Sierra Spirit Kihega is Tulsa-born, Connecticut-based Native American singer/songwriter, musician and creative mastermind behind the rapidly rising solo recording project Sierra Spirit. Storytelling is in Kihega’s blood. Growing up as a member of the Otoe-Missouria tribe and the Keetoowah Band of Cherokees, she spent afternoons and weekends driving around with her grandmother and visiting family on the reservation. With a black coffee in one hand and the steering wheel in the other, Kihega’s grandmother imparted life lessons through ancestral stories. “A central part of our culture is storytelling, and my grandmother turned everything into a beautiful story, big or small,” Kihega says. “I wouldn’t be the writer I am today if it weren’t for listening to her.”
Though she now currently resides in Connecticut, her music dwells with the red dirt of Oklahoma, where she was raised. “I’d always been a writer, but I started writing songs when I became very homesick,” she says. She missed long drives across flat stretches of arid landscape, the “insane sunsets,” and the proximity to family and community.
When she began sharing music online, she quickly found a community of fans, many of whom are fellow Indigenous creatives, who found kinship and understanding in the stories Kihega told. “There are things I need to heal from and it’s important to share, because I want other people who have experienced similar things to feel less alone,” she says. Before she signed to Giant Music, she had already earned both a growing fanbase and a critical acclaimed with the self-release of her first two singles “ghost” and “televangelic,” both of which appear on her debut EP. Those songs caught the attention of the Songwriters Hall of Fame, who awarded her a BMI Abe Olman Scholarship, which is given in the interest of encouraging and supporting the careers of young songwriters.
Kihega’s debut EP coin toss was released late last year. With the EP, the Oklahoman-born artist renders a self-portrait in intimate detail, touching on themes of loss, addiction and mental illness. Inspired by artists like Julien Baker and Phoebe Bridgers, Spirit’s lyrics are frank vignettes. Although the collection of songs are deeply personal, she stressed that the struggles she and her family have faced aren’t uncommon in Native communities.
“As a kid, I didn’t see an Indigenous experience reflected back at me in the media. Native people were always these outdated constructs in westerns,” Spirit says. “I want to be a voice for my community, amplifying that we’re still here. The culture is moving.”
Kihega writes to memorialize people and experiences, but she also writes to overcome a history of mental illness. As a child, she was quiet and reserved, which made her fear she came across as unapproachable. “I had such intense anxiety that I spent my younger years keeping to myself out of fear of being misunderstood,” she says. Years have passed since, but Spirit still fixates on those lonely formative years when she felt like a self-described “pushover” and “kicked puppy” around her peers.
Last year, I wrote about EP single “bleed you,” a remarkably catchy tune that brought Soccer Mommy and others to mind featuring bursts of banjo and slide guitar, which nod to the country music she grew up with. And at its core is a nostalgic portrait of the Oklahoma of her youth, and of a dangerously obsessive, heartsick kind of love.
Kihega begins 2025 with her latest single “American Pie.” The new single sees the rising and acclaimed artist, leaning into her rootsier/Americana/country side while still being decidedly pop orientated with an arrangement that features driving percussion, violin, plucked guitar and enormous, rousingly anthemic hooks and choruses.
“‘American Pie’ is a reflection on the American dream and the uncertainty of this point in time,” the rising Tulsa-born, Connecticut-based artist explains. “We all want our own little slice of it but we take what we can get and we take it as it is.”
Directed by Pierce Pyrzenski, the accompanying video for “American Pie” employs a video within a video motif, in which we see the filming of the video and some of the behind the scenes, suggesting that the dream isn’t necessarily the reality.
