Sierra Spirit Kihega is Tulsa-born, Connecticut-based Native American singer/songwriter, musician and creative mastermind behind the 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 recently awarded her a BMI Abe Olman Scholarship, which is given in the interest of encouraging and supporting the careers of young songwriters.
Kihega’s highly-anticipated debut EP coin toss is slated for an October 10, 2024 release through Giant Music. With coin toss, 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 personal, she stresses 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 Native people were always these outdated constructs in westerns,” Spirit says.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.
Earlier this summer, Kihega shared EP single “i’ll be waiting (pug),” which Flood called “a gentle and heartfelt appreciation for her late grandmother on the Cherokee side of her family, who went by the song’s parenthetical nickname.” The song draws on the Johnny Cash and country music she grew up listening to, while detailing the painful loss of her beloved grandmother, when Spirit was a teenager.
Featuring bursts of banjo and slide guitar, which nod to the country music she grew up with, the EP’s latest single “bleed you” is remarkably catchy tune that seems to bring Soccer Mommy and others to mind. But at its core is a nostalgic portrait of the Oklahoma of her youth and of a dangerously obsessive, heartsick kind of love.
“Have you ever loved someone to the point that it scares you?” Spirit shares. “You take the worst parts of them into account in an effort to make that feeling go away. But the harder you try the closer, the stronger you’re pulled in. This love grows to near obsession to the point that you want to consume their mind, body, and soul. You want in their skin and in their head. Nothing is close enough and no amount of their attention is good enough – you’ll always want more.”
Directed by Pierce Pyrzenski, captures Spirit as one-half of a pair of star-crossed lovers on the beach at golden hour and sunset, full of youthful yearning and optimism. Though clearly, not shot in Oklahoma, there are nods to her teenage years, when kids would drive around, hang out, chat and dream big.