Alexis and the Samurai Change their Name, Sound

Sam Craft and Alexis Marceaux

Now Alexis and the Sanity better reflects who they are as people and a musical act in 2025.

The story behind Alexis and the Sanity takes some unpacking.

You have to start with Alexis Marceaux and Sam Craft spending 15 or so years playing music together in one band or another, and add into that their own relationship. They were a romantic couple before they moved on to other relationships, but they’ve continued to make music together. They’re part of Sweet Crude, and they’ve had their long-time duo act, Alexis and the Samurai.

The COVID lockdown dictated some changes in their story and created a context for them to make more. They put the name Alexis and the Samurai to bed and with it, their jangly guitar-forward sound. Recently the rebranded Alexis and the Sanity released their first album under that name, Tongue Tied. It’s the sound of a dark, electronic cabaret, tightly focused on mood and drama.

“It’s brooding,” Craft says, fine tuning my assessment.

Alexis and the Samurai started life as Marceaux and Craft’s mercantile project. The self-contained duo worked small so that they could play almost anywhere, set up themselves, and actually make money on gigs. Their poppy, vocal-oriented, folk-inflected indie rock was easy to like and influenced by such classic pop auteurs as Harry Nilsson and Brian Wilson, so they could reach audiences across generations. Their Move Into View (2016) is driven by a We can do it! spirit, and even though they designed the act with realities of the live music marketplace in mind, they couldn’t help but make the songs speak for them personally.

While Alexis and the Samurai were finding an audience, their other project, Sweet Crude, took off. Sweet Crude started as a way to introduce Cajun French to the contemporary musical world, and it found its voice by putting down the guitars and foregrounding a more contemporary electronic pop sound. It found a national audience through touring, and they signed a recording contract with Verve Forecast, who also signed Trombone Shorty and Tank and the Bangas. Sweet Crude recorded their debut album for the label, Officiel//Artificiel, with producer Sonny DiPerri, who worked them on 2017’s Creatures as well as albums by Portugal. The Man, Animal Collective, Dirty Projectors and Emma Ruth Rundle.

Unfortunately, Officiel//Artificiel was scheduled for an April 2020 release, when the lockdown made touring in support of it impossible. A release from an indie artist without any touring is almost a record thrown down a well. It got good reviews and some media attention including an interview with NPR, but attention really comes when a band rolls into town, and since no one was going anywhere, the album never had a chance to reach an audience. Reading between the lines, it sounds like the label decided that rather than try to restart the machine to build momentum for another release, they parted ways with Sweet Crude.

“we weren’t surprised one bit, given the circumstances,” Craft says.

The lockdown was a manic time for all of us, and while Sweet Crude still had a label and waited to hear about when they could tour and support their album, Marceaux and Craft stayed busy. They did livestreams with Sweet Crude including Cajun French lessons and worked on new music on their own.

“Sam has good production tendencies,” Marceaux says, and since he learned a lot sitting next to DiPerri when working on Officiel//Artificiel, the time gave him the opportunity to hone his skills. The music they made reflected their listening habits, which had understandably changed over the years. They still loved classic pop, but according to Marceaux, they were listening more to Billie Eilish, Sylvan Esso and Solange.

“Production-minded badass women,” Craft adds.

“The sparseness of Solange records are very very inspiring to me,” Marceaux says, and she liked the way Sylvan Esso used noise and space around Amelia Meath’s voice.

When they started to make music along those lines, two things became clear. First, they developed a better idea of what it should sound like. Craft liked the idea of making Marceaux’s voice the most dynamic element in the songs, and paring away as much as possible to focus on it. “Hind Legs” from Tongue Tied starts with ‘80s electropop simplicity as it paired an elementary synth pattern with the clatter of electronic percussion. Marceaux first appears in the song cooing in the background like a sympathetic ghost. Electronic bass notes get snug with the main pattern so the sound spectrum fills out while still leaving space that Marceaux respects when she sings domestic affirmations to herself in her lower register. The burbling pattern comes to head as she raises her voice to sing “Stand up on your hind legs / if you want to evolve,” and the voice that cooed quickly adds “as an animal in us all.”

Like Craft said, brooding, but beautifully coherent as all the elements are in conversation, affecting how we respond all the assertions made my Marceaux’s voice.   

The second thing that became clear was how far that sound was from the music they made as Alexis and the Samurai. Some older, unrecorded songs found form in their new sonic vocabulary, which only made clear to them how ill-fitting their long-time name had become. It was tied to an approach to music that didn’t reflect them the way it once did.

“We wanted a rebirth,” Marceaux says, and the pivot to Alexis and the Sanity was on.

The title, Tongue Tied, emerged from their relationship. They finish each others’ sentences, and Marceaux says Craft reads her mind on production ideas. But their ability to communicate at that level means sometimes things that need to be spoken don’t get said. “Miscommunication was the way we communicated for so long,” Marceaux says, and as they worked on new songs, the lyrics said things that she had a hard time verbalizing.

Working on the songs became a meta-way of talking about things they needed to say as Craft’s notes or suggestions became a way of responding to the underlying thoughts. That kind of communication happened organically, but they both recognize that it was good for the songs and their relationship.

“We’ve become closer together over the years,” Craft says. Marceaux agrees, but she says that going through the songwriting process was cathartic. “I’m going to perform it cathartically too!” she says, laughing.

As that writing process might suggest, Tongue Tied feels personal to Marceaux. “There’s an arc to this character who is me but not me that is going through stages of life and trying to reevaluate her life,” she says. The electronic torch songs gave Marceaux an opportunity to tap into some of her long-time favorite singers, Karen Carpenter and Barbra Streisand, whose gifts for ballads helped her imagine how to be more dynamic and articulate in the new musical landscape.

Marceaux and Craft have found upsides that come with the changes. It was disappointing the way the Verve Forecast deal went down, but “part of the challenge was dealing with other people’s visions for how to sell our music,” Craft says. “It’s incredibly liberating not to have to do that.” Now if they have an idea that makes sense to them, they can go with it.

With both bands, “the stakes are not so high,” Marceaux adds. “It feels like we’re making the music we’ve always wanted to make.”

Right now they’re focusing their attention on Alexis and the Sanity, but every time it seems like Sweet Crude will wind down, something happens to give the project new life. They get requests and offers, and were brought on to record for a Library of Congress album of contemporary Cajun French music. “Every now and then we get a reminder that this is important,” Craft says. And while Alexis and the Sanity are now officially brooding, Sweet Crude continues to defy emotional gravity.

“Even if somebody comes to the room with something lonely and pitiful, something happens when we all get in a room and jam and have fun,” Craft says.

They’ve lowered the stakes, but they insist that there still are some. They’ve seen the challenges that come with label attention, “but I always have the Hope something catches fire mentality,” Marceaux says.

“The benchmarks have changed, but there are still benchmarks,” Craft says. They don’t have the same goals in their 30s that they had in their 20s, but they still have goals. The result is a musical life that better reflects who they are these days, and that comes with the strong upsides.

“I don’t feel as stressed out all the time,” Craft says.