Artist Interview: Sally Louise
A Nomadic Artist's Spiritual Travels in Lockdown
Sally Louise. Album artwork courtesy of artist, 2021.
What’s a born traveler to do when the world goes on lockdown? If you’re like Sally Louise, you embark on a profound inward journey of creative exploration. We sat down with this emerging folk artist shortly before the release of her debut album, My Hands Are On Fire, to talk about the unusual path she’s taken creatively, geographically and personally.
Sally Louise is a traveler through and through, down to the way she interprets the world and her experiences. When Sally talks about her past, you can sense how she maps her stories like a cartographer, retracing her steps, sketching out the geographical and metaphysical terrain she traveled to bring her where she is. When she scans the future, it’s with an explorer’s keen anticipation at the prospect of entering uncharted frontiers. Talking with her, the sense of momentum and movement is infectious.
“Vanilla” Beginnings
“I feel like I grew up and had a very vanilla childhood, in the best sense of the word,” Sally says. “I think that's a good thing. I had a very supportive loving home, and I was able to learn a lot and just have a carefree childhood.”
Sally was raised in a musical family; classical music and jazz permeated her house growing up. Her mother played violin in a symphony, her younger brother played trumpet and guitar, and her father is a lifelong pianist who taught himself jazz piano later in life. It’s possible that seeing his crossover from classical to jazz made an impact on choices Sally eventually would make in her own life.
Sally herself “bounced around from instrument to instrument,” she says. “Four years was about the max I’d stay with an instrument before moving on. I’d kind of lose interest after a while.” She started with piano in elementary school, then moved to violin in middle school. “I got pretty good, but I was miserable.” She didn’t bond with the string instrument community and found the violin physically uncomfortable. That’s when she switched to a new instrument: her voice.
Following the Trail of “Shoulds”
Sally Louise. Photo courtesy of the artist, 2021.
Sally started taking voice lessons in high school. “Like every young singer I thought my voice was amazing,” she recalls. “You think a voice lesson is basically paying someone to tell you you're good. That's not the case. Voice lessons are the most difficult lessons I've ever taken because it's part of you.” One of the key skills she had to learn was developing a thick skin, separating herself as a person from criticism of her voice as an instrument. “My teacher was really supportive and created an environment very conducive to developing a love of music, no matter what genre you went into.”
Sally learned not just classical but musical theater and Italian art songs. She went into the lessons interested in musical theater but realized her voice was more naturally suited to Italian art songs. Her teacher pushed her to enter state competitions, and she placed fifth in the first one she entered. Encouraged, she made it her focus at college in Utah. “It picked up steam, and I thought ‘okay, I'm good at it.’ I loved doing it, it's beautiful and it's extremely challenging, which was really appealing.” After college she moved to Berlin for six months to pursue an opera career, then came back to the U.S. to attend grad school.
“In retrospect,” she says, “that period of my life was a lot of following the ‘should.’ It was like, ‘You should do this, you should do this next, this is your voice type so you should be singing this, you should go to Germany—that's where people who have your voice type are actually wanted.’ Should should should should should. I was really good at people-pleasing.”
It wasn’t all bad: “It trained me to connect and network very well. In Berlin I learned German, went to auditions and did pop-up opera concerts. It was one of the hardest things I've ever done but I had a blast and learned a lot.” She started her master’s degree at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, but soon realized she was yet again miserable. “The ‘should’ factor amped up to the point where I didn't know who I was anymore—intuition was gone.”
That’s when, in early 2020, Sally started thinking about what had started her down the path of a voice career in the first place. “In middle school my best friend and I learned guitar and started songwriting. They were horrible songs, but that's when I first fell in love with singing.” She continued songwriting for fun occasionally thereafter: “Every now and then I’d get an idea for a song and write it down. It was just an extended journaling practice.” She became more prolific as she was working through her feelings about opera and grad school, she says, “but I wasn't doing it seriously.”
And then, of course, COVID-19 hit. “It was already nearly impossible to make it full time as an operatic artist,” Sally remembers, “but suddenly I felt like opera was dead in the water.” The industry faltered, and it no longer seemed like a good option for a newcomer who didn’t have a foot in the door. She dropped out of her master’s program.
Quarantine Travels
Sally Louise. Photo courtesy of the artist, 2021.
“It was an earth-shattering decision for me to not follow the ‘shoulds’ anymore and to really turn up the volume on my intuition, for the first time in a long time, and go back to my roots,” she says. “The turbulent and absolutely traumatic experience of the world shutting down for all of us created this flood of poetry and lyrics that just kind of came out.”
The circumstances gave Sally abundant time to work on her songwriting and her guitar. “It was really terrifying, but I just kept following that little inner voice saying ‘this is the right thing you should be doing’—following a different type of ‘should.’”
Lockdown was a big change for someone like Sally. “I'm a very nomadic person—in the two years after college I moved about five times,” she says. “Not just little moves down the street; I moved states and across continents. I moved across the ocean and back. To paraphrase something I heard Bob Dylan say in an interview, ‘I was born a long way from home, and I'm trying to find that place.’ I relate to that quite a bit.”
It was also an important part of her self-identity. “I know some people freeze when they first leave home—that initial hit of reality overtakes them for a while—but I’m someone who time and time again has shown myself that I don't,” she says. “I'd prefer to just do something, whether that's moving or taking drastic action, so being trapped in four walls and not being allowed to go out and see people and do things was very much like being stuck inside my own body.”
Luckily that led to a different kind of motion for Sally. “It made me think about being a spiritually nomadic kind of being. We’re in a body that we only have for a limited time; it's not what we're in forever. Our experiences can transcend the present state we're in, so we don't have to freeze, we can actually do things.” Rather than staying mired in unemployment, wondering about the future of opera, she decided to go on an internal journey—to reinvent herself as a singer-songwriter.
“I think all of that has shown up subconsciously in my lyrics on this album,” she says. In fact the last line of the last song bluntly states, “I leave your game, I am no pawn.”
The Album
Sally Louise. Photo courtesy of the artist, 2021.
Sally describes her sound as indie-folk, heavily influenced by the 60s and 70s folk revival. While there are other influences clearly at play, and a contemporary vibe to most of the songs, the fingerprints of that lyrical style are very evident.
“My classical training has helped my compositions, my musical intuition, but it was a really dramatic shift into folk music,” Sally says. But she also sees the connection: “Stephen Foster was really big into both classical and folk, and his classical compositions are very much steeped in the folk tradition. As an operatic singer I found myself being drawn more towards his storytelling style of classical music.”
Plus, she says, “in retrospect, it wasn't unexpected because it's where I came from. I’ve always enjoyed folk. Like a lot of classical musicians, I've never listened to opera and classical music in my spare time—it’s what we do for work. In the last year before I quit, I was really heavily listening to Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell. I think that was one impetus for me; they both did their own thing and followed the beat of their own drum and were wildly successful.”
In Sally’s case, doing her own thing meant writing, recording and producing an album in the isolation of lockdown. “Songwriting just saturated my life and I ended up trying to teach myself home studio recording from scratch,” she says. “I knew nothing about microphones, because you don't need a microphone to sing opera. So I’d wake up at ten and then stay up until two or three a.m. and just learn learn learn and research all these questions about how to do what I want to do. I’d go on these Google tangents, fall asleep, and do it all over again the next day.”
Sally recorded the guitar and vocals in her Rochester bedroom, microphone balanced on her bed. Bassist Jordan Rabinowitz also recorded his tracks in his bedroom in Washington, D.C. Percussion was provided by a Rochester drummer, Chris Palace, but he recorded his parts separately too. “The three of us have never actually played together,” Sally says. “We've never rehearsed together. They're my session musicians, I guess!”
For her sound engineer, Sally chose a Swedish friend from her time in Berlin, so the album was engineered in Stockholm. “It's all virtual—this entire album—so it's been kind of wild,” she says. “The end product is very communal, but the process of making it was very isolated.”
The lyrics flooded out of Sally during the songwriting process; in some cases, she says, “I don't remember writing them very clearly. But I see now that in a lot of ways, looking at my lyrics, they relate to the mortal body and the spirit.”
That theme—of the body and spirit being distinct entities, separate but intertwined while we’re on the mortal plane—comes through explicitly in the first song on the album: “My body’s not my own / Nor do I feel its weight beneath my soul,” the titular chorus goes. There’s a freedom in this realization, which recurs in other songs. “Bodily Exile” opens with the line “I’ve been exiled in my own body,” but the triumphant chorus proclaims, “You’ve found your life / You’re released, freed.” And in “My Hands Are on Fire,” the final song on the album, which Sally says is about “the feeling of being suffused with this creative energy,” she sings “I’ve lived too long in my fingertips.”
This is far from the only theme that appears in the lyrics; the album is a diverse exploration of sounds and ideas. “I think a first album should be an experiment in finding who you are,” Sally says. Indeed, the heady slow-building sonic swirl of the first track leads immediately into a kind of deconstructed doo-wop ballad—an ironic appropriation of a classic love-song style to serenade a love going sour: “How many hours did I waste on you?” she croons sweetly.
“This bittersweetness comes up in a lot of the songs,” Sally says; “they were breakup songs written well before the actual breakup happened. It's a pre-breakup breakup album.” Nowhere is that more clear than in “Honey, Hold On”: “I’m leavin’ you, I don’t know the time and place / But my soul knows where it’s going and someone else will take your place.” There’s genuine sadness in the song, saturated with wistful, slightly distorted electric guitar. The next song, “Sighs,” stands in sharp contrast, pointed and wickedly funny and sarcastic: “Didn’t think a sigh would make me wanna fucking die, but here we are / Didn’t think your tears would make me grind my fucking gears, but here we go.”
“Never Be the Same Again” also plays on the breakup theme: “I’m not ashamed I stayed for so long / Marching to my own drum, each throbbing beat is the sum / Of our confident misery, drowning in our history.” It’s the only song on the album that speaks about the breakup in the past versus future tense. There’s a reason: a fortuitous-in-hindsight technical glitch.
“I actually wrote it two weeks after I thought I’d finished the album,” Sally recalls. “The breakup that a lot of the songs are based on happened and then, four or five days later, my sound engineer told me there was a problem with the files I’d sent and that I needed to re-record some of them. I was like ‘Are you kidding me?’ But I did it. That's when I wrote ‘Never Be the Same Again.’ Even though it's not the last song on the album, in chronological order of writing that's the last song—that's what really happened after all the other songs on the album. It's starkly different from the rest, looking back at everything and knowing what happened. I had a lot of gut feelings of what would happen, and then it happened and I had no clue how it would really go down until it did.”
Despite the themes of breaking up and the initially uncomfortable feeling of the soul feeling trapped in the body, the overall feel of the record is liberating and transformational. “In a lot of ways it’s a celebration of the self,” Sally says, “not in a conceited way, but more about how having free will and being able to actually trust your gut is pretty amazing. It's like you're turning the volume up on the intuition and taking some duct tape and keeping the volume up there. I think the gut is a very, very powerful feeling and every time I've ignored it it's proven to be the wrong decision. This past year, really listening to my gut paid off.”
Sally Louise. Photo courtesy of the artist, 2021.
Connect with Sally @sallylouisesings on Instagram to learn more at her website &
Listen to “Never Be the Same Again”:
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!
