Sierra Spirit: Feelings as the Heartbeat of a Song

[Edited Transcript: Abbreviated for length and clarity]

Interview by Erin Hunter + Photos by Steve Cerf

January 25h, 2025 – Sierra Spirit is an indigenous artist from Tulsa, Oklahoma. Born Sierra Spirit Kihega, storytelling was always a significant part of her culture, and her debut EP is a reflection of this innate part of indigenous culture. In her debut EP coin toss, she invites listeners to go on a journey through her life–the burning love, coping with loss, mental health struggles, and big feelings we have to grapple with as humans.

I caught up with her right before her first-ever tour performance in Philadelphia, PA. She’s currently on tour with David Gray, and you can find her upcoming performances here.  Sierra invites me into the creation of this album, sharing her story and the formative experiences that shape her as an artist today. We talk about processing emotions, the importance of community and family, finding inspiration, and what it means to be a songwriter. Please enjoy my interview with Sierra.

Erin: What’s been your favorite performance to date?

Sierra Spirit: I think my favorite so far was probably my hometown show. I did a hometown show (Tulsa, Oklahoma) for the release of my EP coin toss. Getting to go back home and play and have friends and family and familiar faces there was such a nice experience.

Erin: I’m curious, what’s been the biggest difference between living in OK and Connecticut (CT), where you live now?

Sierra Spirit: The people for sure. Everybody in OK is almost abrasively nice. Everybody wants to chat and tell stories, and everybody is really personable.

Erin: Tell me how you came up with coin toss. Take me back to that moment when you were first creating it.

Sierra Spirit: So creating coin toss took over a year of prep and recording. And when I was writing, I wasn’t even specifically writing for the EP. I was writing and recording a ton of music. The songs that ended up making it married together very well. 

It’s called coin toss because I had a friend in college who–when they would find face down pennies–they would flip them and set up for the next person to find, which was a really fun kind of disruption of luck and fate for other people.

You’re creating this really sweet, small, and seemingly insignificant moment for another person, but that’s how it feels to write music. The way that I write songs might not be how the person listening perceives them, but allowing people to find their own meaning in the space in my music is my favorite part of handing over music. It’s not just mine anymore. 

Erin: That’s well put, this idea that music is kind of like a gift [and] that music, and stories, are similar. Learning about you and your history, storytelling is important, isn’t it? 

Sierra Spirit: And with being indigenous, such a huge part of the culture is storytelling. When I would go into sessions and write these songs about personal things, it always really helped to put everyone in the room–in my shoes [and] in that moment, tell that as a story, and kind of decide how do we put this significant, special moment into 3 minutes and still make it mean what I want to mean.

Erin: It’s hard! I learned in school to ‘kill your babies’ in the metaphorical sense… You have to get rid of a lot of things you think are important to create the final product. How did the final songs make it on the EP? What threads these songs together?

Sierra Spirit: These are a reflection of what I want to tell the world. These songs were my most formative years of growing up–from experiencing death for the first time and losing someone that you love… mourning from that…falling in love for the first time, falling out of love for the first time and then meeting someone and realizing that love is so different from what you thought It was. 

It was those very formative years about the people who shaped me and the events that shaped me as a person. Those songs in particular were really special because they were things that had been hard for me to kind of deal with and process. 

In re-telling those stories in rooms with people that I’ve probably never met before, having to push myself to talk about it and process it in order to create something beautiful and more meaningful, I can know that those moments weren’t for nothing–I could make something new out of them. It would be something that would bring me closure and that other people could enjoy and find their own reasons in it.

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