Today, October 10th, Los Angeles-based dark alt-pop singer-songwriter Samantha Margret releases her debut album Dream Girl. I spoke to Samantha all about her debut album, her growth as an artist and how poetry and trusting your gut really helped her relinquish her artistry to the world.
If you’re in the LA area, on October 19th in Pasadena, Samantha will be hosting an album release at Healing Force of the Universe.
Natalie: Samantha! First and foremost, congratulations on releasing your DEBUT album! I know that this has been a long time in the making, so how does it feel right now for you?
Samantha: It feels creatively complete, which is strange after so many months poking at its primordial goo. When I was in school, studying poetry, a poet called Meghan O’Rourke came and did a reading from her most recent book. Afterward, one of the other students asked how we would know when a poem was finished. She turned her book around, and the page was all marked up in pencil. She had edited on the page of the published text. She said, “the book comes out.” I feel a little like that. The album coming out is the first time that it’s really hit me, “oh, it’s done.”
Natalie: I’d love to learn more about your journey into music. What pulled you into music, and was there a moment you knew this was your career?
Samantha: I was supposed to be an English teacher. I studied poetry, and the only way I could think to make money at it was teaching. But teaching eats you alive, and I didn’t love it enough to be devoured. Music on the other hand, I don’t mind if it chews me up and spits me out.
Music had always been this secret artery running underneath everything, and, finally, I admitted I wanted to follow it. My partner said, “you know, you could just choose music,” and it was like I had been holding my breath for that permission. The idea of it was so scary, but it was also a deep breath. I gave notice the next day, and picked up a day job that would give me more time and flexibility to do this.
Natalie: Who are some of your music inspirations, and do any of them crossover into this album?
Samantha: I’m really inspired by people who reinvent themselves and try new things. Saint Vincent, Taylor Swift, Troye Sivan, Jon Bellion, Marian Hill, Sara Bareilles—they’ve all been in my ears while I was making this record; they’re always there.
I love when you can hear someone’s process. Saint Vincent shapeshifts like a magician—one minute she’s a feral guitar god, the next she’s this icy art-pop alien. Taylor Swift rewrites her whole mythology every few years. Jon Bellion is consistently one upping himself.
That kind of reinvention makes me feel less afraid. It reminds me that the point isn’t to write the single best song of my career, but to follow wherever the work wants to go right now. That energy really helped me be bold in my creative choices for this album.
Natalie: In your press release, you’re described as a dark-alt pop singer who writes music for women who want to own their history, body, and feelings. Can you share a little bit about the process for why this is important to you?
Samantha: My art often starts as a splinter—some problem I can’t quite pick out. I work through something in the song. Sometimes it comes out raw and tender. Sometimes comes out a stronger, more confident version of myself—my ideal self. Either way, it’s always me trying to jailbreak the cultural room I was born into.
Moving through the world sometimes makes me feel like a fly in a bottle. I think I’m about to take off and instead—thud—there’s the diet ad, the off-hand comment from the man at the front desk, or any number of invisible walls. Writing songs is my way of wrapping paper around the bottle, so I can find the opening. If I do it right someone else can slip out that opening too.
- Natalie: Any particular moment you’ve had with a listener that reminded you how important your work and music are to others?
Samantha: I threw this gorgeous release party—tarot cards, candlelight, poems on demand—the kind of night you’d think people would kill to attend. All the ‘important’ names said they’d be there. Almost none of them showed. That’s the trick of LA: sometimes behind the curtain it’s just a room full of people waiting for their own upside.
But the next morning, a fan messaged me with a tiny question. I wrote back, and their shock and joy at my reply—it floored me. That was the reminder I needed: fans aren’t angling for an upside. They just want the music. And that’s all I want too. Not fame (whatever that means now)—just the magic that a song can mean something to someone. That’s the air when everything else feels like mud.
A friend once asked me what success would look like for me, and I replied that if one person loved one of my songs the way I love Jon Bellion’s “Stupid Deep,” I would be successful. They said, “but that could have already happened, and you wouldn’t ever know.” I guess that’s true, but all the small interactions add up to something like that.
Natalie: Your debut album, Dream Girl, is described as a journey told through the language of fire. What was the inspiration for this, and can you give the readers a glimpse as to what they can expect through this journey?
Samantha: The myth of Joan of Arc says she went to the flames stoic, untouched by fear. My first EP closed with a song in her name, and I think that story lodged itself under my skin. Because of course she felt fear—rage, grief, despair. She was persecuted. She was human.
As I was writing this album, I kept circling the power dynamic there. She’s killed—tied up and mercilessly tortured. Yet her response was so stirring, so powerful that it reverberates centuries later. So who really held the real power?
This album lives in that tension. Some of the songs are armor—a testament to strength but also to the need for protection, something soft and fleshy underneath. Some of the songs are that underbelly. Together they ask the same question: who has control, and what does it cost?
Natalie: What do you hope fans walk away feeling after listening to Dream Girl start to finish?”
Samantha: I always hope fans walk away with more of themselves. The songs I treasure don’t just tell me about the artist or the world—they throw me back into my own hurt, my own joy, my own romances. The music helps me get to know myself more deeply.
In that way, music has made me more whole—given me more compassion, more depth of feeling, more freedom to be who I am because I know who that is. If someone hears this album and walks away more themselves, then they can take that wholeness and build whatever they’re meant to build.
Natalie: I love that we are back to focusing on albums as a full body of work because an album and the order of songs are intentional for any artist from start to finish. How did you approach the storytelling of the album?
Samantha: Yes! I’m an album person, through and through.
A few years ago I stumbled on this Spotify playlist where someone had re-created a fast food menu out of song titles. And I thought, what if an album was a poem—what if the tracklist itself was a sentence?
So I started rearranging the bones of songs I already had, stitching together titles until they formed a single body. Then I wrote new songs to fill the gaps, reshuffled the poem, wrote more, and kept shaping and reshaping until the album you hear came alive.
From a process standpoint, I love constraints. There’s something about being able to do anything that makes me do nothing. I make my best work pulling against a leash. This poem was the tightest leash I’ve ever tied around myself, and it gave me the wildest freedom.
- Natalie: You released several singles before releasing the full album. What made you decide to take this approach?
Samantha: I think all great writing is a mystery, and the pleasure is in the slow unblurring of the picture. For this album, I wanted the singles to work like clues—close-up fragments of the cover art, titles that hint at the larger poem without ever saying it outright. If you’ve been paying attention, you’ve already had little tastes of the feast. The full meal was always hiding in plain sight.
Natalie: When I was first introduced to you, I listened to Feminist GF and was obsessed!!! I felt powerful listening to this song. How have you grown as an artist since 2020, which is reflected in this new album? What would you tell your past self?
Samantha: That song is kind of my origin story. I wrote it at the piano, and I could hear what it wanted to be—but no one else could. My partner, my family, they were all like, “this song?” And then, once it was finished, they all got it. That taught me a lot about following my intuition.
Now I use that as a compass: when everyone else is confused, but I have clarity, I’m onto something. RAGE and Hot Enough are both examples of that. I wrote them in the car and I had immediate clarity, but, even when I released them, there was this hesitation for everyone else.
I used to be really insecure about being a real artist, like maybe I cared too much about what other people thought. And, I do care. But, I’ve learned that caring what other people think and living in service to their opinions are two very different things. I would tell my younger self that other people’s opinions are thermometers not commandments. The whole job is making what you want to make. We all die at the end, so why not be who we really are until then?
Natalie: Now that an album has dropped, what’s next? Any tours or shows coming down the pipeline that we can catch you at?
Samantha: I have a release show on October 19th in LA. Other than that, I’m working on new music. I love playing live—it’s chaos in the best way—but, if I had to repeat the same day over and over, I would be in the studio.
Listen to Dream Girl today!
