"It's a girl and a guy both ripping on guitars!"

How Samantha Fish and Jesse Dayton got together to create a new blues explosion

- By Ellie Rogers

Samantha Fish and Jesse Dayton’s new Death Wish Blues album is a fun-filled alt-blues exploration that has been, as Samantha puts it, “swirling” in the realms of possibility for quite some time. They first met a decade ago, when Samantha was an up and coming blues star in the Kansas City music scene, and Jesse, the Texas-bred outlaw country badass, was headlining shows there. They took note of one another’s skills, but it took years – and a proposition from Samantha – for their creative stars to align as they have now so spectacularly.

As she recalls with a laugh: “I’d been talking to management about a collaborative record that I wanted to do with another artist, but it was like, ‘Who could that be?’” After seeing Jesse perform in New Orleans at the beginning of 2022, she knew he was just the man for the job. “It all just clicked”, she says. “He’s such a special artist – very diverse and very talented. I’m grateful he wanted to try it.”

Jesse had also clocked Samantha’s incendiary capabilities years earlier, when she once lit up the stage as a local opener for him at Kansas City’s Knuckleheads Saloon. “I remember being in the backstage area and asking somebody who it was playing guitar down there,” he reminisces. “They said, ‘Oh, this girl’s playing’. I walked down to watch and was like, ‘Wow, something’s going to happen for her!’”

Their undeniable chemistry first shone on their 2022 EP The Stardust Sessions, where they twisted up classic tunes by the likes of Townes Van Zandt and Magic Sam. But for