Dave's Music #93 Sarah King - The Hour
It's been a while since I reviewed a single release, and how about the last one I bought the start of August. July saw nearly ten hours of music added to the library so I do have a wealth to pick from, but Sarah's release is a compact set of five songs, and one "War Pigs" I had bought as a single earlier and was featured in a previous post. Sarah has a hint of dark gospel in her writing which gives it a depth; let's explore it a little.
1) Poison
This was the song that Carol Roth (Adventures in Americana) recommended to me and it got me hooked. She also sat down with Sarah for an interview. Carol story is a great read and documents Sarah's life story from a controlling mother, to a wandering college and band life, to a rebirth after some tough losses. The step into the dark while not deliberate was described as,
I (Carol) 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.
The first song I bought was the stripped down version, but this one is sweet with just the right texture to the heartbeat pound of the piano. I'm pretty sure I know some of the people she wrote the song for, and the chorus has such a great line.
lyrics
I don’t want to waste my breath
You say I’m crazy, out of my mind
You ain’t seen nothing yet
Making excuses for your behavior
In the only way you can
No these reasons they don’t make you
A decent man
CHORUS
I gave you a taste of your own medicine
And you say I poisoned you
I know you won’t change cuz you can’t understand
So what else can I do
Searching for something he could never define
The world’s been trying to drag him down since the day he first arrived There’s a darkness a-reaching for my hand
I take the gun from my nightstand
Dancing to music to bury a body by
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.”
Now you’re greeted by a day you knew would come
Starin down everything we both know you done
And I can only be good for so long
You done me so wrong
You’re not worth the whisky
I tried to hold you
Back when I told you
I won’t find myself to blame
If you set yourself aflame
You walked into the fire
I found you a liar
Your blood won’t be on my hands
Cuz you’re not a gentle man
Black Sabbath's “War Pigs,” about the hypocrisy of war, has only grown in meaning since Sarah first started covering it when touring around Georgia and the South with her band Ophir Drive in the early 2010s. King lost her first husband, a soldier, to suicide after a struggle with PTSD. His death came a few years after their split over her realization that her dreams and his military aspirations were at odds.
Recording a new stripped down acoustic cover of “War Pigs” has been one way for King to deal with the trauma of losing him, and the regret that she couldn’t do more. “I will forever live with the thought of ‘Maybe I could have just waited,’ or ‘Is any of that my fault.’ We remained close friends up until about a year prior to his death, and I will never know the answers. I know my life is better for him having been in it.”
