When I called Santa Ynez–based folk-rock-pop songstress Stephanie Croff, she was up on a mountain somewhere in the vicinity of Figueroa Mountain and Zaca Peak, loving life. The wild-flowered slopes remind her of her teenaged days growing up in the Black Hills of South Dakota. “I would just hang out on the cliff out there and just listen to the wind coming, and you could just hear everything and feel the history,” she said. “I felt way more connected in the trees.”
The warm climes of Santa Ynez are a world away from her “desolate” hometown of Watford City, North Dakota, where she lived for the first nine years of her life in brutally long winters and bare prairies. “My feet were always frozen, my shoulders always crushed,” she said.
But cold and darkness is something Croff bears well. From being raised in an environment of Jesus Camp–style religious fanatics to enduring abusive relationships and deaths in the family, she has endured more than her fair share of trials and tragedies. And yet hers is a phoenix tale, rising out of the struggles with greater strength and a fuller self-understanding, with music making as her medicine.