Alycia Lang may be a familiar face to anyone who’s seen Samia play live lately, yet the musician newly settled in Durham is also putting her own songwriting chops on display. Her latest single “Bad Luck Bad Habits” was produced by Wye Oak’s Jenn Wasner and it echoes the dreamy textures heard on Honey while further exploring Samia’s more balladic influences—notably via the aesthetic of the current indie-country revival.
“When I started writing this record, I would wake up with random lines and melodies stuck in my head—’Was it bad luck or bad habit’ was one of those,” Lang recalls, perhaps explaining the track’s half-awake swoon. “Simultaneously in my waking songwriting I had started to feel like the only way forward was to write what was directly in front of me. The song came together when I merged what my early morning subconscious was presenting with what was actually happening in my real life. A lot of the lines in the song are literal experiences that only became metaphorically significant when I put the pieces together.”
Describing her conscious intentions for both the lyrical themes and the instrumental direction, she continues: “When the song started coming together, I knew only two things: I wanted it to look at this question of impulse contradicting desire, and I wanted there to be one big refrain at the very end that felt like throwing your hands up in the air. It felt important to me that the song released whatever tension had been building the whole time in a big way at the end, and that it only happened once.”
Producer Wasner’s hand in that finale—and the song’s overall mood—is important to note, as Lang mentions that the original recording was more of a “sad-girl kind of a song.” “When I took it to Jenn, she heard a whole other side to it that seemed sonically more cheerful or upbeat, but the felt sense of the song that resulted from our two production approaches merging made something so spot on, and ultimately her influence really made that ending I was dreaming of a reality.”
Check out the song below as it soundtracks a moody trip into the desert in the song’s official video directed by Lang alongside Jacob Moss and Kaitlin Parry.
