"You should always get outside of the box," Samantha Fish says while discussing her boundary-breaking new album Belle of the West. "Challenging yourself is how you grow." After launching her recording career in 2009, Samantha Fish quickly established herself as a rising star in the contemporary blues world. Since then, the charismatic young singer-guitarist-songwriter has earned a reputation as a rising guitar hero and powerful live performer, while releasing a series of acclaimed albums that have shown her restless creative spirit consistently taking her in new and exciting musical directions. The New York Times called Fish "an impressive blues guitarist who sings with sweet power" and "one of the genre's most promising young talents." Her hometown paper The Kansas City Star noted, "Samantha Fish has kicked down the door of the patriarchal blues club" and observed that the young artist "displays more imagination and creativity than some blues veterans exhibit over the course of their careers." As far as Samantha Fish is concerned, her musical future is an open road. "I'm never gonna be a traditional blues artist, because that's not who I am," she asserts. "But it's all the blues for me. When Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf came out, what they were doing didn't sound like anything that had been done in blues before. For me, you've gotta keep that kind of fire and spirit. And I'm never gonna do Muddy Waters better than Muddy Waters, so I have to be who I am and find my best voice. "Having these two very different records come out back to back this year has been really liberating," she concludes. "Even if I go in a completely different direction on the next one, I feel like as long as I'm convinced, the music will convince other people."