was my first instinct once I got through the process of death, someone dying. I was like, ‘I think I have to hit the road. I have a minivan now, and I think it’s time. We’ve been putting it off for a year.’ ”

Little Place is now available.