In 2020, John Samson Fellows released two new songs. The first was a hymn of support for Winnipeg’s public libraries. The second, “Fantasy Baseball at the End of the World,” was more personal. The singer is part of a long-running fantasy baseball league, and the song’s warming affirmations seemed autobiographical: “I’m going outside. I’m gonna help organize something different, something beautiful.”
No one knew it yet, but in a way, they were John K. Samson’s goodbye to the music industry.
Under the name John K. Samson, Samson Fellows had made music for a living since the mid-1990s. As a wiry, spiky-haired anarcho-punk, he played bass in Propagandhi, the proudly leftist Winnipeg skate-punk outfit. When he started the Weakerthans in 1997, he rose up the Canadian indie-rock ranks with four critically acclaimed records. Then, as a solo artist, he continued building on what felt like a central, guiding artistic idea: that small things—including small people, places, and lives—contain whole universes of meaning. As a lyricist, he had a knack for detail. His poetry and storytelling, often centred on life in Manitoba, moved the author Miriam Toews to call him “the prairie poet voice of my generation.” “I struggle with seeing the whole frame,” says his spouse, musician Christine Fellows. “He somehow frames things so that everything is in perspective.”
When I visited Samson Fellows in Winnipeg in December of 2024, though, songwriting—the art he’d practised for more than 30 years—no longer held any interest for him. The passion and energy he’d felt for writing songs was now focused on an old loom that lived in the basement of the River Heights bungalow that he and Christine share.
In the split-level home’s poorly insulated basement, the concrete floors felt like ice underfoot. Samson Fellows shuffled in his slippers to a small space heater and flicked it on. He stepped carefully around a beautiful weaving machine: a Leclerc floor loom made in the 1970s. It looked like a grand piano with its intimidating foot pedals and intricate construction. Beside it, on a small countertop, was a rigid heddle loom. Pale blue yarn stretched from the loom to a warping peg affixed to the lip of a Fender Deluxe Reverb amplifier, now requisitioned as part of the weaving setup. It was one of few hints of Samson Fellows’s past life.
After the JUNO Award and Polaris Prize nominations, the Hollywood film syncs and SOCAN Songwriting Prize, this is where Fellows spends most of his days. When he gets too cold, he warms up by a wood stove in the living room upstairs. At some point, Samson Fellows admits he’s not really an “outside” person, as if he were talking about a cat. He’d prefer to stay home with Christine and his crafts.
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Samson Fellows was 15, looking out on a lake in Manitoba at night, when a phrase popped into his head: “Lake after dark looked like burnt plastic.” Suddenly, everything in the world was alive, and more than it appeared to be.
Beginning in the early 1990s, he wrote songs, recorded them on cassette tapes, and gave them to his friends. Winnipeg’s punk scene was exciting, but could sometimes be violent. Samson Fellows joined Propagandhi in 1991, and with them he recorded the anarchic and hyper How to Clean Everything and the more militant Less Talk, More Rock. After six years with the band, Samson Fellows split to start the Weakerthans, a punk band that leaned into the rootsier, softer side of the genre. Their music wasn’t so much interested in politics as the interior lives of the flawed people who practise them: A common protagonist of a Samson Fellows song was a depressed dreamer who wants to fight for a better world, if only they could get out of bed at a decent hour in the morning and swallow their heartbreak.
Profits from touring and record and merch sales were enough to get by on, and over six years, the Weakerthans became Canadian indie-rock darlings. By 2003, they’d been nominated for a Juno Award and signed with the heavy-hitting American punk record label Epitaph. The 2005 comedy Wedding Crashers ended with the jubilant Weakerthans banger “Aside,” in which Samson Fellows yelps, “And I’m leaning on this broken fence between past and present tense.”
It would have been a dream career for so many musicians, but at a certain point, Samson Fellows began to feel like he was “feeding and fuelling” a ruthless machine. Was he writing songs because he wanted to and had something to say, or was he doing it for the paycheque? There was also a third, worse option: Had songwriting, the thing that first connected him to his surroundings, started to shield him from the complexity of the world? “It can become pathological, right?” Samson Fellows reasons. “You want to interpret the world so that you can control it and you can be safe in it. I felt that that’s sort of what was starting to happen.”
As the 2010s pressed on, Samson Fellows continued making music amid some major life changes: He quit drinking and converted to Quakerism. But he’d already begun to fall out of love with his work. At first, it was merely unfulfilling, but over time songwriting and performing became actively unhealthy.
In 2015, as he was working on his second solo album, Winter Wheat, he started to feel anxious and depressed. The 10-song record was a patient, earthy collection that pulled inspiration from the titular hardy wheat variety, Winnipeg’s oldest oak tree, Neil Young’s On the Beach, Cold War spies, and a certain fictional cat named Virtute. Christine remembers that it came together quickly. “I was off doing something for a couple of weeks, and I came back and he had the whole friggin’ thing written,” she said. The record contains some of Samson Fellows’s most optimistic lyrics: “We know this world is good enough, because it has to be,” he duets with Christine on the title track.
Anxiety and depression had always been a part of his recording process. He was prone to overthinking and perfectionism, but making Winter Wheat drove these tensions to a breaking point. Unhappy with how the record sounded, he had it remastered again and again, six times over. “Good enough” was not good enough for his brain. At some point over the course of the process, he started to think about ending his life.
A psychotherapist diagnosed him with major depressive disorder, prescribed lorazepam, and sent him to group therapy. With the help of Christine and his bandmates, he completed Winter Wheat and toured around its release. But for Samson Fellows, the magic of songwriting had evaporated. He’d also developed what he calls a “curmudgeonly” hatred of cellphone recordings at live shows. A recording of a song never turns out precisely the way you hear it in your head. In the pre-cellphone-camera era, live performances were a second chance at nailing it. That potential is gone as soon as a performance is recorded. After Winter Wheat, “My desire to interpret the world in a specific way from my perspective, and share that with others, dried up,” said Samson.
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For a few years, Samson Fellows managed to keep himself on an even keel. But he developed an addiction to the benzos he’d been prescribed, and over time this collided with his worsening mental illness. He started thinking about harming himself again—but this time the intrusive thoughts were worse. One day, he told Christine, “I have to go to the hospital now.” He was admitted and stayed there for 10 days. Christine visited every day with snacks and books.
Samson Fellows’s illnesses both spurred and limited his artistic work, but they also predisposed him to focusing on the least favourable reactions to his songs: It feels terrible to make things that people don’t like. “I can pretend that there’s more to it than that, and there is more to it than that, but that’s fundamentally it,” he says. “If your brain is like mine, the people who love it are not going to matter as much as the people who hate it.”
Why release music at all, then? “Because it’s a conversation,” counters Christine. “We get a lot when we share things with each other. But maybe it’s okay if some folks like John want to change the way they do that.”
A professional music career, onstage and in the spotlight, was no longer possible. But Samson Fellows still needed to do something with his hands and his heart—something that wasn’t tied to money or critical approval.
He tried knitting but wasn’t any good. Maybe weaving was a better choice? He amassed a small library of books on the subject and ordered the hulking, Quebec-built Leclerc loom that now sits in his basement.
As we talk, he unpacks some pale blue yarn and sets up the heddle loom. He’s starting work on a small wall hanging that will bear the name of someone’s pet. A completed piece, a mostly black-and-white work with bright red text reading “Rosie,” hangs on a wooden beam beside the loom. Like his songs, Samson Fellows’s weavings are ways to make sense of the world around him. He’s made a number of scarves with colour palettes inspired by the cover art of books he recently read. Ahead of a city council budget meeting in January 2025, he wove a scarf with 13 different colour bars running along each other that represented the Winnipeg Police Service’s outsized budget. For friends who’ve had to go to the hospital, he’s stitched small, brightly coloured sachets of calming lavender.
Samson Fellows half-jokes that weaving doesn’t necessarily scratch the same itch as making music, but that perhaps it’s a different part of the same rash. For him, the point is “to make something exist in the world that didn’t exist before.”
Unlike music, with its endless exploitation and reproduction, his weaving creations only reach as far as their threads, and they’re shared with intention between appreciative community members. Music had once brought this sense of warmth and camaraderie. Could it ever do that again?
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Samson Fellows peered inside a Winnipeg church on Grosvenor Avenue. A community bridge tournament was unfolding in the warmth. Neil Young grew up in a house just across the street. It was May, 2025. For the first time in six years, he could picture playing a show of the music he made as John K. Samson.
Christine was excited about the prospect of a show in the church. The couple started brainstorming. There could be basic weaving workshops, singalongs, sparkling water, home-baked goods, a ban on cellphone video recordings. Everyone would be home by 10:30 p.m.
Tickets for two 200-person shows sold out within hours of the announcement, so they added a third evening. The board was set, and Samson Fellows was feeling good—until the week before the shows. Four days before the first gig, Samson Fellows felt like he’d made a terrible mistake. Since these were his first solo shows since 2019, people were going to assume that what he thought of more as a glorified craft night was a professional comeback. Weakerthans fans were flying in from around the world to hear his old songs. Songs with lyrics he hated.
Samson Fellows and Christine think of the pre-show process like a conveyor belt: Once you’re on it, you can’t get off, so you just resign yourself to the inevitability. In the week leading up to an engagement, stress naps are abundant—quick, temporary shutdowns of all feeling. Two days before a concert, says Christine, Samson Fellows becomes so morose it’s insufferable. “It’s like he’s going to the guillotine,” Christine says.
But on the night of the show, Samson Fellows did what he’d done for decades. He sucked it up and took the plunge. Before the second show, people were lined up around the white stone hall. Everyone settled into folding chairs ringed around folding tables. Near the back, a huddle of friends played crokinole. The room swelled with hooting and clapping as Samson Fellows climbed onstage. He plunged into “One Great City!”, one of many odes to his hometown with an unforgettable chorus: “I, hate, Winnipeeeeeg.” During this, and the call-and-response of “Sun in an Empty Room,” the crowd joined in. They sang cautiously at first, then their voices grew to a soft wave while Samson Fellows sang out the refrain: “Take this moment to decide if we meant it, if we tried, or felt around for far too much from things that accidentally touched.”
The show was punctuated by craft breaks, led by Samson Fellows from the stage. During one, he guided the room through how to make a pompom cat toy. He fumbled and muttered “shit” when the yarn fell out of his hands. He later tried to walk the audience through folding a sheet of paper into an origami crane.
At the end of the night, Samson Fellows posted himself at the doors, thanking every single person for coming, embracing strangers and fielding questions about when the next shows might be.
After the shows, Christine told me it was “a joy to see [Samson Fellows] play a show in a way that didn’t destroy him physically and emotionally,” but fans aren’t likely to see him taking the hits on the road anytime soon. Samson Fellows says that for now, he sees the ring highway around Winnipeg as the border on his musical life. However, there are two musical activities that he’s practised in the past few years. The first is rewriting public-domain hymns with community members to sing at protests. The other is Sacred Harp, a centuries-old style of Protestant shape-note singing that frequently takes place in United churches around Winnipeg.
In shape-note singing, a group of people divided into four parts form a circle, all singing toward the centre as loud as they can. There are no concerts. The rehearsal is the performance. There’s no recording or reproduction. Like his weaving pieces, each gathering is one of one in the world. You can walk into the centre of the circle and feel the congregation of voices hit you. It’s a transformative, accessible experience, and the absence of a performance aspect is especially appealing for Samson Fellows. Christine says the practice is a natural fit for him. “There’s just something about the way he sings,” she says. “It’s like a voice that’s meant to sing with, resonate with, other voices.”
Buoyed by the excitement of last year’s solo shows, Weakerthans fans will likely continue to clamour for a full-on Weakerthans reunion (in retrospect, it’s cruel that their last studio album was called Reunion Tour), but the peace Samson Fellows feels with his new creative tools—his Sacred Harp songbook and his Leclerc floor loom—have helped clarify his feelings on the subject.
On one of our phone calls, Samson Fellows tells me about the Quaker concept of knowing when to “lay things down.” The idea has shaped his relationship to what increasingly feels like a past life: his professional music career. “Everything dies,” he concedes. “We’re upset by change and by things dying and passing away, but sometimes they really need to.”
