Blues singer-guitarist returns to Tucson with new album

In her early 20s, as she was trying to find her place in the blues-rock world, Samantha Fish wrote songs that fit her idealistic narrative.

They told a story that might not have been entirely her own or had a message that felt forced or coerced.

“I listen to some of my early work and you know, I don’t hate it and I’m not like cringing anymore, but ... I feel like I can hear where I was trying to shoehorn in an idea that ‘it has to be this’,” said the now 36-year-old. “If I would have just relaxed a little bit and let the song breathe, it probably would have naturally ventured into something else. I’m not saying one’s worse or better than the other, but I’m trying to kind of allow things to breathe.”

On her ninth studio album, “Paper Doll,” released last spring, Fish took that concept to heart.

“I genuinely think it’s the most mature songwriting,” said Fish, who brings her “Paper Doll World Tour” to Rialto Theatre on Sunday, Sept. 14. “A song will always dictate what it needs and where it wants to go.”

“I find sometimes my most stifled work is when I really am desperately trying to write about something that I like, something that happened to me, that I want to make a point about, and I’m like, ‘This song has to be exactly this’,” she added during a mid-August phone interview. “Sometimes it can be stifled and it just doesn’t come together naturally. When I let it go and let it breathe and let it become something else, it sort of frees it up and sort of ends up where it’s supposed to be.”

Fish recorded “Paper Doll” in Los Angeles and Austin last winter with her road band — bass player Ron Johnson, drummer Jamie Douglass and keyboardist Mickey Finn. it was the first time Fish has recorded with the band she takes on the road, which was part of the genius of producer Bobby Harlow (King Tuff, White Fang, Jessie Jones).

“He loved how the live band sounded, you know. He came to see us in Detroit and he really had an appreciation for the band,” she said. “So capturing that kind of energy was the utmost importance to him and to me. Just to get these songs to have that kind of personality (of) living and breathing things.”

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That live-on-stage vibe comes through on the scorching rocker “Fortune Teller,” a collaboration with Detroit garage rock legend Mick Collins, and brings an elevated sense of heartache to “Sweet Southern Sounds,” where long-distance love is worth the price “when you come around.”

The opening track “I’m Done Runnin’ “ is an anthem for embracing the moment and moving on — “The past is coming undone, but I like where I’m going” — while Fish tackles the cruelty of being molded into someone’s unrealized version of you in the bruising title song: “You pin me up just to tear me down, I’m not your paper doll/It’s by design, you change your mind ‘til I’m nothing at all.”

“I think it’s the most polished and also raw that the band has sounded,” Fish said. “And I think the guitar playing and the singing and the production and the album as a whole is just the best thing I’ve done.”

Fish’s show Sunday comes just over a year after the blues guitarist was on the lineup for Guns ‘N’ Roses guitar slinger Slash’s “S.E.R.P.E.N.T. (Solidarity, Engagement, Restore, Peace, Equality N’ Tolerance) Festival Tour” at the AVA at Casino del Sol and it will be her third show in Tucson since she played the Rialto’s smaller sister venue 191 Toole in September 2021.

Fish, who has opened for The Rolling Stones on the band’s final U.S. tour and toured with Christone “Kingfish” Ingram, earned a Grammy nomination in 2024 for Contemporary Blues Album of the Year for “Death Wish Blues,” her 2023 collaboration with Jesse Dayton.

Her show Sunday, which begins at 8 p.m. at the Rialto, 318 E. Congress St., will draw heavily from “Paper Doll” as well as her earlier albums.

“Selfishly, I like to play all the new songs because it’s fun for me, it’s fun for the band, and I like to create a show around the new record,” she said. “But I know that there’s an expectation to hear some of the fans’ favorite songs. ... So I try to mix in a little bit of what they like, a little bit of what I like and a lot of the new record.”

The blues duo Sgt. Splendor (Kate Vargas and Eric McFadden) opens the show. Tickets are $43.50-$76.30 through rialtotheatre.com.