Sarah’s Diary

I will finish the rest of the album soon. We are ready to mix, but Steve Christensen, our mix engineer isn’t ready for us until mid July. He has become quite the hot commodity lately. I’m having a baby in August, so there’s no reason to hurry. “Let go and let God” is pretty much my M.O. these days. I plan to play a few more shows around Austin over the next month or so and then check out for a little while. Then I must, must, must return with a vengeance, especially so that I can redeem all of the good will that has spent on my behalf getting this album made. DAN WORKMAN = M.V.P.

Please buy the EP on iTunes! You could totally help me to get more attention for this project , like perhaps a good indie label to release the album, film/TV placement, radio play, etc. Mama needs your help.

Tonight I did an interview with Radio Mike. I think it was a great conversation. I enjoyed myself and I’ll be proud to let you know when it’s posted.

I’m loving the Spring that we are having in Austin, though today’s glimpse of the mid 90s makes me feel a bit of dread to spend the next 3 months or so completing this pregnancy. The AC went out today on my 1981 diesel Mercedes station wagon, which is becoming more and more of a labor of love. I bought it last summer so that I could run it on biodiesel. Who knew that diesel would increase by 40% and some new tax would make biodiesel even more expensive than regular diesel. Ouch! I want to convert it to run on straight veggie oil, but the whole kit takes up room that we need for music gear. The old shocks and the relentless speed bumps in my neighborhood give a whole new meaning to “bouncing baby” (make that babies).

I’m so happy for Hayes Carll and all of his recent success. Check him out, if you are not familiar with him. He had a fantastic, thorough review on Fresh Air recently, which for me is the ultimate measure of having arrived. I listen to her show every day.

If you’re in Austin, please come to Momo’s this Wednesday.

We decided to do a digital only pre-release of 6 songs from my upcoming album Fight or Flight as a lead in to our official South By Southwest music festival showcase. Fight or Flight the EP will be available on iTunes, Emusic, Rhapsody, Napster, Musicnet, SonyConnect, etc. next week! You can preview the songs on my brand new website and myspace page that will appear on Valentines day. I am so proud and excited to shares these recordings with you!

We recorded basic tracks for 14 songs over 2 days at Billy Harvey’s Bee Hive Studio with Dan Workman and Kevin Ryan producing.

Vocals: Sarah Sharp, Sam Arnold
Guitars: Sam Arnold, Buffalo Speedway & Kevin Ryan
Drums: Pat Kennedy
Electric Bass: Sam Arnold
Acoustic Bass: Will Schultz
Other Instrumentation: Kevin Ryan and Dan Workman

We did a lot of gigs as pre-production to be able to do this on a shoestring budget. We used literally every room of Billy’s house. Sam’s guitar amp was in the bathroom, so we had to mute that mic anytime someone had to go to the bathroom. There is some really cool bleed that I think adds character to the tracks… I HAD to keep the leak from the talk back mic that showed up at the end of Hot As Hell, where Kevin, Dan, and Billy are laughing and Billy says, “Damn… That shit’s awesome…”

The vocal on Above Water and Hot As Hell are original from that 2 day session. I went to Studio B at Sugarhill Studios to re-cut the vocals with Dan for the other 4 songs that are on the EP, partly because of bleed, partly because I just wanted to see what we could get and I’m so nostalgic about recording with Dan at Sugarhill. I’m so happy with the result.

The finishing touches have come together over the last few months as schedules and favors have permitted. So we’re very close to being ready to mix the rest of the album. Getting a South by Southwest showcase was the perfect excuse to get some songs mixed and then we figured, “Why not release them digitally?” Perhaps it will help me find the support of a solid indie label and get some film/TV placements while we mix the rest of the album… Intention submitted to the universe!

Wish me luck. Please spread the love! Much more soon!

Love,
Sarah

Helloooo

We asked Cedar Street Courtyard if we could play tomorrow so that we could get our synnovial fluid all warm for game day. We are going into Billy Harvey’s Studio on Saturday and Sunday to make the next album. That’s right… all of us live in the same studio… knocking it out. We may add a few keys and strings later, but come Sunday night, this album will have been born. Dan Workman and Kevin Ryan are coming up from Houston to Produce. YES!

So come to Cedar St tomorrow. We play 6-8pm. We’ll warm up with a few songs, play all of the songs that we plan to record in the order that we plan to record them and then fill the rest of the time with whatever we want.

Then Buffalo will hop over to Fado to play with his U2 cover band, Mysterious Ways until 2am. So he’ll be SUPER warmed up for game day!

P.S. If you live in 78723, click here: http://www.keepaustinbeautiful.org/news.php?p_query=event&p_id=141

The TWO THREE, baby!

I am alternating between Regina Spektor’s ‘Samson’ and Elliot Smith’s ‘Memory Lane’, just because I particularly feel like being killed. Each song kills me. The flip flop between them is most unbearable, but just perfect for making one raw. Tears just hanging out. Something so authentic and poignantly detailed that the song kills you each time, every layer, even before you know what the hell it’s about. When I first heard ‘Memory Lane’, I lived with it on repeat for hours and returned to it often to loop and loop and it hit me on such a guttural level that I didn’t dare pay too much attention to the lyrics. I wasn’t ready to move past the overarching experience. One day, on tour in Italy, sitting on the beach on The Riviera, I decided I was ready to write the lyrics down and know what all he was saying. And when I did, the flood gates opened and I realized that it was all about my poor mother and wretched mental illness and I felt so sad for her and Elliot Smith and I felt awe for the inspiration that such illness sometimes provides. I have often thought that perhaps my choice of profession has turned out to be an homage to my mother and her illness, on the one hand, constantly trying to reach that inspiration and also recreating the pendulum of highs and lows. ‘I rock!’ ‘I suck!’ ‘I rock!’ ‘Who am I kidding?’ It makes me want to forego all of my worldly possessions and just write and write and write. Ahhh how life gets in the way…

‘Take what’s given me most cooperatively.’ It’s all about time.

My almost 9 month old son is asleep for the night and even though this is my turn to sleep too, I have poured myself a Dewar’s on the rocks and settled in for a few moments of remembering what it was like to be me before I was a mommy. Jennifer ordered a Dewar’s when we went to see Jesca Hoop at Stubbs and I decided that it would be a good idea to have a bottle of it at home. She told me, ‘DON’T! Well, actually DO! And tell me what happens, because when I bought a bottle it didn’t last a week.’ It has lasted and lasted, because I am usually too shattered to make myself stay up long enough to have a drink. Rather, I turn the light off and fret in sleepy delirium, not with it enough to just get up and catch up, until I fall into a deep sleep about an hour before Alistair wakes.

Previously I had begun to write about Precious, but I never posted it…

Precious is our neighbor’s dog with a death wish who has no idea how small she is. She chases after every car that comes down our street, yapping, and trying to play chicken. I have always hated that dog and judged the owners for not controlling her. All along, I have prepared myself emotionally, accepting that some day I might be the one to fulfill Precious’ wish, because no one can slam on their brakes every time they leave or return to their own home.

Their previous dog was killed by a car. I recall their little girl Tyler, who is as old as the years we have owned our house telling me one day, ‘Our dog’s dead.’
‘Oh honey, I’m sorry.’
‘She was hit by a car.’
‘Who hit her?’
‘A Mexican.’
She was just repeating what she heard, just like my British husband, when we moved here from the UK.
‘Can’t they hire some Mexicans to work with them?’
Totally innocent intentions, regurgitating what they had heard, but not yet understood first hand.
‘Honey, you have to be really careful about saying things like that.’

It’s like my father-in-law in a small village in Wales, who had never flown on a plane or left the U.K. saying to me when we first met, ‘How can you sing Blues if you aren’t black?’

I was reminded recently by my brother that Precious was nothing compared to the childhood dog we did a terrible job of raising for a while, before he bit a chunk out of my brother’s face and was later sent to live in the country with my step-mom’s cousin… Sparky pooped on our dining room table. He would steal a steak straight off the backyard grill. Sparky not only chased cars, but he bit tires… and we lived on the main thoroughfare for our neighborhood. Sparky would yelp and literally spin off like a ninja turtle from the tires of 18 Wheelers going 35 m.p.h. and never be deterred. I had COMPLETELY blocked this memory out until Matt brought it up and I was reminded that we judge the most harshly that which we see in ourselves… or as my dad says that they say in A.A. ‘Spot it. Got It!’

Ever since becoming pregnant, nesting, getting more friendly with the neighbors, which is profoundly easier with a baby… really it’s embarrassing that we could live here this long and not know all of our neighbors… I’ve been in super friendly neighbor mode. I want to reach out. I want to be someone they can call if they’ve fallen and they can’t get up…

So my new b.f. on my street, Luz , who grew up on an orchard in Mexico is helping me in what I consider the final frontier of adulthood – my gardening. She clips things and sticks them in the ground and they grow an she coaches me on when to water and I now feel responsible for keeping these things alive, because they were a gift from her and because I do want to keep these things alive, especially the fig tree that I planted for my son. Not to mention that going out to water is a big event with a baby.

The eternally saintly Luz was not so friendly to a neighbor who walked over recently and started telling us her worries about the half way house that is on her block. It is one street and an entire world away. I could almost throw a rock and hit it. Mental patients. Not hurting anyone. I mean, my mom’s been in that scenario before. I feel for it. She comes over asking, ‘Isn’t there anything we can do?’ because apparently the lady who runs the place is switching out mental patients for Parolees. ‘I have grand babies and they are out of school for the summer.’ Knocking door to door. Bless her heart, pounding the pavement. My neighbor, the unofficial neighborhood watch man comes over and tells me the low down, makes his presence known to her. Shows me how she just took my $9 “loan” and went straight in to that house that all this time, I never knew was selling crack. Not to ever give her money and no matter what to never let her in my house. How he caught her trying to get in his car. How she dresses like a man sometimes and so he treats her like a man…

So one night, shortly after I had attracted the crack lady by suddenly becoming a gardener… there I was trying to transcribe the vocal part on ‘Great Gig in the Sky’ (just cuz) and considering the repeated whaling of me trying to match her phrases with a cold voice, I joked to my husband that Precious had come to bark on our front porch because she was being called like I was another dog. But Precious had never done this before and Andy remarked, that perhaps she thought I was in trouble. Then the soft knock of a desperate woman needing a fix, that neighbor from the world 1 block away who never came back to repay my $9 like she had promised. 11:57 p.m.on a week night and she’s at my door, clearly out of her mind jones-ing, asking for $3 (this time the story is that it’s a sick, hungry grand child). My husband, who has taken over as the heavy says one single word “No”. No meanness, no more information, just a clear message. And all the while, the mighty precious is standing on my porch, making her presence known. She’s got my back, as do all of my neighbors and I’ve decided that precious and I are simpatico.

We went out for a walk tonight and Tyler decided to join us. “Precious found a black dog.” Indeed, Precious was humping a black male dog about 4 times her size in another neighbor’s yard. Sup?

Currently listening :
Begin to Hope
By Regina Spektor
Release date: 13 June, 2006

If I hear one more Patty Griffin cover… Really, who do these people think they are? In all of my touring, it never ceased to amaze and disappoint me when, no matter where I was on this globe, some songwriter would pull out a Patty Griffin cover and slaughter it. I’ve never heard anyone do a Patty Griffin cover justice. I’ve never heard someone out-Patty Patty. The thing that kills me, I’m mean really makes me embarrassed for the person is how they sing it as if no one else has ever been so profoundly affected by Patty Griffin. As if she was really put here to inspire THEM to make music… For me it was 1996, during the heart break that made me into a songwriter, when I first heard “Let Him Fly’. It was the first time I felt that “DAMN, I wish I had written that song.” And I had never written a song at that point. I’ve seen it in North Carolina, NY, Oregon, England, Italy even, but the worst is when I see it in Austin, here, in her home town, right under her nose, as if they want her to hear it? I even heard someone do it recently at the Cactus Café in Austin… not some open mic, but an established venue, where in order to be headlining you should have some identity of your own… I mean, when I lived in London, I sang Toni Price covers, but I would never do it here in Austin…

Anyway/—

I read about the Police reunion and I decided that I would see that show, even if I had to go to another state or country to do it. Today I got tickets for the Dallas show in section 329, which the computer warned me is even with the side of the stage. That’s all that was left after the tickets had been on sale for like 3 minutes, so I am hoping there will not be any major obstructions on the side. If so, I’ll be pretending to pee a lot. Once I printed my e-ticket and my visit this time around on earth was potentially made significantly more meaningful, I began to reminisce about hearing, seeing, meeting Andy Summers when he played at House of Blues in Cambridge, MA and I was in my last year at Berklee College of Music. Heidi and I stood right in front. The show was a big blur, mostly because I was able to apply so much of what I was learning at school to the point where none of it mattered one bit, all of those dendrites forming and such. It was a remarkably intimate setting. When the show was over, I followed Heidi’s lead as she was hell bent on meeting Sir Summers and she was clearly more experienced at this kind of thing. The closest I had ever come to meeting a rock star was when my dad represented ZZ Top in a lawsuit about some huge festival that ran out of Barbeque. OK, tangent… Drummer. Talked to the drummer first. Thought of something semi-intelligent to say about his china symbol, because I had just learned about those in a class. It worked, as he was surprised at my (sort of) knowing what I was talking about. Meanwhile, Heidi, a bass player, had entered into a genuine conversation with the bass player. The four of us watched the crowd try to get a piece of A.S. and stood back in the corner. We hid behind a wall when the staff kicked everyone out. The guys said “good night (wink, wink)” and motioned to us to come upstairs when no one was looking. We ducked under a rope and everything, super rebellious for me at the time. When we got upstairs, I listened to Heidi give A.S. the most perfect profession of gratitude for his influence on her life. She nailed it. I mean, she really could not have done it better if she had rehearsed it with a coach. Then we sat in pregnant silence, realizing that it was time to make a graceful exit, before we turned into groupies. The club was empty, the crowd had gone, they asked us what we were doing later. They followed us downstairs. “where are you going?” … “Goodnight :}” We left with dignity. We got around the corner and jumped up and down holding each others’ hands saying, “We met Andy Summers, We met Andy Summers…” As we rode the bus back to the Mass Ave dorm, Heidi informed me that it was the ides of March and that something magical always happened for her on the Ides of March. Indeed…