“As I evolved as an artist, I stopped wanting to be just a ‘great rapper’” Samara Cyn tells NME, “I wanted to make really good music.” It’s in part what’s responsible for her melodic delivery and her fluid sound vocally and sonically. In her own words, she’s “a neo-soul hip-hop fusion artist” and while she cites icons Lauryn Hill and Erykah Badu as influences, Cyn’s music combines current stars like Doechii’s soul inflection and Tyler, The Creator’s experimentation.
It creates a rich and varied musical landscape to pull from; not surprising since Cyn, born in Tennessee, grew up moving around the US and used these experiences to take note of what she saw. “Writing, for me, has been a constant thing,” she says. “It’s my spark for my music.” She had an early interest in poetry, encouraged by her mother, an English teacher, who introduced her to the youth-focused spoken word poetry festival Brave New Voices, an annual event that tours throughout the US. “It’s these kids that looked like me, and were young and they were doing poetry in a different type of way than Edgar Allan Poe,” she says. To her, spoken word had a similar feel to rap. “After that, it opened my mind up to more slam poetry cadences, talking about societal issues and the things that I was going through and how to express myself.”
It wasn’t until a night out during her second year at university that her interest in poetry transformed into a drive to create music. Her friends were playing beats and rapping over them. “And I was like, ‘Man, I have something in my notes that can go with this,’” she remembers. “I basically rapped one of my poems to the beat.” That was just the beginning. “Once I started writing, I couldn’t stop,” she says. “And I remember we didn’t even sleep that night. We went back up to my apartment and grabbed our backpacks and went straight to class and even in class, I couldn’t not finish the song.”
In 2019 she wrote her first song and, in November of that year, she played her debut live show. In 2020, she performed at speakeasies and open mics and continued gigging in Phoenix, Arizona during her studies at Arizona State University. In November 2021, she opened for fellow ‘Bose x NME: C24’ artist Teddy Swims at his show at her alma mater.
When writing songs, she opts for getting her thoughts down on paper first before a brutal editing process. “It’s like a puzzle. I’m trying to figure out how I can say what I’m trying to say, in the cleverest way possible, in a rhyme scheme and a cadence,” she explains, “and still communicate the message?” Over time, she’s grown into a less-is-more approach to writing. “I think the most beautiful things are very simple, consolidated and precise,” she says. “I’ve definitely tried to refine and figure out how to say what I want to say in fewer words.”
Cyn wrote the vibrant, bouncy track ‘Loop’, her submission for the ‘Bose x NME: C24’ mixtape, in 15 minutes, when a friend of hers joined her in the studio. “We were just talking about being stuck in that same relationship and not being able to get out of it and I feel like I was definitely pulling from situations that I was just coming out of,” she explains.
Cyn and producer Cameron Ellis were struck by a video they’d seen on YouTube that showed Pharrell Williams and Justin Timberlake working on the latter’s 2002 debut solo album ‘Justified’. Cyn and Ellis took influence from the track ‘Señorita’ in particular. “We wanted to make something that was upbeat and sassy… and cool,” she remembers. “So we were like, ‘OK, let’s pull from this, the energy from this and go off of it from there.’”
Cyn likes writing in real time in the studio with her contemporaries. “I really love cook-up sessions, which is basically where everybody makes everything from scratch,” she says. “I like hearing the beat build.” It also makes her process a lot tighter, since it’s often hard to recapture that emotion and headspace. “Normally, I’m writing as the beat is being created,” she explains. “When the beat is done, I try to be done with my lyrics.”
While writing may have been the catalyst, her recording career has expanded from there, including recent single ‘Moving Day’. “There’s so much extra shit that comes with just writing – being an artist and doing the shoots and doing the social media and content creation and the creative direction, and all of these different things,” she explains. But writing is what grounds her and pushes her forward: “This is why I do it.”
Stay tuned to NME.com/C24 for the latest on the return of the iconic mixtape