It may be hard for audience members to tell that Sarah Smith is anything but the passionately expressive, high energy, deeply compelling and spectacularly gifted performer belting out her extensive repertoire of songs, with her trademark 1000-watt smile.
But she is more than anything else you can say about her, human. Profoundly so, authentically so. Sarah Smith is a deep thinker and feels even more deeply. She cares massively and has an unbridled sense of love which she shares freely with those close to her, as well as her audiences around the world through her art.
Complex, spiritually searching and saturated with a sense of artistry and infused with uncommonly compelling and connective talent, Smith uses her musical gifts to channel and process the experiences of her life, the feelings – good, bad and ugly – that rise within her heart and soul. It’s draining and cathartic, not only for the artist herself, but also for those of her keenly attuned fans along for the ride.
Unveiling, her new album, is arguably a public deconstruction of Smith’s former life, laying bare the layers of the past few years, a lost love, a new love, travels and travails around the world, and the beginning of a radiant new approach to life. It’s an impressive 15 songs worth of emotive storytelling, broaching a diversity of styles that is also one of Smith’s hallmarks, all pulled together in the binding force of her powerful voice.
By her own thinking, Unveiling is the wrapping up of a chapter in her life, setting the stage for something exciting and new.
“I released my last album 11, two years ago. After I released it, I was writing constantly. I wrote 50 or 60 songs after that album and my band and I whittled it down to like 25 songs and then we eventually got it down to the 15 songs that are on the album. But since January of this year, I hadn’t written anything – not one song. And that’s because my entire life has changed; everything about my life has changed, it’s gone 180 degrees. Which means that I am going to settle into this new life that I am in and allow songs to take shape in their own good time. I have no desire right now to do any writing. I think that Unveiling was a final puke of emotions for me for a little bit,” Smith said from her home in southwestern Ontario.
“Lately I have felt love that I have never felt before. It’s amazing, so I have these two full spectrums of pain and joy that have happening in the last nine months. I think I needed to find my real self and my real happiness. I am a completely different person that I was even nine months ago. I am 100 per cent completely different. I am living a completely honest, truthful life. I have always strived to be truthful in everything, but I don’t think I always was. Secrets kill you and I think I had some secrets that almost killed me. I don’t have any secrets anymore.
“I feel like with the release of this album and the new life I have, I am finally at equilibrium with my core. I have had these core values forever, I was born with them, I was raised with them and I have felt I was always in between my core values and my ego. I feel like, finally, I am living my core truth. I actually have found inner peace. I can honest say I am at peace.”
The expunging of the emotions that had built up in the weeks and months leading up to the completion of Unveiling, inform so many of the tracks on the album and give the record an emotional gravitas unlike most other albums you will hear, and something even unique amongst Smith’s own impressive catalogue.
“The music always gives me an outlet to deal with my emotions and I was going through some painful things. I was feeling lonely and struggling with my own worth and my role in life, and questioning where I should be, looking for answers, trying to find courage, that kind of thing. And the music helped me go there. I guess that’s what this album would be – the Unveiling of me. Sometimes you have to be whittled down to nothing in order to find your power within. It does feel like a crucible, that’s exactly what it feels like. It feels like I went through hell within, and I think when you’re crawling through that kind of internal hell, you’re crawling through fire, you’re crawling through the mud and mire, it just feels so hard to get through. But then when you finally break through that barrier there is this incredible sense of relief,” she explained, adding that having more than 70 minutes of music, and 15 songs is an extraordinary amount of music for one recording in this day and age.
“I think it’s in order to just end a chapter in my life, put a little seal on it and then move on from that. To me it’s like, ‘this is my life in a nutshell, I am going to seal it in a little package, put a bow on it and move on.’ It’s almost like I can leave my legacy through my music. When I listen to the music on Unveiling, I feel all the feelings I felt while writing it, and when I sing this music night after night, I go through those same feelings night after night, and I think people can relate to that. Most people have had struggles, have had heartache. Most people have felt love, most people have felt pain and abandonment, most people have felt loneliness – all the feelings that I sing about most people can relate to because we’re human, right?
“If people have ever felt that feeling of being stripped naked, stripped to the bone, laying there for everybody to view and realize there is actually power in that vulnerability, if anybody else had ever felt that, they are going to relate to these songs.”
The rollicking lead-off track, You Don’t Get My Love, could also be entitled, You Don’t Understand My Love, as it represents that point in a relationship where what one person sees as tender loving care is perceived differently by the other party – with unforeseen results.
“I am saying, ‘it’s not that I am not going to give you my love. It’s all I do is give you my love, but you aren’t seeing it as love.’ The words are, ‘all my care and wonder, you turn it into thunder.’ It’s when you feel that no matter what you did, it wasn’t the kind of love that the other person needed. Instead that love was something causing them pain,” Smith explained.
“And that’s just shitty, really. The number one thing that frustrates me most in any relationship is when I am misunderstood, when I do something that is taken the wrong way. That is so frustrating for me, so I guess this song is that frustration coming out.”
Sailing Free, in a way, picks up the narrative threads, and examines the importance of moving on, with lessons learned and a new purpose in your heart.
“The number one thing I learned this year was about letting go. It was a really, really hard lesson to learn. You can let go with love, and that has been a really, really hard lesson. You can love somebody so much that letting go is the only option that you have, and it can be a really loving move. Letting go doesn’t have to be a hateful thing, it can be very loving,” Smith said, adding that Never Alone is her belief that regardless of the situation we are in, others in this world may have it worse, and that kindness and caring and compassion can always be demonstrated.
“No matter what situation you come into in this world, you have the capability of giving of yourself to another human being. And when we give of ourselves, that’s when we are truly living. To me, it’s about this feeling again, of connectivity, because when we are around other human beings and we’re connected by more than just our own selfish desires, when we’re actually thinking about other people and we’re helping them to not feel alone, in the end, that makes us live a better life.”
Musically, Smith and her band have let their unabashed rock nature shine through, which is logical seeing as how they had been playing so many shows together and were would up like a tight-wound clock, just ready to hit the proverbial ground running.
“Lately we have been playing so many shows together as a band, I was so ready to just work as a band, rather than have an outside influence in our recording process. I just wanted to work as a band, so we took a good year and a half to go through the songs together and work them out arrangement-wise and work on all our parts,” she said.
“We just went into the studio and I just played guitar and sang; I just sang these songs live off the floor, no overdubs. The only thing I overdubbed was my own vocal harmony, the rest of it was done live right there in the studio. So, what you get is the energy of the band, what I have always been missing in all of my recordings is that energy we have live. The most feedback I get is that the band is better live than it is on CD, and I wanted to have the band as good as the CD as it is live.”
Speaking of live, before the holiday season begins, Smith and her band will be playing four Ontario CD releasing parties for Unveiling over four consecutive nights: Nov. 20 in Leamington, Nov. 21 in Collingwood, Nov. 22 in London and Nov. 23 in Kitchener, before a run of shows throughout southwestern Ontario and the Niagara Region, right up until Dec. 20. Starting Jan. 11, 2020, she is participating in a week of dates as part of the JahWomen Blues Tour in Jamaica, before an extended run through Texas through the latter part of January and well in February.
Prior to heading for the Caribbean, she will play a special return engagement in Napanee, Ontario, at Ellena’s Café, as part of the Starstop Music Series.
For more information on Unveiling, and upcoming tour dates, visit https://www.sarahsmithmusic.com.
- Jim Barber is a veteran award-winning journalist and author based in Napanee, ON, who has been writing about music and musicians for nearly three decades. Besides his journalistic endeavours, he now works as a communications and marketing specialist. Contact him at jimbarberwritingservices@gmail.com.
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