The Band That Never Was

I was ten or eleven when I started the band Earth Chicks with my best friend Jessica and her older sister Erica. I wrote the songs and sang lead, which probably just meant I sang the loudest, and we recorded two or three songs onto a cassette. The moment we finished, I mailed it straight to my dad, a professional musician I barely knew.

I had his cassettes too. I would listen and rewind them over and over, scribbling down every lyric by hand, desperate to understand his world even from a distance.

When I was nineteen and in college, we finally reconnected. One day he called and asked me to drop out of school to join his band. He wanted me on bass. I wanted to play guitar. We went back and forth, playfully debating the structure of a band that didn’t exist yet.

I thought about it seriously. In the end, I said no. I had wanted to make music with my dad for as long as I could remember, but his life was untethered, and at that point I needed stability. So I stayed in school. I took music classes alongside everything else, songwriting, voice lessons, guitar, choir, music theory, djembe drum. Anything I could find to keep my musical side breathing.

In 2006, I got a call from Judith, my stepmom. My dad had passed away, ultimately succumbing to the substances he had used all his life. Our chance to make music together, to build something real between us, was gone.

I regretted staying in school for a long time after that.

Years later, I felt myself sinking back into that old ache. Then I looked up and there were my two little girls, watching me. Something shifted. I didn’t have to stay stuck in what I had missed. I could build it right here, with them.

So we did. We started singing together, picking up instruments, making music that sounded like us. It became the connection I had always longed for, a tie to a past we only know through song. I get to live in that world now, with my daughters Elliot and Logan. Singing his songs in our voices, writing our own, making harmonies and memories as we go.

This is how Samson Cats came to be. Samson is my maiden name, my dad’s last name, the musical thread running through the generations of my family. It lived then, with him. It lives now, with us. And it will hopefully carry on long after we are gone.

And now you are a Samson Cat too. Welcome. We are so glad you are here.

Samson Cats