Samantha Urbani Is Back and Breathing New Life Into the New York Music Scene

It didn’t take Samantha Urbani very long to settle into the small room in the sprawling South Williamsburg loft that she’s been living in for the past few months. She laid down the black-and-white linoleum tiles herself, she’s already hung a small disco ball above her bed, and a rack of clothes—one that wouldn’t look out of place in a well-curated vintage store—hugs one of the walls. “These clothes aren’t the ones I even wear the most,” Urbani says, sitting on her bed and nibbling matcha-flavored Pocky. “I just like the way they look. I love clothes as decorative pieces.” Some of these ornamental pieces aren’t even hers; she excitedly shows me a small pair of thigh-high boots, asking me if I can guess who they once belonged to. She points at a tambourine hung on one of the walls, to help guide my answer. It’s immediately recognizable as a Prince artifact—the unpronounceable symbol that was later copyrighted as Love Symbol #2 is painted in purple on the front (sidenote: Prince’s feet were surprisingly petite). It’s only then that she points out that one of Janet Jackson’s velvet red bustiers has also been hanging above my head for the past hour or so.

Urbani is new to New York, for the second time over. She first moved to the city from her hometown of Mystic, Connecticut, in the fall of 2007 to attend the New School when she was 20 years old—but her life quickly started to orbit around the then-thriving Brooklyn DIY music scene. She garnered her first breakout song with her first band, Friends, and the sight of a young Urbani in their “I’m His Girl” video now registers as a 2011 Bushwick time capsule: Urbani saunters down the street with a boombox firmly planted on her shoulder, clad in cutoff black jean shorts, a vest, and a golden brooch-adorned snapback embroidered on the front with the words, “no prejudice.”

After extending what was supposed to be a temporary move to Los Angeles in 2015 to a whole four years, Urbani eventually began to feel that something cosmic was pushing her back to the East Coast. Almost all at once, she developed a phobia of performing live, a relationship ended, her car broke down dramatically on the Los Angeles freeway, and an airplane she was on experienced engine failure while they were in the air (it landed safely). “I started feeling this vibration of stress and change about to happen. I didn’t know what decisions to make, and right then was when my friend [and her former collaborator] Sam [Mehran] died.” She worked with Mehran on her debut EP, Policies of Power, which came out in 2017, but since his unexpected death last year, Urbani says that she lost all momentum when it came to making music. “I couldn’t listen to music for a few months. It all felt triggering,” she says. Putting music aside for a moment, she started to do some visual creative work in Los Angeles to make money. As a teenager, she worked primarily in the visual arts (she even went to an intensive pre-college puppetry and marionette program), so she dug into these roots after Mehran’s death, helping her set designer and prop stylist friends on different gigs across the West Coast for a while.

Now that she’s back in New York, though, Urbani is bursting at the seams with new creative energy. “Ever since I’ve come back here, it’s all come back together,” Urbani says. She’s been hosting weekly parties (which end in karaoke every time) under the name “Urbani’s Clubhouse” at the Delancey—last week, there was a Marie Antoinette–themed dress-up party, and this week, there was an alien costume contest.

She’s also gained a newfound sense of confidence when it comes to her music practice. Working with producer Nick Weiss of Teengirl Fantasy, she says that she’s made more songs over the past 10 months than she’s ever made before. Just last week, she dropped “Made in Love,” a song that she started just a few weeks after Mehran’s death, which is about remaining friends with an ex. “It’s about friendship love being transcendent. I’ve really been visualizing love as a space and not a feeling,” Urbani adds, citing bell hooks’s All About Love: New Visions as a force that’s shaped her own conception of love and respect within a relationship. “She talks about different people having different definitions of love and that making it impossible to be in love with somebody if you haven’t shared what your definition of what love means,” Urbani paraphrases. “Thinking of love as a space where the people who are in it understand what it is, know what it means, and when you act in that space, you’re being kind to each other, thinking of each other’s best interests, and acting with total sincerity, support, and tenderness. ‘Made In Love’ is this cute pop song, but it’s really about if you come into a relationship with somebody with sincere love, you can’t come out of it in a superficial derogatory way. It’s illegal,” Urbani jokes. “That is highly illegal in my country.”

Urbani is now adding customized jackets to this growing list of projects. Urbani has turned her paintbrush onto her own thrift store finds for years—one leather jacket in particular that she painted with a yin-yang symbol has become so much of a signature that she recently had it immortalized on the cartoon anime version on her new merch. When she was touring with Blood Orange towards the start of the Black Lives Matter movement, Urbani wore her personal politics on her sleeve, crafting DIY T-shirts for the stage emblazoned with the names of Trayvon Martin, Jordan Davis, and Eric Garner, along with phrases like “Stop Police Brutality.” “We were our own billboards—if you’re making a statement and you put that on your clothes, you have to integrate into the world where you’re being seen by people you will never speak to,” is how Urbani describes the power of these political garments, in contrast to the echo chamber of activism that social media often engenders. “That is launching so many new thought processes more than if you were just talking to your own followers. I haven’t been doing a lot of political clothing work lately, but it is a huge part of why I think creating custom fashion is interesting and important, and everybody should be doing it themselves.”

This past summer, though, Urbani’s DIY jacket painting got kicked into high gear thanks to a coveted Zoë Kravitz boost. Urbani gifted Kravitz, a good friend of hers, and her husband Karl Glusman with personalized, matching leather jackets, each painted with their respective faces framed by some red roses and the words “Just Married.” It all came together last minute—Urbani bought the jackets on her way to the airport in New York, painted them on the floor of her friend’s apartment in London, and then flew to Paris soon after for the wedding. Glusman and Kravitz ended up wearing them all night, and the next day fashion publications (Vogue included) picked up the romantic fashion gesture.

She’s now taking commissions for these customized jackets, even if she’s still figuring out exactly how she’s going to price them, advertise her services, and eventually build it into a sustainable, long-term business. “It’s always going to be on secondhand clothes, because for me, that’s part of the ethical energy of it,” she says. “I’m just a vintage hoarder and a total vintage freak, so it’s always sustainable and upcycled.” So far, she says, she’s had a guy reach out to craft a gift for his girlfriend’s birthday, asking her to design a sort of emblem that combines her favorite music, the day she was born, and other personal touches. “Just the sweetness of a guy reaching out to me for a girlfriend’s birthday present, that’s the energy that makes me really feel good about doing this stuff,” she says. “I’ve always wanted to make clothes. I would have these big grandiose ideas when I was young, but I didn’t have any resources, so it would just get overwhelming, and I’d get depressed because I didn’t know how to make any of it happen,” Urbani describes. “Right now, it feels like I’m going to be able to bring a bunch of ideas to fruition, and it’s awesome, and I’m so happy to be in New York doing it.”

Originally Appeared on Vogue