'samantha marie' Is Already Everything
By Natalie McCarty
After more than four years in Los Angeles, Samantha Marie Saglibene arrived in New York craving something elemental. “I truly wanted to be able to feel the seasons changing, as winter is one of my favorite seasons, and being with snow and the changes in the weather were really cathartic,” she says. The romance of it all, she admits with a laugh, does not include “picturing the moments in wind tunnels, or slipping on ice this year.” Still, the cold has clarified something in her.
Credit: Julissa Yasmeen Ramirez / @1800_i_luv_you
Part of the move meant selling her car. In Los Angeles, autonomy often looks like a set of keys. In Brooklyn, it looks like a train ride. “Walking and taking the train as my main transportation source has been something I really find beneficial for me. I enjoy doing the act of going somewhere, with other people by my side, in a literal way.” That intimacy with strangers, the choreography of bodies on a subway platform, the hum beneath it all, has found its way into her forthcoming self-titled record, samantha marie. In the second verse of “claire,” you can hear it: live recordings of the subway and birds in Brooklyn, captured on her phone and folded into the song’s atmosphere.
Community, she says, has been the most transformative part of the shift. “Community has been the most touching thing to experience here in New York, through music, art, dance, poetry, many mediums, and I feel really supported by this sense of community here.” The cross-pollination is tangible. Live strings now thread through her arrangements. She has taken up ballet again, leaning into discipline and fragility. She spends afternoons co-writing with other artists, exploring poetry, and working on her own artist project. “The talent that continues to amaze me within songwriting, music, and art here is coming into my work in so many ways,” she says, before adding, with care, that she carries “a deep appreciation” for her Los Angeles community too.
If there was no singular lightning-bolt moment for this album, there was a slow alignment. “I'm not so sure that it was one moment of something clicking, but more a gradual sense of me feeling more sure, confident, and intentional with my artist project in a visual and sonic way,” she explains. The record is self-titled, and the choice feels less like a declaration than a quiet claiming. She has learned the instruments that feel like home. “Acoustic guitar as my canvas to work on,” she says, is central now. She knows how she likes to design her vocals, how to stack harmonies until they glow, how to show up as a co-producer with clarity.
Visually, her world is equally considered. Cursive handwriting. Lace. Ballet-inflected imagery. Vintage materials. Soft pink. She threads them through her photography and film work, and into the cover art for “claire,” photographed by Julissa Yasmeen Ramirez and collaged and designed by Saglibene herself.
Working with textiles has become central to her process. She’s been building collages from these fragments, letting their textures and histories guide the composition. That same tactile sensibility carries into the album’s visual language: pieces from these works helped form the cover for “samantha marie.”
Even the track titles read like heirlooms: “necklace,” “music box.” On the album, you can hear her blowing out birthday candles. You can hear the care placed on a single violin note.
“I put a lot of care into this,” she says. “It’s all felt like something that’s been coming together for quite a while, honestly.”
Credit: Julissa Yasmeen Ramirez / @1800_i_luv_you
At the emotional center of the record sits “claire,” a song that feels like early spring in New York: cold air, bright light, something thawing. “Because the album is self-titled, I really wanted it to be honest, and for it to speak to others through that honesty,” she says. “I wanted people to feel as if they were reading a page out of their own journal.”
“claire” is about an alter ego, “someone who is a version of yourself that your inner critic would approve of.” In the song, she names her small habits and insecurities with a tenderness that resists spectacle. It becomes, she says, “this gesture to accept ourselves, including the parts of ourselves that we can be afraid of.” Releasing it now felt intuitive. “It reminds of spring, it feels sparkly, and I’m ready for it to be out into the world.”
Cover Art (Design & Collage) by Samantha Marie Saglibene
The melody that anchors the chorus has its own history. The elongated “youuuu” is something she wrote in 2023 and posted as a demo. She returned to it in 2024, wanting to deepen it. At her piano in Los Angeles, she solo-wrote the verses and an outro that still catches her breath. Built around one of her favorite chords, F/Am, the final lines linger:
“It’s so cold and it’s spring, it’s all but changing she sings
While she compartmentalizes things, while i hold on,
For so long, for so long”
Before leaving for Brooklyn, she met producer Chris Gaskell, also known as Paper Fairy, for coffee in Los Angeles—he was visiting the city at the time. “I ended up taking the song to his studio, and we worked together on production, making the song reach a new form of creation through layering lots of vocal harmonies, vocal doubles, using a vintage rhodes piano, acoustic guitars, and drinking lots of iced lattes.” Once she moved to Brooklyn, she brought the song to his studio there to continue refining it. The image feels cinematic: iced coffee sweating in the studio, harmonies stacking, a life mid-transition.
Honesty is the album’s thesis. In Nashville last November, on a writing trip, she realized why she feels called to write not only for herself but for others. “Some of my favorite artists, bands, and poets are forms of therapy for me,” she says. “The thought that someone could find that within my words, made me realize that I could be of service in this way, I could be of therapy in this way, I could make someone know that they aren’t alone.” If the work is to be of service, it has to be truthful.
That truth surprised her most on the closing track, “angel.” “I did get the most descriptive, and honest with something personal, for the first time in one of my songs,” she says. One lyric in particular has stayed with her: “I want to be soft like an angel, but what if i’m not.” She describes it as “a pretty way to describe exposure therapy,” something she practices while living with OCD. It is the act of confronting a fear and asking, “Okay, if this is true, then what?” In the lyric, softness is both aspiration and risk. Imperfection is not hidden; it is held.
Her influences are as diaristic as her songs: Carol Ades, Runo Plum, Torri Weidinger, Dacelynn, Annabelle Dinda, Annika Bennett, and Mazzy Star, among others. “Yes, times a million,” she says when asked whether other artists’ vulnerability shaped her openness. Just as important are her friends in the music community, the collaborators who continue to model courage in their own work.
Confidence, in the studio, now sounds like specificity. “Communication is so vital, especially in the studio,” she says. Over the years, she has learned how to articulate what she hears in her head. Whether it is “a thousand vocal doubles, a specific harmony, or a quieter master,” she can name it. The collaborators on this record are not only skilled but close to her. Watching her friend Katherine play violin. Meeting and working with Gaskell. Building arrangements that lean on live cellos, harps, nylon guitar picking, layered harmonies. “I believe that music can say a lot of things that language doesn’t,” she says. “Sort of like how eye contact with someone can say a thousand words.”
For Samantha, self-titling the album felt inevitable. “From the lyrics that explore being an independent artist to being a capricorn, to the colors of the visuals, the album has these descriptive details of myself,” she says. Over time, those details became the concept. She hopes listeners will see themselves in it too. “It feels like a piece of work that someone can hold onto, put in their pocket, and not forget, because it stuck with them.”
When new listeners press play on “claire,” her hope is simple and radical. “I would love it if they have found a new friend in me,” she says. A song that lessens shame. A song that reminds them they are already the person they are reaching for. She often thinks of a line she read in a Thích Nhất Hạnh book: “You are already everything you want to become.” That belief hums beneath the record like a quiet pedal tone.
Credit: Julissa Yasmeen Ramirez / @1800_i_luv_you
In many ways, samantha marie feels like a study in integration: Los Angeles sunlight and Brooklyn snow, acoustic guitar and vintage Rhodes, birthday candles and subway brakes. It’s the sixteen-year-old girl she sings to in “sixteen,” and the woman she is now, running into her younger self with compassion. The alter ego and the imperfect truth. The softness and the question of whether she can hold it.
Three words she uses to describe “claire” are “bittersweet, incandescent, heartfelt.” They could just as easily describe this chapter of her life. In the cold of a New York spring, Samantha Marie Saglibene is not shedding who she has been; rather, she is layering it. And in doing so, she offers something rare: a body of work that feels like a page torn gently from a journal, folded carefully, and placed into your hand.
