We recently connected with Samantha Rose Garrison and have shared our conversation below.
Samantha Rose, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. So let’s jump to your mission – what’s the backstory behind how you developed the mission that drives your brand?
My mission is to share my own stories of loss, reformation, and empowerment through my art to document and alchemize my experiences to be beautiful. Despite the wretched or euphoric states of origin, I hope my stories can help others to also feel their way through their own lives. Writing songs since I was a young kid, I’ve always ran with the experiences I’ve had in order to end up with a tangible version of that memory. Surviving the battlefields of abuse, dating, the corporate world, and now being on the verge of having my rights taken away by my government, I’ve been writing a lot these past 10 years. Fight or flight mode is hard to escape when you’ve been conditioned to thrive in it while the pressures of current events seem to feel like a never-ending whirlpool into a deep unfulfilling hell.
Creating art allows me to feel safe in my existence and find solidarity with my past and future selves. I think the hardest part about this process is to allow it to be unfiltered when the world is consistently shouting its standards and expectations of you. Art in itself is breaking through the negative voices to connect with the higher voices telling you what to culminate next. ART HAS NO RULES. It is one of the only chances to express true freedom in this life. I wish everyone could embrace this and I do look forward to continuing to grow as an artist while being part of a community that strives for the same. I’ll continue to fill my role and stand up for my past selves that didn’t know how to, while synthesizing beauty from the pain along the way.
Samantha Rose, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
I was born and raised in Miami, FL but I’ve moved cities every 4 years since I was 14 years old. Finally, after two years in Los Angeles, I hope to call it my permanent home. Music has always been a big part of my life; humming tunes from Hilary Duff to The Doobie Brothers, I started playing classical piano at 6 but became unbearably bored with the classical aspect of things. Eventually, I asked my dad to teach me how to play guitar when I was 12. I wanted to be a fucking rockstar. A year later, I started writing full-length songs about my middle school love quarrels and began frequently performing in malls across Miami and recording in studios. Nonetheless, after moving to a less than “happening” place at 14, I felt like I lost my avenue to success and felt pressured to abandon my musical dreams to become a scientist. I was always trying to escape the “dumb blonde” allegations. So at 18, I made my way to Florida State University where I progressed to be the Co-President of the Environmental Club, became extremely involved in a sea turtle research lab, and took on a double major in Environmental Science and Biology. Music really didn’t fit in my schedule anymore. Since I have always been adamant about preserving our environment and our children’s future, navigating to a teaching path seemed promising and fulfilling. I published a research paper in a scientific journal, won awards, and upon graduating decided that I had completely given up on my goal of becoming a musician. I thought, “Oh well, it’s time to get married and have kids now. That was a dream of the past and just a hobby.”
After moving to New Mexico to be a Secondary Science Teacher, I met someone on a dating app after a span of feeling lonely and love-starved…then eventually married them. To say the least, this was not a healthy marriage. I fawned over being loved to my own despair. Thankfully, my dream of pursuing life as a singer-songwriter seemed to be the claw of the claw machine of life that eventually helped me regain my freedom. Listening to empowering artists like Taylor Swift, Kacey Musgraves, Shania Twain, and Olivia Rodrigo, I separated from my marriage, finished the school year as a teacher, quit a full-ride Masters to PhD program, and started delivering pizza at Domino’s until I could make my way over to Los Angeles. I dropped everything. I continued to work random jobs upon my arrival (including more Domino’s) and finally began to find my niche in music again. In 2022, I released my debut single ‘vampire boy,’ which I self-produced with a free trial of Ableton. I released it with no expectations and was completely shocked to be recognized for it by Hank Green, one of my favorite creators, after he had come across one of my stickers in Silver Lake. Seeing him listen to my song in his video was surreal and I honestly still can’t believe it. At the time, I was working on a divorce and developing stability in LA but have since been working with producers on tracks like ‘baggage,’ ‘stuck in the void,’ and ‘PALM TREE BLUES.’ All on point themes of what you’ve read so far. These days, I work a 9-5 remote sales job in the midst of performing around LA while writing and recording my tangible memories. With the intense rage in me surrounding the political climate, I am looking forward to creating more music and various art that exposes the toxic strategies of control. I will continue to break the chains link by link and hope to help others free themselves, too. After all, that is what art is for.
What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?
Moving people. Art is supposed to make you feel something. It’s not supposed to be comfortable, safe, or ordinary. It’s known to be messy, new, controversial, and explorative. I love when artists embody this principle. When people can find the same type of frequencies tied to themselves within my art, I feel like I am doing something right. That being said, it is very confusing to be an artist because the world tells you to only value the fixed things in life. For example, science just makes sense. There are mathematical proofs to explain almost everything and a hunger to understand new laws. You get paid great amounts of money to know these laws and in turn, pay great amounts of money to learn them. In art, all of that is thrown out the window, and we move towards the gray areas of the human experience. The parts in which there are no laws, no rules, but only complete culminations from the series of events that have happened and continue to occur randomly. Although we are in a dark time of political history where there is a massive divide, I look forward to finding the silver-lining in the art created. It feels a lot like what I imagine the 1960s-1970s felt like, where people protested while creating art amongst the greed and hate. I hope more people reach new depths in themselves and decide to become artists too. Once we get past our world filters, we can share the parts of ourselves others never got to see.
Do you think there is something that non-creatives might struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can shed some light?
My life is not always going to make sense the way some people think it should, and yours doesn’t have to either. As a person that believes in God, I believe our hopes and dreams are internalized within us for a reason. Whether that is starting a solar power business to cut down on emissions, owning an art gallery to showcase work, or pursuing an expansion of hobbies, I think it’s important to pay attention to what your mind has instilled in it. Is there a chance of failure? Sure, though you can only fail by giving up. We all bring to the table something special, and I think the aforementioned “world filters” tend to cloud these gifts with standardized expectations. Of course we all need to make enough money to survive and feed ourselves, but if you made the million, billion dollars, would you be fulfilled? Is your heart and soul going to be satisfied with the life you created for yourself? I hope so. My life tends to be confusing to others, especially on first dates and job interviews due to my whirlwind of changing experiences/jobs but I think that’s okay. Though it can be frustrating at times with a less than cookie-cut past, I’m proud of my outcome. I’m paying attention to the internal compass telling me where to go and what to do, while dealing with the consequences of not doing so in the past. All of these twists and turns make up life, and I hope both yours and mine at the end, feel complete.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: @samantharosegarrison
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/samantha.garrison.372019/
- Youtube: @samantharosegarrison711
- Other: Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/52vfTPVM1XU5VKmLoOH6zq?si=PbhevvaYQO-z3SubXOjmmQ Apple Music: https://music.apple.com/us/artist/samantha-rose-garrison/1650346693
Image Credits
Kevin Aguirre, Starr Light, Robert Storey