Shine

'Ruby loved her man. Like he was the King. And like an old oak tree he reigned'...

Ruby was written about my Grandmother, and her Mother. About what life dealt them, the dreams they had, and the deep pining for place called home, far, far away. 

Written by Samantha Lindo, James Cameron and produced by Daniel Cole. 

Ruby

'Last Light in the Sky' out 1st December 2012. 

www.samanthalindo.com
www.allthegirls.co.uk 

Last Light In The Sky

As president Trump leaves the seat of power, UK Soul/Jazz artist Samantha Lindo releases new track ‘Lights Go Out’ about the crumbling grip of white supremacy and the process of relinquishing privilege to achieve freedom for all. 

After the feature of Samantha Lindo’s first single in the BBC Sounds ‘Hot List’ curated by BBC Introducing and BBC 6 Music, her latest track ‘Lights Go Out’, written on ‘black out Tuesday’, promises to pack just as much of a punch. 

Samantha Lindo is a Bristol based soul & UK jazz artist of mixed Jamaican heritage making waves both locally and nationally. She has been championed by the Bristol Post as having ‘a voice that is hauntingly flawless’, which has ‘crowds mesmerised within seconds’. 

Her track, ‘Underside’, was launched at her last live show before lockdown at Rough Trade and was performed live on BBC Radio Bristol, receiving rave press reviews of her ‘spine tingling vocal performance’. It was also at this show that she debuted her chilling spoken word piece ‘Naming the Water’, about white privilege, climate change and police brutality. 

Following that, on Black Out Tuesday, an action originally organised within the music industry in response to the killings of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor, Samantha took out her pen once again to say that, although good, we need to be doing more than posting black squares to show our commitment to racial equality.

Achieving racial equality involves not just shaming individual acts of racism & racist attitudes, but recognising and being prepared to relinquish white privilege. Author Otegha Uwagba, says “if white people take allieship seriously they stand to lose the privileges that are as integral to their lives as breathing. Losing those privileges is necessary, that allieship will cost them the shape of their lives as they know it”. Equalling the playing field might feel like losing out to some in the short term, but the song asserts that as a society, we’ll ‘find our freedom underneath it all’. 

Speaking as someone who is mixed race but passes for white, her perspective straddles experiences and identities and Samantha has been talking about issues of racial justice for a decade. Nitelife magazine describes how she ‘weaves poetry, spoken word and beautiful lyricism’ through her songs, ‘presenting some very real and raw issues of love, life and the human condition’ and the new track ‘Lights Go Out’, which brings together her music and activism, is no exception.

“The song is upbeat, fun and hopeful but it also speaks truth. The words ‘frozen still, scared to give it up, one more sip, from the silver cup’ describe the kind of last ditch attempts to cling to racist power that we saw so clearly with the recent invasion of the US capitol. 

However, the lyrics ‘you know it wasn’t earned, so we unpick and we unlearn’ describe the more subtle necessity of recognising privilege on an individual level and doing the work to dismantle biases. I think that there is real hope and freedom for everybody on the other side of that process.” 

Lindo explores this in more depth in an episode of her podcast ‘Let’s Hear it From the Underside’, which will be released alongside the track. She has a moving conversation with diversity coach & educator Will James as hip-hop rap artist and ‘Check Your Blind Spot’ campaigner Joshua Luke Smith, a white man who is using his privilege to & educate his audience and platform black artists. 

Lights Go Out is inspired by Janelle Monae’s Turntables, the gospel roots of Micheal Kiwanuka and BBC 6 Music’s 2020 album of the year winners, Sault and you can hear flavours of the Afro-beat, soul and RnB sprinkled in that influence her sound. Her authentic style and musicality draws from a wide range of influences, from vocal greats like ‪Etta James to spoken word prophetess ‪Kae Tempest, as she harnesses the intrinsic power of the female vocal to speak beauty & truth.

Lights Go Out

Samantha Lindo is a multidisciplinary RnB and Soul artist whose sound spans the realms of spiritual jazz, gospel and spoken word. 

Her forthcoming album, 'Ancestry', was funded by Arts Council England and the MOBO awards and uses the stories from her family history to explore themes of dual heritage identity, inter-generational healing and climate justice. 

Her music was featured on the BBC Sounds Hot List curated by BBC Introducing & BBC 6 Music, in award winning short film ‘About’, currently streaming on Amazon Prime and she was invited to perform it and speak about her activism at the TEDx ‘Daring to Disrupt’ event in front of 1M+ online. 

She is influenced by classic artists like Marvin Gaye, Carole King and Minnie Riperton as well as contemporaries such as Cleo Sol, Sault, Robert Glasper and Jordan Rakei.

Lights Go Out

Samantha Lindo

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