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Nearly 40 years ago, a fiery blues singer from Port Arthur, Texas moved to San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury and set the city ablaze with her soaring soulful voice and southern charm. Channeling her idols Billie Holliday and Bessie Smith, Janis Joplin overwhelmed audiences with her sexy sultriness and balls-to-the-wall attitude, a rare dichotomy not found in rock music today.
Samantha Stollenwerck’s not from the Gulf Coast (San Diego, actually), nor does she share the late singer’s penchant for Southern Comfort, but her bluesy voice and ballsy attitude are Joplin through and through.
“I’ve heard a lot of people compare my vocals to Janis Joplin, and that’s a huge honor ‘cause I love her music,” Samantha says as we filter into Amoeba Music on a busy Friday afternoon. “It’s interesting, ‘cause she was the only female rock star back in old school San Francisco during the Summer of Love days with the Dead, Jefferson Airplane and everyone else and in San Francisco today you’ve got all these guys in Tea Leaf Green, ALO, Eric McFadden, guys like that, and then there’s me. So I kind of feel a connection with her in that way.”
Square One, Stollenwerck’s debut record on In the Pocket Records, is a poppy rock album featuring good songwriting and catchy riffs. It’s a nice start, but doesn’t adequately capture Samantha’s looser live sound.
“It’s funny, because I don’t think my vocals came across as very soulful on that album,” Stollenwerck admits. “I think I sound really young on that record. It was recorded over a year ago, so I’m ready to sit down and record something that’s more like what I sound like right now.”
Like many twenty- and thirty-somethings, Samantha was hugely influenced by Paul Simon’s Graceland. Mixing folk music with Afrobeat and mbaqanga music from South Africa, Graceland is a timeless classic that sounds as relevant today as it did when it dropped in 1986.
http://www.jambands.com/Features/content_2005_10_13.06.phtml
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