Sarah McQuaid has a busy summer planned ahead of her August-September UK tour and new music to share!
As she prepares for her August-September UK tour (to be followed by an October-November tour in the USA), Cornwall-based singer-songwriter Sarah McQuaid is spending the summer working hard on material for a new album to be recorded in the garage she’s in the process of converting to a home studio.
“I’ve been playing three of the new songs live during my spring tours in Europe, Ireland and the UK,” she says, “and they’ve been going down really well, so I can’t wait to finish off the rest of the half-written tracks I’ve got in the pipeline and then get properly stuck into pre-production for the album!”
She’s also continuing to make and release what she anticipates will be an ongoing series of “Garage Sessions” videos.
The first of these, “I’m Slowing Down As I Get Older (And That’s Good),” has been mooted as the new album’s title track, and has a bluesy flavour that evokes Sarah’s roots in Chicago, where she spent most of her childhood before moving to Ireland and then on to Cornwall.
“And we’ve already filmed the next two,” says Sarah. “The first week of June was our last chance to do anything in the garage before work got under way on the roof repairs, so as soon as we got home from the spring tour we unloaded the van straight in there, set up our PA and stage lighting, and recorded two more songs before packing it all away again!”
The garage studio — where Sarah plans to write, rehearse and record all her future albums — is being made possible in part by a crowdfunding campaign that’s still in progress, with thank-you gifts for donors ranging from CDs and LPs to original artwork, online guitar lessons and free downloads for life to all Sarah’s current and future releases.
More information about Sarah’s crowdfunding campaign here: https://gofund.me/93af33d7
On top of all this activity, in May of this year Sarah quietly released Walking Into White Live In Rapid City, recorded back in 2015, when she was performing that year’s album Walking Into White live, track for track, as the first half of every show.
“My wonderful manager and sound engineer Martin Stansbury was sorting through some old hard drives when he stumbled on the files,” Sarah explains, “and after listening back to them and hearing how good they sounded, he suggested we go ahead and put the live version out as a ‘surprise album drop’ to mark the 10th anniversary of Walking Into White.”
Restored and mastered by Stansbury, the album is available only as a download via Bandcamp, and not via streaming services or as physical product.
It also features three bonus tracks from the second half of the Rapid City concert, among them a rare solo performance of “Crow Coyote Buffalo”, the title track of the album Sarah made with Zoë Pollock (writer and performer of 1991 hit single “Sunshine On A Rainy Day”) under the band name Mama.
Sarah’s August-September UK concert dates are as follows:
Thu 21 Aug: Veryan Parish Church, Veryan, Cornwall
Fri 22 Aug: The Plough St Anne’s, Barnstaple, Devon
Wed 3 Sep: Nuneaton Folk Club, The Crew/Queens Hall, Nuneaton, Warwickshire
Fri 5 Sep: Theatr Brycheiniog, Brecon, Powys
Sat 6 Sep: Trottiscliffe Village Hall, West Malling, Kent
Sun 7 Sep: Acoustic Events UK Brackenfield Village Hall, Alfreton, Derbyshire
Fri 12 Sep: Ilkley Manor House, Ilkley, West Yorkshire
Sat 13 Sep: Middlesbrough Little Theatre Club (Toft House), Middlesbrough
Mon 15 Sep: Samuel Worth Chapel (via Nether Edge Festival), Sheffield
Wed 17 Sep: West Malvern Social Club, Malvern, Worcestershire
Thu 18 Sep: The Place Bedford
Fri 19 Sep: Downend Folk & Roots Christ Church, Downend, Bristol
Sat 20 Sep: The Watermark, Ivybridge, Devon
For further details please visit Sarah’s website https://sarahmcquaid.com
*Born in Spain (to a Spanish father and an American mother) and raised in Chicago, Sarah McQuaid was taught piano and guitar at an early age by her folk singing mother, and remembers being inspired by meeting her distant cousin, well-known singer/songwriter/storyteller Gamble Rogers, at her grandmother’s house in Indiana.
From the age of twelve she was embarking on tours of the US and Canada with the Chicago Children’s Choir, and at eighteen she went to France for a year to study philosophy at the University of Strasbourg.
In the mid-1990s Sarah found her way to Ireland, where her authorship of The Irish DADGAD Guitar Book (published in 1995, still in print and selling worldwide via Novello & Co./Music Sales Inc./Hal Leonard) led to an invitation to write a weekly folk music column for the Evening Herald. Full Biography here: https://sarahmcquaid.com/about
Featured image: Phil Nicholls (https://philnicholls.co.uk)
