Artist Interview: Sarah King
The Vermont Americana artist talks about her unusual life path and her brooding new EP, The Hour.
Sarah King, 2021. Photo credit: Arielle Thomas.
To listen to Sarah King’s EP The Hour is to step into a dark and twisted world. It doesn’t last long but has a lasting impact: In five songs and 16 minutes, she puts gaslighting men on blast, delivers two murder ballads, savors the prospect of dying, and decries the evils of war. King’s unique blend of country, blues, soul, rock and folk creates a rich backdrop for her powerful vocals. Every song is delivered with relish, intensity and a kind of empowering fury that doesn’t drag you down. Quite the opposite, they’re energizing and cathartic.
I’d never encountered a woman artist embracing the darker side of Americana music with such glee before, so I was curious to learn more about King—what combination of circumstances and musical tastes could result in this incredible EP? Suffice it to say, her life experiences—and King herself—are a study in contrasts.
The first one that struck me during our conversation was how warm and funny she is, in contrast to the often tormented, sometimes vengeful narrators of her songs. Darkness and light coexist in King, and she was open and forthright about the range of circumstances that shaped her.
Sarah King, 2021. Photo credit: Jacquelyn Potter.
Unlikely Beginnings
“I’m not from a musical family,” King says. Unlike many artists who grew up surrounded by music, encouraged to pursue it from childhood, her musical exposure was severely constrained. “My mother wouldn’t let me go to concerts, and she put a block on the TV so we couldn't get MTV or VH1,” she remembers. “So I never saw music videos, never went to concerts—never had any of those experiences. You see that a lot in really religious households, but we weren’t super religious—it was so weird.” Looking back, King says, “I think my mom struggled with a lot of things. She probably equated music with sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll and just couldn't see the difference.”
King made the most of the limited music experiences she was permitted. “I've been singing forever,” she says. In elementary school, she was allowed to join a chorus, and later she played flute in the school band. “My mom listened to country music, so I grew up listening to Faith Hill and Martina McBride—those big voices—and I loved singing that music. We lived on a farm in Maine, and I would always be outside singing to the animals—I think that’s where the big loud part of my voice came from!”
In high school she joined her first band: “I had a boyfriend who was in a band, and I weaseled my way into it,” she laughs. “It was a bunch of teenage dudes and we were literally called Will Play for Food. We just played cover songs, alternative music like Third Eye Blind.” In late high school, her mother agreed to let her take voice lessons, and she began studying classical music.
King started writing her own songs in high school, too, and quickly broadened her musical horizons as soon as she was allowed to call the shots.
“I saved up all my money and bought myself a guitar on my 18th birthday and never stopped,” she says. “I had to do a lot on my own; I went to my very first concert right after high school graduation. All these things that I wasn't allowed to do, I was like ‘I'm doing them all now!’ I figured I was never going to be a musician if I’d never been to a concert or seen a music video and didn't know how any of this works.”
Despite her newfound independence, King admits, “I went to college, but I had no business being there. I wish my parents hadn’t pushed me to do that, because I feel like my career would’ve had a very different trajectory if I’d done what I wanted to do. But their attitude was ‘you better go to college and get a job, because music isn't a career.’”
But she didn’t leave music behind. King continued her study of opera in college, though she couldn’t connect to the material. “My teachers would always say, ‘Sarah, I don't believe you when you're singing.’ I'm like, because I'm singing in German about somebody being lost in a rosebush or something! They’d tell me to think about the meaning. But that stuff didn’t mean anything to me. I was writing my own songs where I’d tell stories that meant something.”
She continued to practice guitar and write songs on her own, but she couldn't figure out how to take what she was learning and put it into the music she wanted to make. “I knew I was definitely not going to be a classical musician, but I struggled to bring all of this training into rock and country and blues. When I listen to older recordings from that time, singing opera then singing pop music, there's two totally different voices.”
Sarah King, 2021. Photo credit: Arielle Thomas.
Forging a New Path
Inspiration suddenly came, in the unlikely form of the band Evanescence. “They’re a rock band with a lady singer who had this big operatic style,” King says. “So I went down a metal rabbithole, because I realized a lot of metal bands have crazy distortion and drums—and then big opera vocals.” Being able to marry her classical training with rock gave her a starting point to begin shaping her own sound.
“By the end of college, my guitar skills were better—I was finally able to accompany myself and write my own songs—so I kind of went folky rocky. There was always an element of rock because I loved the power of it. I’d hear folk musicians and think, they're so quiet! I've since learned there’s quite a variety of folk music, but at the time, being so sheltered, I was like, well I'm not a folk singer…” She pauses. “Yeah, I'm a folk singer.”
She moved to the South and put together a band, Ophir Drive, which would eventually become The Guilty Henchmen. They created a hard rock sound, a result of a booking mixup. “We got booked on a tour and showed up to the first night to discover we were the only band that wasn't metal, because the promoter hadn't listened to our stuff!” King remembers. “So we had a quick huddle—‘Okay, guys, we're third in the lineup—what are we going to do so we sound like we belong here?’ We were like, ‘Okay, we're going to put distortion here, we'll put double bass drums here’—and it worked! They loved us.”
As they continued playing together, the band’s sound evolved, gradually adding funk and soul nuances. “That’s where I hit my stride,” King recalls. “Putting the soul back in the music really struck a chord with me. Yeah, I can go balls to the wall, but that connection and that feeling in every song—that's what's really important to me.”
She and the Henchmen toured the southeast for a couple years, but eventually King left the south, living for a time in New York and Pennsylvania before settling in rural Vermont. During that time, she says, “I kind of took a break. Without the band, I didn't know what I was going to do on my own, and I was feeling a little burnt out from all the touring and those long nights and smoky bars.” She also suffered a string of devastating personal losses, including the suicide of her first husband—a military veteran with PTSD—and the death of her mother.
But, her move to a rural area and her losses somehow proved to be sparks that reignited her music career. “Vermont is very kind to musicians—that was one of the things that catapulted me back into music full time. The biggest one, though, was my mother dying. It's almost like when she died, it gave me the permission to go be the person that I wanted to be that she’d been so against. It was also that she died of dementia at age 60, and so I'm like ‘oh shit, if I only have this many years left, I’m going to make the most of what I have.’ So I kind of hit the ground running.”
She wryly recalls her official re-entry into music: “I walked into a brewery smashed on my birthday, and I was like ‘Who do I need to talk to to get a gig around here?’ The manager came over and said ‘You can talk to me,’ and they booked me and three weeks later, I had my first show in Vermont. And thank God—I was such a disaster that day. What was I, like Foghorn Leghorn?” She cracks up and does an impression: “‘Who do I need to talk to to get a gig around heah, around heah?’”
She was soon playing regularly at breweries and other small venues. “It was amazing how fast it happened here. So you can be big in Vermont pretty quick. But I don't want to just be big in Vermont. Since I’ve had this time to reassess, now I’m going to literally take the show on the road.”
Sarah King, 2021. Photo credit: Jacquelyn Potter.
Unintended Benefits
“This time,” of course, refers to the pandemic, which was a huge stumbling block for many but also sometimes sharpened artists’ focus, creativity and ambition, King included. “This past year has actually been—and I hate to say it—phenomenal for me,” she says. For one, it gave her an unusual opportunity to broaden her sights past Vermont. “Technology has allowed me to connect with people wherever they are, instead of being limited by my geography,” she says. “I feel like my career would look very different this year if last year hadn't happened, because I've had time to build these relationships.”
It also enabled a creative outpouring like she’d rarely experienced. “I tend to write really slow, so I don't usually write that many songs in rapid succession—or at least that many that go anywhere,’” she says. “But all the songs on The Hour (except the cover ‘War Pigs’) all just sort of came out the way that they came out. I kind of let the muse guide me. It was only when I stepped back from the songs when they were finally outside of me and I listened to them, that I realized I’d been working through a lot of things. And again, part of it was stepping out of my daily routine. Without the pandemic I may not have had the time to let my subconscious reflect on this stuff.”
What resulted was an evolution of her sound, weaving elements of country and folk into her soul/blues/rock aesthetic, and lyrics full of raw yet triumphant anger. Lockdown also spurred a re-evaluation of career priorities that went hand in hand with her new music. “I had to slow down, and it gave me a chance to think back on things,” she says. “When we go back to normal, there are a lot of things that I'm not going to be okay with anymore. After I heard my songs, I was like ‘Oh, I didn't even realize that was bothering me.’”
I wondered if the dark bent of The Hour was a result of her recent losses and the pandemic. Not so, says King: “Songs for me were always a way to deal with struggles. Pharrell’s ‘Happy’ is a great song but it drives me nuts. I don't want to hear how happy your life is and how good everything’s going. My songs have always been about playing with fire, temptation, doing bad things, doing things I know are bad for me, being mad at other people…I can't write a happy song! And I think that's okay—there are plenty of people who are great at that,” she adds.
“For me, sharing my music is a way to get out what's inside before it kills me, and for people listening to know that you're not alone for having those feelings, even if you don't want to tell anybody. I hear you, I see you, I've been there—we're going to make it through.”
“A lot of songs dealing with tough topics tend to be slow or sad or depressing, or they'll really drag you down,” she says. “I might be singing about stuff that's unpleasant, but coming from a place of power. It’s not just terrible things happening, it's like, what am I gonna do about it? My music’s always walked that borderline of ‘I could go do this, or I could go get into some trouble. Then I'll feel better.’”
In fact, the very first song on The Hour, “Poison,” is about a woman turning the tables on a man’s misbehavior, and calling out the hypocrisy of criticizing her for it: “I gave you a taste of your own medicine and you say I poisoned you.” “Nightstand,” a darker-than-dark murder ballad, follows a narrator deeply damaged by life as she plots and carries out drastic revenge on the men who wronged her. (Sample lyric: “I keep a gun in my nightstand, waiting for music to bury a body by.”)
Another murder ballad, “Not Worth the Whisky,” consists of the narrator’s chilling justification of her deed as she speaks directly to her victim: “Now you’re greeted by a day you knew would come / Staring down everything we both know you’ve done / And I can only be good for so long.” “War Pigs” is an unlikely but successful acoustic cover of a Black Sabbath anti-war classic, recorded live in one take in the studio. Stripped of noise and bombast, it’s a foreboding incantation about the evils of war.
Compared with the other songs, “Cold Hard Ground” flies under the radar. It plays with the classic country theme of anticipating death, but instead of reaping eternal rewards, the narrator is simply looking forward to the grave itself: “When I die, I know just what awaits me / I’m free from a world that betrayed me. / The cold hard ground is gonna hold me.” I ask King if she purposely twisted that tradition. “It wasn’t conscious, but a lot of my songs come that way; if I’d tried that, it wouldn't have worked out. ‘Cold Hard Ground’ is an outlier but it's almost what makes the record, like it kind of ties everything together.”
The way it was created was unusual too. “I’ve never written something one day and recorded it the next, but this one just tumbled out of me,” King recalls. “I was staying in this budget hotel by the studio; I was spending so much on recording I had to save money everywhere else. While brushing my teeth I saw a grain of sand roll across the bathroom tile. And I thought of the line ‘The bad seed’s rolling across the floor.’
“I ran over to my guitar on the bed, toothbrush in my mouth, to finish the song. I wasn’t ruminating on anything—it just came out—but when I looked at it afterward I was like ‘Wow, I'm really tired.’ Tired of living. Not in a bad way like I was about to take myself out, but being in the studio’s a lot of work. It was great, but it was like this whole exhausting year culminated in that experience. To me it's kind of a funny song,” she adds, cheerfully macabre, “because it's just like, the end. You’re done. That song is just about being fucking done.”
It’s almost like non-secular gospel, I offer. King gets it, and we bond over our nonbeliever love of gospel music. “One of my favorite tunes is ‘Wayfaring Stranger,’ about getting ready to die and go meet God,” she says. “I don't believe that, but I love singing it. Gospel songs are so good. We think we have it bad; we think we struggle—we don't know shit about struggling. People wrote those songs hundreds of years ago when life was really tough, and the only one they could bring their worries to was God.”
Sarah King, 2021. Cover photo credit: Christian James
Stepping Into the Foreground
Despite how tiring the pandemic and recording were, King sounds energized as she talks about her plans. “I got a new-to-me car this year, so I’m ready to head out and put miles on it,” she says. I talked to her on the eve of her first in-person show in over a year, which sold out. “That’s really setting the tone, I hope, for the year to come,” she says.
“I'm being quite a bit more discerning this year,” King adds. “I’m past doing happy hour shows, where I play in the background at a winery—that's just not me, and I don't think that was actually helping my career progress. I can't do that anymore.” She smiles defiantly. “I updated my Twitter bio so it just says ‘not background music.’”
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Watch the Western-themed music video for “Cold Hard Ground”
Carol Roth. Photo credit: Dan Lee.
Carol Roth is a full-time marketing copywriter and the main music journalist and social media publicist for Adventures in Americana. In addition to studying the guitar and songwriting, Carol’s additional creative side hustle is writing self-proclaimed “trashy” novels under the pseudonym @taberkeley!
