Earlier this year, Tulsa-based singer-songwriter Casii Stephan went viral on TikTok with her “southern gothic female rage version” of the Black Sabbath classic “War Pigs.” Her cover swapped out heavy metal bombast and Ozzy Osbourne’s commanding scream for a foreboding piano arrangement and the quiet intensity of Stephan’s vocal.
“I have a fondness for war protest songs. Redoing it for piano was a fun challenge,” says Stephan, who was born in Minnesota. “I wanted to encapsulate the feeling of women left behind praying for mercy or vengeance.”
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The righteous anger of a wronged woman courses through “Average Man,” an original from Stephan’s Relationship Status EP that takes aim at an unfaithful spouse: “Instead of hanging stars in my skies, you were buried in somebody’s thighs.” Bobby Ross directed the “Average Man” music video which features Stephan, who has appeared in SXSW and Folk Alliance International showcases, performing in Thelma’s Peach in Tulsa.
The song feels like it could have only come from personal experience, but Stephan actually took inspiration from a Canadian country music icon after watching the 2022 documentary Shania Twain: Not Just A Girl.
“‘Average Man’ was written after watching the Shania Twain documentary and learning more about her marriage,” Stephan says. Twain was struggling with Lyme disease when she found out that her husband and producer, Mutt Lange, had cheated on her with her best friend. “It pissed me off even more when I learned how common it is for women diagnosed with cancer to lose the support of their partners.”
The fury captured on “Average Man” is just one extreme on the spectrum of emotions Stephan explores on the Relationship Status EP, with the decidedly happier “Wine & Gold” on the other end. “I realized the four songs told a story of going through relationship statuses and finally starting over again,” Stephan says. “We open up ourselves to others, let them in or cut them out, and do it all based on what our intuition says.”
Stephan signed with the New York-based indie label Shamus Records to release the collection. “I had a goal of partnering with a label for this EP and to have Shamus Records believe in me and these songs have been such a gift,” she says. “Pursuing art is always an act of bravery and vulnerability.”
The last song on the EP, “Without A Box,” is Stephan’s closing message to the listener that there’s no one ideal relationship status for all of us. “Can we live life in a way that loses the parameters of what we’ve been told is how we should live our lives? You don’t have to get married. You don’t have to stay married. Get married if you want to. Get the divorce if you need to,” she says. “Don’t live your life under the weight of your expectations. Let it go.”
Stephan decided to make a 500-mile journey to a legendary music town, Muscle Shoals, Alabama, to capture the soulful sound she envisioned for those songs. There, she recorded at Sun Drop Studio with producer Ben Tanner, who has two Grammys for his work with the Alabama Shakes and the Blind Boys of Alabama.
“I was looking up different records that I wanted this to sound like. Ben’s name came up along with a list of other people, and I emailed them all. Two of them got back to me, one was Ben,” Stephan says in the Making of ‘Relationship Status’ documentary
Stephan will venture out even further from Tulsa next year, when she performs at Ireland’s folk music conference Your Roots Are Showing in January.
Casii Stephan’s Relationship Status EP will be available on all platforms on September 20.
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