Sierra Spirit’s Songs are Stories First

LOS ANGELES — I had the chance to hear Indigenous artist Sierra Spirit perform live June 11 at The Airliner, a small bar and bar-top venue where independent musicians and the fans devoted to them pack into the same dim, blue-lit room. By the time she stepped up to the microphone — glitter streaked like tears beneath her eyes, a Yamaha kit glinting behind her — the place had gone quiet in the way a room only does when it knows it is about to be told something true.

That is the word that kept coming back all night: storyteller. Spirit, who records for Giant Music, released her EP “Rodeo Clown” on June 10, produced by Dan Wilson, whose credits include Mitski and The Chicks. The songs move between country, folk and indie, but they are held together by something older than any genre — the practice of passing a story down so it is not lost.

“Oral history is such a huge part of Indigenous culture,” Spirit has said of the record. Onstage and in conversation afterward, she made clear where she learned it: at home in Oklahoma, in a family whose history is rooted in one place even as she has built a life far from it.

An uncle, and a warning

The EP’s title track grew out of loss. “Rodeo Clown” is about her uncle, a former bull rider, and the long, painful arc of watching someone she loved struggle with addiction and depression — struggles, she noted, that run higher in Native communities.

What people remembered about him, she said, was how he made them feel. “He made people feel special. He made people feel the happiest they’ve ever been, and they laughed the hardest they’d ever laughed with him,” she said. “Hearing that I remind people of those best parts of him definitely influences the way that I live and write.”

But the song carries an edge of caution, too. She and her uncle were so alike, she said, that the song doubled as a private warning to herself. “I think I’ve just learned that you can be the happiest person in the room and still struggle,” she said. Her answer has been to write it down.

 “Putting those thoughts and feelings into writing is incredibly cathartic,” she said. “It’s so much better to do something with my worst moments and feelings than to just have it sit there and feel like it’s for nothing.”

‘Protect your peace’

If the title track is grief, “Can’t Be Friends” is its sharp-tongued cousin — and the song the room seemed to know best. Spirit said it began, almost word for word, with a phone call from a friend in the wake of a sudden breakup. The friend couldn’t sleep, couldn’t sit still, and just wanted someone on the line so the house wouldn’t feel so empty.

Spirit cast herself in the role of the loyal, slightly ferocious friend who says the hard thing. “If I have to do it, then I’ll do it — to remind them not to go back to that awful, terrible person,” she said. The message under the swagger is plainer: “Protect your peace. It’s not going to do anything good for you.”

Her friend, she said, is now with someone who treats her well and has since told Spirit she is grateful she didn’t try to hold on to what she’d left behind. It is why Spirit hears the track less as a breakup song than a self-reflection.

The walls we leave

The song that sealed her reputation as a storyteller, for me, was “Walls.” Its central image is one familiar to anyone raised in California — the Winchester Mystery House, the Bay Area mansion whose owner is said to have kept building, endlessly, room after room. Spirit, drawn since childhood to the macabre corners of “Ripley’s Believe It or Not” and Guinness records, had always wanted to write about it.

She braided that house together with her own departure from Oklahoma. Raised near her tribes’ reservations — she lived in Claremore, about 40 minutes from Tulsa, from age 14 until she left at 22 — she sings about the guilt of leaving and the search for something better. She did not want the people she loved to resent her for chasing a life elsewhere.

“It’s hard to not feel like when you do something so big for yourself, you’re leaving people behind,” she said. For a long time, she added, she tried to talk herself into staying — “trying to trick myself into thinking this was the best version of my life.”

Her grandmother, she said, had been the first in the family to build a life off the reservation, a small step away from the only world she had ever known. Spirit sees her own move as part of that same line. “You can go back and still have incredibly fruitful relationships with your upbringing,” she said. “But you can add to that. You can have both.”

She is still close with her family, she said, and keeps those ties deliberately. “Just because I’m not there anymore doesn’t mean that that’s not still the goal.”

Her grandmother’s voice

That grandmother surfaces again in “Devil’s Tower,” a song built from a story she used to tell on long summer drives. At the time, Spirit said, she didn’t register what was happening — only that she was “intoxicated by the way that she could tell a story.” It was, she realized later, culture and history being handed to her in real time.

“I wouldn’t be writing music — I probably wouldn’t be writing at all — if my grandmother wasn’t the storyteller that she was,” she said. In Native culture, she added, the elders are the record itself. “That is your code to history. If you listen, you will be so rich.”

Making room

Growing up, Spirit said, she loved singing but never saw music as a path she could take, because she didn’t see other Indigenous artists reaching those levels. That is changing within her generation, she said, and she is conscious of being part of it. She didn’t start releasing her own music until a track called “Ghost” drew label interest; she has been making music full time for about two years since.

Her advice to younger Indigenous artists doubles as a thesis for the whole night. Pursuing what you love isn’t abandoning your culture, she said — it strengthens it. She recalled a line from Tulsa-based filmmaker Sterlin Harjo’s Peabody Award acceptance speech: that diversity is not an advantage but an opportunity. “You’re adding to the world around you just by pursuing what you love,” she said.

And, she insisted, the work has to start with yourself. “Do it for you,” she said. “Other people will find their own meaning in it and find their reasons that they love it.” She summed it up simply: “It’s not selfish to live your life for yourself, because that’s how you build it for everyone after you.”

As for what comes next, Spirit would not give firm dates. She would say only this: a full record is next. On the evidence of one small, blue-lit room in Lincoln Heights, it will arrive with its stories already intact.

Reporting and photographs by Brittany Evans

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