On her new album, Sara Swenson shows she’s learned a few things
By TIMOTHY FINN
The Kansas City Star
She is a high school teacher, so Sara Swenson knows all about the process of learning.
Swenson is also a fledgling songwriter with a lot to learn, so she knows the value of getting advice from smart people with lessons to teach.
Two years ago, she released her first record, “Sara Swenson,” a collection of acoustic coffeehouse tunes she’d written the previous year. It was a notable debut: a sketch of an artist with talents and potential. Between then and the time she started making her second album, she’d already figured out some things about her music.
“For the first album, I pretty much just brought those songs to Don and said, ‘I have this much money for a record. What can you do with these?’ ” she said recently. “It was just me and Don. He played guitar and piano and some percussion. We made the record in about a day and a half. It was the right project for me then, but I’ve grown so much since.”
Don is Don Chaffer, a record producer in Nashville with roots in Lawrence. He and his wife, Lori, are in the band Waterdeep. This summer, Swenson returned to Chaffer’s studio to record her second album, but under different circumstances: She had better songs. Her singing voice had grown. She had more time and money. And she had grander ambitions. She also had the sense to tap into the advice and talents of others, especially Chaffer.
The results are “All Things Big and Small,” a collection of lush pop-soul and pop-folk tunes showcasing the talents of a singer/songwriter, and a producer who knows exactly what to do with them. Swenson sounds here and there like several other women who write irresistibly pretty songs. Feist comes to mind a few times. So do Beth Orton and Sarah McLachlan, one of Swenson’s music heroines.
But what makes this record first-rate from the start is the combination of the songwriting and the production.
Imagine if T-Bone Burnett had applied his “Raising Sand” touch to “I Am Shelby Lynne”; that’s the vibe that emerges from this record throughout. It’s warm, acoustic and organic, clean but unvarnished, and soulful. There is pedal steel where there should be, harmonies and handclaps, too.
A song called “Show” comes and goes in less than two minutes, and a ballad called “Passing Cars, Passing Time” approaches five minutes but seems to pass in half the time. A hymn called “East” is as pretty as anything McLachlan has ever written. The elegiac “River, You and Me” has Swenson backed by piano and Mellotron. And the pop-folk ditty “O, My Babies” has commercial potential, in both senses of that word.
The leap in quality from the first album to the second was the consequence of several factors, Swenson said.
“I took a lot more time on this album, starting with my preparation before I got to the studio,” she said. “I had a much better sense of what I wanted to accomplish. And I spent a lot more time talking to Don about what I wanted, the kinds of sounds I wanted.”
It also helped that she had a couple years of live performances behind her. “It helped me develop my singing voice,” she said. “I was able to define a style.”
She could also hire a group of musicians to back her up in the studio, many of whom are friends and some of whom are familiar names in the Kansas City music scene: the Chaffers (Lori sings harmonies on a few songs, and Don plays and sings throughout), drummer Billy Brimblecom Jr. and singer/songwriter Greg LaFollette, who plays a variety of instruments and lays down harmonies on a few songs.
“I have a lot of friends who are really talented,” Swenson said, “and they all make me sound really good on this record.” She also has one or two acquaintances in high places, thanks to her gig at this year’s Lilith Fair at Sandstone Amphitheater. Swenson was selected to play the Our Stage after competing in the festival’s local talent search. She said the experience was as grounding as it was inspirational.
“I felt like I was treated like a peer, not just some cute little girl with a guitar,” she said. “I got to see how things operated at that level. And I got to talk with Sarah. She didn’t really have much advice. She talked about how much things have changed since she started. She said she didn’t envy anyone trying to start now.”
But that’s where Swenson is right now: a few steps beyond the beginning. So what’s the next step for someone who knows she’ll be in the classroom from now until the end of May?
“It’s funny, I released my first album in September, too, and I vowed I wouldn’t do that again,” said Swenson, who teaches journalism at Platte County High School. “It coincides with the first month of school. It’s crazy. But it happened again.
Her next gig is Saturday night at the Living Room, where she and some of her talented friends will celebrate the release of “All Things Big and Small.”
For the first time in her hometown, she will perform with a full band, the Pearl Snaps: Jeff Larson, Ian Davidson, Sarah Mueller, Roger Strong and Brandon Graves (also of Waterdeep).
Beyond that, Swenson said, she’s asking questions and taking notes, fully aware that having a good album on your resume isn’t always enough to prompt good fortune. But like all good teachers, she knows the keys to success include a hunger to learn and the willpower to work hard.
“That’s the tricky thing,” she said. “There are a million things I could try, but who knows what’s the right thing? It’s such a roll of the dice. You have to be smart and work hard, but you also have to be in the right place at the right time.
“This isn’t my full-time gig; no one’s helping me with this. So I take all the advice I can get and put it to use, hoping to keep pushing things farther down the road.”
Saturday
Sara Swenson and the Pearl Snaps perform at the Living Room, 1818 McGee. Gerram Mathews opens at 7 p.m. Tickets are $8 in advance, $10 at the door, available at www.brownpapertickets.com.
Link to article in The Kansas City Star/Back to Rockville Blog