Now preparing to embark on a three-month autumn UK and USA tour, Cornwall-based singer-songwriter Sarah McQuaid has had a busy summer.
Not only has she been working hard writing songs for a new album to be recorded in the garage she’s converting to a studio, she’s also released several “Garage Sessions” videos featuring some of that new material – plus a new archival album, Walking Into White Live In Rapid City.
“The work on the studio is nearly finished,” Sarah reveals, “and I’m looking forward to getting properly stuck into tracking the album! I’ve already been playing a few of the new songs in my current concert set and they’ve been going down really well, so I can’t wait to share them with a wider audience.”
The first three of what Sarah anticipates will be an ongoing series of “Garage Sessions” videos can all be viewed on Sarah’s website and YouTube channel, and were recorded and filmed during breaks in the building work, before doors and windows had even been installed.
The first of them, “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.
It’s followed by a moving cover of Radiohead’s “Fake Plastic Trees” and another McQuaid original, “When I Held Up My Phone To The Sky.” “Sometimes I have to take a little poetic license when I’m writing songs,” Sarah writes in her notes to the latter, “but every bit of this one actually happened, including the free chocolate. Great big thanks to the receptionist on duty the night of Friday the 10th of May 2024 at Premier Inn Stockton-On-Tees!”
The garage studio — where Sarah plans to write, rehearse and record all her future albums — has been 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.
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.
“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 realising 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 year of Walking Into White.”
Restored and mastered by Stansbury in his Cacophony Cottage studio, the album is available to purchase as a download only via Bandcamp. 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.
