John Kristjan Samson is a rock musician from Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. He is a singer-songwriter and is currently front man for the Canadian indie rock band The Weakerthans. He played bass in the punk band Propagandhi during the mid-1990s but is probably best known for his current role fronting The Weakerthans.
Samson is married to Canadian singer-songwriter Christine Fellows. [edit] Background In 1993, while still a member of Propagandhi, he released a fifteen-track solo album on cassette tape, entitled Slips and Tangles. Six of these songs were featured on a split album shared with the now-defunct punk band Painted Thin in 1995. Following the critical success of The Weakerthans, Samson's side of the split was re-released online by G7 Welcoming Committee as a digital EP in 2006.
In addition to his musical pursuits, Samson is a founding member of Arbeiter Ring Publishing, a Winnipeg, Manitoba publishing collective. He is active in the Winnipeg arts scene, collaborating on projects with artists such as Clive Holden and Christine Fellows, to whom Samson is married.
In 2006 Samson championed Miriam Toews' novel A Complicated Kindness in Canada Reads. A Complicated Kindness won the competition. In the 2007 edition of Canada Reads, an "all-star" competition pitting the five winning advocates from previous years against each other, Samson returned to champion Heather O'Neill's novel Lullabies for Little Criminals, which was the winning title.
In 2006, Fellows and Samson recorded This Old House, an album intended only as a Christmas gift for friends and family, although they released two songs, "Taps Reversed" and "Good Salvage", for airplay on CBC Radio 3 in early 2007. Fellows and Samson also performed live on the network on March 17, 2007, to mark the final night of the network's terrestrial simulcast on CBC Radio Two. [edit] Solo albums *Slips and Tangles – 1993 *Little Pictures – 1995
