Sarah’s Diary

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…

So… it’s been a while. I’m slowly peeling myself away from being 100% in maternal dream land and beginning to return to my music and so, I suppose it’s time to return to this diary. I was grossed out by the idea that I would ever do anything other than keep my family completely separate from my public, music self, but the longer I wait to have anything honest to say that is not related to the fact that I am a new mother, the longer I stay away.

This dreaminess is probably equal parts exhaustion, wonderment and gratitude. All of the clichés about the depth of love you feel for your own child and how quickly they change and how it all flies by are just plain true. I spent every day of my pregnancy praying that he would just be healthy and now I spend every day not daring to take any of this for granted, for it is when you least expect it, that accidents and tragedy hit you. It never occurred to me to be overly careful with my own life until I was married and this sense of having something to lose was suddenly acute. This is a much more intense version of that same feeling.

I called my friend Teresa one day in the middle of my pregnancy, beside myself. I was a puddle on my bedroom floor, overcome with all of the things in this world that could hurt my child. I explained what was going on to Teresa, the fact that I couldn’t stop worrying and the act of worrying was making me scared that I would bring my worst fears upon myself and that the struggle to try to stop thinking was making me feel crazy and that it was probably just hormones, but I was suffering. It was a perfect Teresa response, “Sarah, you now officially have the knife in your heart and it will only get worse.” I had previously heard her refer to this knife that is permanently implanted in your heart when you become a mom and I was now part of the club. This might not sound like comfort, but it was. Teresa has an ability to shoot straight in a way that is so grounding. “You’re not crazy. What you’re feeling is real. You might as well enjoy this part, because it is only going to get harder”

So I’m learning to balance this superstition that I cannot, for a moment get used to my incredible good fortune with a discipline of trying not to harbor all of the thoughts that race through about ways this world could hurt my child or even worse, ways that we could. Sometimes I think his innocence will literally split my chest open. It hurts. It huuuuurts. So my heart is a big, sore, plump muscle working overtime… the balance of what matters is all different.

I can think again, which is such a relief. Thinking well was basically impossible for me while I was pregnant. It was like walking through oatmeal every day. My brain cells are finally cooperating in a way that I am finishing lots of songs that have danced around for the last year. I had the next album written already and now this new batch of songs is coming out that will vie for their place. I was not yet anxious to play out, when Sam recently convinced me to share his gig with him this Wednesday at The Carousel Lounge and to use it as a very casual forum for trying some of this new stuff. We have found a really cool upright bass player named Will Schulz who has learned a handful of songs and will try them with us at the show. I don’t know what I think of these songs, except for one, that I am sure is good. It’s different, perhaps heavier on music than poetry. Sometimes I hear a song that can knock me flat out and it’s so damn simple. How did they do that? Damn. I’m allowing some things to be simpler.

Well, many things will just have to be simpler. I certainly can’t get back on the road the way I was doing it. Can’t bring the baby in the Geo Metro and sleep wherever is free, each night in a different city. Yes, things will have to be more efficient and I have decided that that is a blessing. I enjoyed going and going, throwing everything at the wall to see what would stick, but I can’t do it that way any more and I shouldn’t. Time to concentrate on making each gig, word, lyric, action, decision, alliance count. Time to make an album that does some of the legwork for me, finds the people. It’s scary to admit that as my intention. Would be far safer to hide behind maternal contentment and protect myself from the disappointment that will come if I don’t make a really good album.

Lot’s of decisions to be made about how we want it to sound, who to work with, and what the process will be. Getting to make demos at Capitol Studios will spoil anyone. When I first went to the studio to meet the people who had gotten excited about me, we arrived 1st and waited for them in studio A. I inhaled and a calm set in with the little voice in my head saying, “OK, you’re here, let’s get to work.” I suddenly knew that I wasn’t going to get super nervous and blow it and I felt very at home. The official answer is that nothing further came out of those demos and they will never be released. The honest answer is that I don’t know what happened. I just rode the wave until the people involved stop doing what they said they were going to do. In life and especially in the entertainment industry, people who do what they say they are going to do are so rare and I don’t know why. I don’t consider that chapter closed, but it is time to move forward with the things that I can control. I look forward to getting to record like that again, but it is 2007 and I am surrounded by people making amazing albums at home. There is a balance.

Along the whole ‘people who do what they say they are going to do’ thing… I think there are 2 reasons I haven’t been able to write any diary entries. One was that I was pregnant and couldn’t string a coherent thought together. The other was that I was so deeply disappointed in the way my last music supervisor job turned out and just terribly embarrassed to have been connected to a project that turned out that way. The whole iVEEA/American Made show was a nightmare for most of the people involved and in the end the company didn’t pay their vendors, including all of the musicians. These shows continue to air on CNBC all over the world and the music licenses haven’t been paid for. 51 different musicians are owed money. These are musicians who had to go to great lengths to get contracts to us at a moments notice, because the project was so terribly run that the music was never locked in until the last minute, usually the day before it aired. One episode was even changed hours before it aired. Oh, I shouldn’t get into it, it’s so awful, but this feels like confession even though none of it was my fault. These poor indie bands spending money they don’t have to fax contracts on a Sunday from some Kinkos on the road, making us instrumental mixes of their albums to us for background music… I mean the Austin music community did back flips for these people, for me, to make the impossible happen and they haven’t been paid. These musicians are my community, my network, my friends and that’s the very reason that I was able to get around 50 songs per week licensed for this damn show. What’s to stop any TV channel from hiring an independent production company that uses whatever music they want and then just goes bankrupt and never has to pay for the music (or the equipment or the B roll footage, etc)? I have tried and tried to get advice from lawyers who I know, but everyone’s response is pretty much, “Wow, that sucks.” All along, my mission has been to bridge the many film/TV projects that go on in Austin with this amazing pool of indie musicians right under their noses who are eager to get their music placed. It’s so simple and now this one company has made it so much more complicated for everyone. Lessons learned are the very reason that the verbiage in contracts get longer and longer and everyone has to spend time and money covering their asses instead of just accomplishing a mutually beneficial goal.

Whew… OK that’s where I am. I think I can come back now that I have cleared my head. Things I can do my best at and things I can’t control. Blessings and disappointments…

Happy New Year