Halifax-born down-tempo indie electro-pop artist Sampson recently released a new single, “Damned,” off her most recent album, the broody but danceable Dark Sky Night. With some of the album’s track penned when she was only 15, there’s a streak of raw, formative teenage emotion that has been maintained in her music. That, paired with an extraordinary amount of talent, makes Dark Sky Night feel like fresh growth after a wildfire.
While the Sampson moniker comes as a reinvention of the artist, or at least a significant resurfacing, the song was written in collaboration with two of her friends, Nicole Ariana and Laurenn Marchand, at a song camp on Cape Breton Island.
“It was about a relationship I had at the time and kinda feeling like regardless of whether I peace or stay it was gonna hurt,” explains Sampson. “It’s a song about feeling stuck, and having choices to make that all bear consequences. For me, it was about whether or not I should leave somewhere and miss it, or stay while knowing something that would inevitably make me start to hate it.”
“I’ve grown up a lot throughout the making of my new record, Dark Sky Night,” says Sampson. “It captures a point in my life when I went from being a kid to being an adult (sort of), which consisted of many existential crises resulting in an overload of metaphors about stars, the sky, and the night. Eventually, every question I asked ended with who am I? and why am I here? As transitional as Dark Sky Night was for who I am, many (if not most) of the songs on the record are about those closest to me. That’s what makes it so special for me – I get to keep the memories of moments with these people for a little longer.”
The lyrics behind “Damned” get to the meat of the story: “damned if we do, damned if we don’t, damned if we let it go, damned if we won’t. Damned if I leave, damned if I stay. Damned either way.” It’s about as accurate a summary as can be crafted for the restless anxiety that a bad relationships will burn through you before you burn out.
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