Steeleye Span - Gaudete

British folk rock group Steeleye Span had a hit in 1973 (No. 14, UK singles chart) with an a cappella recording of the song Gaudete. Guitarist Bob Johnson had heard the song when he attended a folk-carol service with his father-in-law in Cambridge, and brought it to the attention of the rest of the band. (Unlike the album version which fades up slowly and fades down slowly, the single was at the same volume for the entire length of the song.) This single is one of only two top 20 British hits to be sung fully in Latin (the other was a recording of "Pie Jesu" from Andrew Lloyd Webber's Requiem performed by Sarah Brightman and Paul Miles-Kingston in 1986). Gaudete is also one of only a handful of a cappella performances to become hit singles. When Gaudete was performed on Top of the Pops, the resident dance troupe walked onto the set in medieval-style robes, holding candles, followed by the members of Steeleye Span.
Gaudete is a sacred Christmas carol, thought to have been composed in the 16th century. It was published in Piae Cantiones, a collection of Finnish/Swedish sacred songs published in 1582 in the North German city of Greifswald. No music is given for the verses, but the standard tune comes from older liturgical books. There is a known entry from around 1420 in the Hussite Jistebnice hymnal. The Latin text is a typical medieval song of praise, which follows the standard pattern for the time – a uniform series of four-line stanzas, each preceded by a two-line refrain (in the early English carol this was known as the burden). Carols could be on any subject, but typically they were about the Virgin Mary, the Saints or Yuletide themes.  From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaudete 

Pryapisme - Un Druide Est Giboyeux Lorsqu'il Se Prend Pour Un Neutrino

Short and True Biography

Pryapisme still hasn’t learned how to write a biography since 2000, even though they receive daily advice from a dozen communication consultants. Pryapisme is the true definition of a band with a tragic background: from a failed career in the professional table football league, followed by an eviction from the board of a major oil company, to ending up being the only men to have nearly died of leucosis because they systematically accompany their Burgundy beef with cat urine. Some members are digging even deeper by sporting a moustache, long hair or having flabby nails. There’s even an almost bald redhead. In other words, a grenadine diabolo might not be enough to pick up girls. So, Pryapisme prefers spending their time with small cats, and getting hugs on a cozy couch in exchange of a few music notes. This is now their only social bond. On stage, it’s almost as if a 10-year-old child raised by Saint Seiya was trying to play a DragonForce track on Guitar Hero while eating a pizza with extra cheese. There are failures, but it’s really funny. Yet, they still haven’t understood that their music is bound to be a commercial failure and will end up lost in the digital limbo, the place where some obscure and forgotten bands are only listened to by a bunch of theoreticians of the vacuum.

Full and Boring Biography

The band started in Clermont-Ferrand, France, with Ban Bardiaux and Aymeric Thomas in 2000 during high school. Aymeric played drums on Ban's classical piano songs then they were joined by two musicians: Simon Gastaud on bass (who would later play in the band Format) and Jack Bardiaux, Ban’s brother, on guitars. To rehearse, the band found a good place in Aymeric’s mum cattery, among around 30 cats who often pissed on their amplifiers and bass drums. In their hometown, they had a solid reputation for being a band that smelt like cat piss and ammonia. Which was true. For many years, the band played a bunch of gigs in France until the release of their very first listenable demo "Pump up the pectine" in 2005.
Then, Nicolas Sénac on guitars and Alex Peronny on bass/cello joined the band. The band was featured on the Ulver Tribute "My own wolf" (on Aspherical Asphyxia/Cold Dimensions Records) in 2007. They worked for 4 years to produce the first full-length album "Rococo Holocaust" in 2010, mostly composed by the pianist Ban. The album was mastered by Tom Kvalsvoll from Strype Audio in Oslo, Norway. Alex left Pryapisme soon after, and the band continued for 3 years as a trio. They also recorded a music soundtrack ordered for the videogame documentary "Tournament of Legends".
The years 2012/2013 were a turning point: they moved from their rehearsal room to another place, still in the cattery but in a safe zone (i.e. without cats). Since then, Aymeric has been handling most of the composing and arrangements with computer softwares.  They turned their place into a bigger home-studio to record the instrument tracks and to rehearse. The "Plimptphlymst Studio" is now cat-proof and better equipped! In 2012, they also met Simon Capony, the sound-engineer from Basalte-Studio who has mastered most of their releases since then. Thanks to "Rococo Holocaust", the band was contacted by Apathia Records and signed their first record deal.
In 2013, they released their second album "Hyperblast Supercollider" and a tape of chiptune music from their two first albums "Blastbit Rococollider" in 2014. A first music video came out: "Un druide est giboyeux lorsqu'il se prend pour un neutrino". It made over a million views on YouTube before being removed due to less than a second of nudity content. Soon after, Nils Cheville on guitars and Antony Miranda on bass/guitars/moog joined forces for live gigs. Pryapisme played for the first time outside of France. Since then, the band has been a five-headed monster.
2 EPs later, "Futurologie" (one long 23min track - Apathia Records in 2015) and "Repump the pectine" (re-arrangements of their first demo EP - self-released in 2016), they produced their third album, "Diabolicus Felinae Pandemonium" (still on Apathia in 2017) after 17 years of existence. In 2017, the band was commissioned by the French video-game studio "Macrales" to create the original soundtrack for the game "Epic Loon". With the support of Shibuya, Pictanovo and the CNC, the game was published by Ukuza on July 2018 on PC, Switch and Xbox One (later on PS4). Apathia records also released the OST (2Cds digipack) the same year. Some cats from the beginning have died, but new ones are born and continue to inspire Pryapisme with cuddles. History goes on.  From: http://www.pryapisme.net/the-band.html

Maria McKee - Life is Sweet - Live 1996

To my ears and soul, Life Is Sweet is not just one of the greatest lost albums of all time, but one of the greatest, period. It’s glam. It’s rock. It’s operatic. It’s art. The story behind it: While touring in support of her country-rock classic You Gotta Sin to Get Saved in 1993, one of the members of Maria’s band is said to have given her a mixtape of classic glam and glitter tunes. Maria listened. Loved. Obsessed. And then wrote and recorded a set of songs, released in 1996, that blended those glittery hues of yore with dramatic colors of her own design.
“Scarlover,” the opening track, is a great example. It’s rough, ragged and refined all at the same time, with guitars giving way to strings that give way to guitars, set to Maria’s seemingly stream-of-conscious admission that “ugly inside of me taught me of beauty/I wouldn’t trade that work of art.” As a whole, the album explores self-doubt, self-loathing and, ultimately, self-acceptance. At times, yes, it’s stasis in darkness (aka Sylvia Plath set to song). More than that, however, it’s Maria McKee unshorn, seemingly exploring her rapid-cycle bipolar disorder in ways that both replicate it and make it relatable. It’s the Bowie homage “Absolutely Barking Stars” with lyrics that delve into yin-yang duality and the dramatic “I’m Not Listening,” in which she attempts to ignore the voices inside her head that are taunting and haunting her.
The utterly catchy “Everybody” explores celebrity and Andy Warhol’s infamous “15 minutes of fame” maxim: “We’ve all been flirting/with the perfect day/when they think we’re perfect/Yeah, but who are they?” There’s also a flat-out incendiary guitar break: “Carried” is another highlight and, of course, there’s the title track, which may well be the greatest song she’s yet written or recorded. Geffen, her record label, hated the album. AAA radio stations like WXPN, which embraced and promoted the hell out of You Gotta Sin, refused to play it. Some critics slammed it. Some fans did, too. Artistic growth often comes at a price, and in this case the cost was Maria’s major-label career. Life Is Sweet failed to sell, and she left Geffen not long thereafter. The album also fell out of print, and has never been reissued, even digitally. (A true crime against art. Twenty-plus years since its release, however, and it sounds as fresh and hauntingly familiar as it did upon first listen. If you like Anna Calvi, Bat for Lashes, and similar dramatic acts, seek it out. You won’t be disappointed.  From: https://oldgreycat.blog/2018/06/23/the-essentials-maria-mckees-life-is-sweet/

Little Feat - Dixie Chicken (with Emmylou Harris & Bonnie Raitt) Live 1977

"Dixie Chicken," a classic rock staple by Little Feat, went on to define the Southern music-loving Californians and inspire the former Dixie Chicks' name. Lowell George, Little Feat's primary guitarist, vocalist and songwriter, co-wrote the future standard with Martin Kibbee (billed as Fred Martin). It tells of a visitor to the Commodore Hotel who goes from thinking he's met the love of his life to pouring his broken heart out to a bartender. They soon learn that other barflys at the hotel had been let down by the same potential suitor.
"Lowell and I had been up all night trying to write a song. We had the Ace Screen Door factory down on Laurel Canyon. As I was leaving, there was a chicken place with a sign that said, 'Dixie chicken,'" Kibbee later recalled in an interview. "He'd been playing the damn thing all night, you know, [imitates riff], which was going through my brain. By the time I got home, I had written this song. When I came back the next morning to the rehearsal hall at the Warner Bros. soundstage, I went, 'I've got it! I've got it!' And they all looked at me like, 'Puh-leeze, you're kidding!'"
Dixie Chicken became the title of the group's third album. Its 1973 release came at a time of transition for the band. Prior albums Little Feat (1971) and Sailin' Shoes (1972) sold poorly, and the group's lineup had become a revolving door. Two new members (guitarist Paul Barrere and congas player and percussionist Sam Clayton) shored up the band's New Orleans R&B/funk sound, while Kenny Gradney replaced original bassist Roy Estrada, who'd left to join Captain Beefheart's Magic Band. These newcomers teamed with keyboardist and synthesizer player Bill Payne, drummer Richie Hayward and George for the remainder of the '70's.
Noteworthy songs beyond Dixie Chicken's title track include Allen Toussaint's  "On Your Way Down," instrumental jam "Lafayette Railroad" and George compositions "Fat Man in the Bathtub," "Roll Um Easy" and "Kiss It Off." "Dixie Chicken" wasn't an overnight success, but its fame grew after subsequent albums (namely million-selling live LP Waiting For Columbus (1978)) gained new fans hungry to hear Little Feat's earlier material. Once momentum was in Little Feat's favor, "Dixie Chicken" became easy pickings for rock radio.
It still hooks in listeners to this day because it's a Los Angeles-based band's earnest exploration of the great Southern music to come out of Memphis and New Orleans, highlighted by George's slide guitar solo and the backing vocals of roots rock icons Bonnie Raitt and Bonnie Bramlett. Raitt, Emmylou Harris and Jesse Winchester joined Little Feat during a 1977 episode of the Midnight Special for a proto-jam band rendition of "Dixie Chicken" that captures the song's jazzy appeal even better than its classic studio version.  From: https://www.wideopencountry.com/little-feat-dixie-chicken/

Jill Sobule - Bitter

Q: It’s been almost a decade since you last released a proper solo album. Why such a long time?

A: Yeah. That’s so weird. I had that little Dottie’s Charms record, which was more of a concept album, out in 2014 and I’ve been working on musicals, but I’ve procrastinated so long on making another solo record of new songs. It’s funny, I think maybe LA just got to me. I also think I had a little bit of a depression and I kind of got spooked. You know, the last record didn’t do so well and you just get a little crestfallen. It also coincided with going through a bad breakup. For whatever reason, I needed a break. I needed to start loving music again. I needed to start listening to older stuff, to newer stuff. Eventually I started writing again. It also coincided with getting a couple of theater projects that I had to write for. When you’re on your own and you don’t have a record company saying, “We need that record,” it gets harder. I think about a band like the Beatles, who had people saying to them, “We need another new record in three months!” When you don’t have someone pushing you, sometimes you stall. The good thing is that I was writing for other projects. Being forced to write for my musical projects, having to be a part of a collaborative community, it all nudged me back into writing again. I started loving it. Also, there’s something great for me about being back in New York, where I go out and see music all the time. In LA it just feels so hard to get in your car and drive for 40 minutes. It feels easier here.

You were famously one of the first people to use a crowdfunding platform to raise money to make your own record. This was back in 2008, before things like Kickstarter. Now it’s such a common thing to do. So many artists now even question if they need a label at all, or whether it’s easier to just do everything yourself.

Well, here’s the thing. When I did my jillsnextrecord.com no one really knew if it would work or not. I came up with the various pledging levels over the course of a drunken night with a friend. The donation levels ranged from polished rock to weapons-grade plutonium. Somehow CNN got hold of the story and the whole thing started going totally gangbusters, mostly because there wasn’t anything else like that yet. Eventually I stopped it after raising nearly 100,000 dollars because Perez Hilton—you remember that horrible man?—wrote about greedy Jill Sobule asking fans to give her money. So, I freaked out. Then a few months later everyone is doing projects this way. I remember having meetings with the people from Kickstarter, telling them about what had worked for me and what hadn’t. So, all these years later I used Kickstarter to make my new record. I was afraid it might fail because nowadays there are so many people asking everyone else to donate to things, but in the end I did it and it worked and it was great. Still, I procrastinated forever before doing it. I just finally had to come to a point of thinking: I want to do a record. I’m not gonna get a record deal or an advance, so I’m gonna have to do this on my own. It was out of necessity, really. I had no choice.
It’s an easier thing to do if you already have an existing fanbase, but it’s still hard. You have to be really tenacious about promoting it and coming up with good rewards for people. I think crowdfunding can be hard for people because it still involves asking for help on some level, which can be a hard thing to do.
The way I look at it, you just have to make sure you are giving something back in return. It’s an exchange. You’re not begging people. My recent Kickstarter met its goal times three, and it had done really well within the first two weeks. I was completely taken aback. Some of the levels of sponsorship we created were really just like jokes, things I thought nobody would ever actually do. For 10 grand you will be my personal lord and savior. Very funny, right? Somebody bought it! Joss Whedon bought it. So on my record he gets listed as my personal lord and savior. I also did things like offer to write people their own personal theme song. That was a big ticket item that a lot of people actually went for. So now I’m writing people their theme songs, as promised.

People might now realize how many different kinds of things you’ve done over the years, other than releasing solo records. Did you find that having these outside projects—writing a musical, for example—let you come back to your solo work with renewed energy or a different perspective?

Oh, completely! How boring would it be to just do this? On one hand, with the music industry changing and being so terrible, I mean, who makes a living doing this now? It’s the one percent who actually make a living doing only this. I’m really a part of the other 99%. There used to be such a thing as a middle-class working musician, but now? I mean, we used to complain about the stupidest stuff, and how the record labels were ripping us off, but now? Shit. I’d love an advance, you know? I actually had something called a “tour bus” for a couple of years that we toured in, with all of this nice airbrushing on the side. I will never get that again. I had to explore other options, take on other kinds of projects and collaborations.

I know you worked with Ben Lee on Nostalgia Kills. When you are doing things on your own terms with your own money, do you set up certain parameters for yourself? Did you give yourself specific deadlines?

Not really. Actually, I had written a bunch of songs over the last few years here and there and just kind of stuck them aside. I basically gave everything to Ben and asked him to pick out the songs we should work on, which was a little overwhelming for him because I think there were over 50 songs there. He definitely gravitated towards the songs that were kind of melancholy. I was really interested and surprised by the things he chose, but it also felt nice to hand that part of the process off to a friend who I also trusted. There was definitely a kind of running theme in the songs he picked that might not have been there if I had chosen them. I also wrote some new songs during the process, which felt good.

Everyone’s career has peaks and valleys. Big tours and small tours, hits and misses, going from playing big rooms back to clubs. How do you keep all of that stuff from creeping into the art you make? Was there ever a time when you were sort of like, “Screw this, I’m gonna do something else instead?”

Yeah, absolutely, because it can be heartbreaking. It can all be so wonderful and then also just so crushing. There was a time when I just didn’t want to listen to music. At all. Not just mine. I don’t know if listening to music just reminded me of my own regrets or failures or what, but I just couldn’t do it. At some point I also realized that I have no marketable skills doing anything else. I have a friend who is a very talented artist and musician, but she also has a law degree and a real job and can be organized. Her thing was always, “If I wasn’t a lawyer and didn’t have this job, maybe I could have made it in the arts.” Jane Siberry has a song that’s called something like, “I’d probably be famous now if I wasn’t such a good waitress.” I basically have no skills to do anything else. Sometimes that feels like a curse, but it could also be a kind of blessing. There was nothing else I could do but this.

How has your definition of success changed over the years?

Oh yeah. What is success? I hate how it’s always like you have to be at the very top or somehow you are meaningless. Like, if LeBron James is the greatest of all-time that somehow means Michael Jordan is now a loser. Like, what are you talking about? Does it mean that I’m a loser if I’m not playing Madison Square Garden or if I’m not even selling out the Bowery? I always get people coming up to me and saying things like, “Oh, I loved you! Why aren’t you bigger? Why aren’t you more famous?” I know they mean well and that they mean that as a compliment, but damn. It’s hard to hear things like that over and over. Like, yeah, why aren’t I? I don’t know. But when that happens I have to remind myself of things like… you know, last week I played a show at someone’s house and I was singing, “I Kissed A Girl” in between Lily Tomlin and Jane Wagner, who were singing along with me at a party that I was hired to play. In that moment I’m like, you know what? I’m a fucking success. We’re all so fucked up about what success means now.

From: https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/musician-jill-sobule-on-reconfiguring-what-success-means/

The Big Moon - 2 Lines

The Big Moon come across like four different parts of the same person. They finish each other’s sentences between sips of coffee, all the while dutifully filling in holes in one another’s biographies. But perhaps to the surprise of some, frontwoman Juliette Jackson writes the band’s songs in complete solitude. “Juliette lives near the market where I get my groceries from, so sometimes I’d be like, ‘Wanna come in for a cuppa?’ and she’s like, ‘No! I’m trying to finish this song!’” says the band’s Welsh drummer, Fern Ford, miming Jackson’s blustering frustration. At a bustling central London cafe on a brisk British morning, the entire band – Ford, Jackson, Sophie Nathan (lead guitarist) and Celia Archer (bassist) – are crammed around a table built with only two adult-sized humans in mind. They’re here to discuss their upcoming second album, Walking Like We Do, although the conversation often finds itself coming back to the travails of the modern music industry, as well as the prospect of an impending apocalypse.
The Big Moon formed in 2014 after Jackson posted a call-out on Facebook in search of instrumentalists to help her execute a budding songwriting vision. The call-to-arms worked: soon after coming together, the group began hitting a stride, combining ’00s-style indie with Jack Antonoff-ed hooks and production. It was a sleek guitar band sound as indebted to Taylor Swift as it was the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. The quartet burst into wider prominence in 2017 with their debut album, Love in the 4th Dimension, which earned them a place on the Mercury Prize shortlist. Thematically, the album was interesting with the metaphysical: infatuation dragging you headfirst into the unknown. This time around, though, Walking Like We Do’s songs offer a liveliness only this plane can. Optimistic, danceable pop rock shot through in flashes of modern anxiety and heartbreak, where keyboard chords have mostly replaced the grungey guitars. A bigger audience has meant more shows. During a soundcheck in Toronto last year, the band’s punishing schedule appeared to physically and mentally grind Ford – who was juggling roles as tour manager, driver, and drummer – to a halt. She collapsed, crying, even though she didn’t feel sad.

Because of the position you’ve found yourselves in, it might seem ungrateful to complain about working conditions. But musicians – especially independent or less commercially successful ones – are increasingly flagging mental health as being a big issue.

FF: It’s the best job in the world, but it’s not the easiest. It takes its toll in so many different ways. You’re away a lot from your closest friends and family. You’re away for long periods where there’s nothing, then you have this burst of adrenaline for like an hour and it’s… [gestures a sudden deflation] afterwards. So that, everyday, fucks up my moods. You have to find some kind of equilibrium in all of that.

It’s essentially a 24/7 job when on tour.

SN: It’s about finding a way to do it that gives you a sense of routine – in a healthy way. We’ve toured enough now that we’re getting more professional about the way we see it. At the beginning, it was more like, ‘We’re on tour, this is so much fun!’ But you can’t keep that up.

CA: Musicians complaining and suddenly starting to moan about their mental health is good. It’s quite nice to hear people who do the same job as you being like, ‘Hey, I feel weird at the end of a tour. Does anybody else feel weird?’

JJ: We have to work with it at the end of the day, because this is what we all want to do. It’s hard to be honest about those feelings because, well, this is a dream job. This is my dream job – every time I have a bad day, I remember what it felt like to work in a cloakroom, or work in a bar. This is still better. But it’s really hard to be honest about when it’s shit because people just don’t get it. I still have friends who joke about when I’m going to get a real job.

SN: I feel guilty sometimes with friends who work full days.

So when you say that you’re suffering from burnout, do they almost struggle to believe you?

SN: When I’m at home, they’ll say I’m not doing anything. I am – it’s just in a different way. It’s not like people always make me feel like that, but I do sometimes get that feeling. I’m not really doing anything, then I go away for a month and it’s like, ‘Oh my god, this is so intense.’

CA: Then you cry.

SN: It is comforting to know that other people feel weird and that it’s normal [for a musician].

An awkward segue, but one of the things that has caught my eyes has been your visuals. Juliette, do you think about songs visually – and who comes up with the ideas for the videos?

JJ: We usually come up with the ideas ourselves. When I’m writing, I do think about visuals a bit. I quite like watching videos while I’m listening to a song that is half-written.

Because I work on my laptop, with my guitar or whatever, you can get really stuck looking at these little blocks of music that you’ve recorded – graphics, sound waves. But if you watch a video on mute while listening to your song – and I’ve got some favourites, like Robyn, who has got some great videos – you can suddenly hear your song.

Just music videos or other types of videos, too?

JJ: Just music videos, because they have loads of slow-mo and dancing and flashing lights.

SN: It’s a great idea! Your senses are distracted and you’re not overthinking with your eyes.

Your videos have a strong sense of self-awareness.

JJ: The video for ‘Your Light’ – which is the one where we’re riding bicycles – we spent ages just trying to decide what to do for that video because it was our first single back after the first album and we wanted it to be more serious than previous videos.

CA: ‘It’s not a joke! We’re not a joke!’

JJ: Like, we mean these things – we’re a serious band. We developed this little routine on the bikes and then, obviously, the puppets appear. There was a moment where we looked at each other and went, ‘Oh, we can’t help it. This is just who we are.’

Is this lack of self-importance central to your music?

JJ: I think it’s just our personalities. We take our music seriously, but we don’t take ourselves too seriously.

SN: The songs aren’t sad, even though some of them are about sad things, or are moving in certain ways.

CA: With our first album, there was a lot of, ‘Who are these girls that just bounded onto the scene? Oh, The Big Moon? Lol!’ It was a bit like, ‘Do you not take us seriously? Maybe we should make people take us seriously.’ But then we realised that’s boring, and we’re not like that.

And where does the album title come from?

JJ: It’s a lyric from the song, ‘A Hundred Ways to Land’. It just summed up the whole feeling of the album, which is about growing up and moving on and going forward. But also about trying to feel strong when everything in the world feels quite unsteady. 

From: https://www.huckmag.com/article/the-big-moon-interview-walking-like-we-do-album

Sarah Jarosz - Song Up in Her Head

For Sarah Jarosz, it had to be validating to earn a Grammy Award (her fourth overall) for 2020’s World On The Ground, an album released in the thick of the pandemic, when so much great music fell into a lockdown-induced black hole. Produced with style and restraint by studio veteran John Leventhal, the Best Americana Album winner is a beautiful piece of work, propelled by inventive arrangements and one pristine melody after the next. It’s also one of the finest things Leventhal has helmed since Shawn Colvin’s 1996 breakthrough, A Few Small Repairs. After 2021’s low-key song cycle, Blue Heron Suite, Jarosz aims to regain some commercial momentum with the new Polaroid Lovers (Rounder), the 32-year-old singer/songwriter’s seventh studio album in 15 years. A mandolin prodigy raised in Wimberly, Texas, she was just 18 when she released her debut, and the accolades have rained down pretty much ever since. Polaroid Lovers was produced by Daniel Tashian, who’s best known for his work on Kacey Musgraves’ Golden Hour, a 2019 Grammy winner for Album Of The Year. For the most part, Jarosz’s latest comfortably follows in the same refined folk/pop vein as World On The Ground, though with a bit more of a rock edge. We caught up with Jarosz in her newly adopted hometown of Nashville, where she’s prepping for a tour that kicks off in Washington, D.C., on February 1.

From a songwriting standpoint, Polaroid Lovers is your most collaborative album to date. How did that come about?

I hadn’t really embraced cowriting with other songwriters before this record. Any cowriting I’d done was with other musicians—people in my band, for example. Every song on this record is cowritten by someone—mostly Daniel Tashian, but also Jon Randall, Natalie Hemby, Ruston Kelly … So, yeah, it does feel more collaborative in that sense.

How much did moving to Nashville play a role in your urge to collaborate more?

I moved here in March of 2020, so there wasn’t a lot of meeting up with people at first. I spent a lot of time at the house with my husband (acclaimed bassist Jeff Picker) making music. But when it came time to start thinking about a new record, I wanted some outside inspiration in terms of fleshing out what I wanted to say. In the spring of 2022, I decided to reach out to some writers I’ve always admired. I was sort of closed off to doing that on my earlier records because I was still finding my voice. It was cool to finally reach that moment where I felt there was actually something to be gained by meeting up with other writers I really respect.

How was working with Daniel Tashian different from your experience with John Leventhal?

Daniel’s studio—the way he has it set up, the vibe—is almost like the Nashville version of what Leventhal has in New York. It’s a home studio. Its comfortable. It’s cozy. It feels like a safe space to try stuff. But with Leventhal, we were recording in bits as we went along. The demo would sometimes become the track itself. He plays everything, so something like “Orange And Blue,” for instance … He actually built out that track, playing drums, piano and bass, and recording a verse and a chorus. I wrote the vocal melody and lyrics and recorded my part over top of that. With Daniel, we wrote everything on the front end. Our first writing session was the first day I met him. We wrote “Take The High Road”—the song that got me so stoked and made me see what this record could be. Then he put together a band, and we tracked the album in eight days, mostly live. That’s a very common occurrence in Nashville, but it was new and different for me. I think the energy from that process comes through on this record.

World On The Ground came out at pretty crazy time, yet it still got some great recognition. How weird was it to snag a Grammy Award in the middle of a pandemic?

The awards were virtual that year, so it was challenging. But that time was challenging for everybody, so I’m obviously not alone in that. We mastered the record in January or February of 2020, and there were a lot of conversations about whether we should even put it out at the time. Ultimately, I’m glad I did. I think it was comforting for people who dug into it, and I’m happy about that.

It seems like you’ve finally settled into a sound you’re comfortable with. How has that evolution felt over the past 15 years?

I feel confident and comfortable right now, especially with this record. But more than anything, that comes from time and growth—not being 18 and knowing myself a little better. It’s a never-ending thing. I hope that I never feel like I’ve arrived. There’s no finish line with art. The goal is to keep running the race.

From: https://magnetmagazine.com/2024/01/29/a-conversation-with-sarah-jarosz/