Walking Into White is the fourth solo album from Sarah McQuaid. To record it, she travelled from her adopted home in Cornwall, England, to the small town of Cornwall, New York, USA, in order to work with co-producers Jeremy Backofen (Frightened Rabbit, Felice Brothers) and Sarah's cousin Adam Pierce (Mice Parade, Tom Brosseau, Múm). The album is being released on Waterbug Records today, August 18, 2015 in North America.
Coming from outside the folk world and having never worked with Sarah before, Adam and Jeremy found and nurtured the raw edge and intensity that have always been present in her live performances, while their occasionally unorthodox recording methods (a mini-cassette recorder mounted on a microphone stand, for example) bring out a striking intimacy and immediacy in both her vocals and her guitar sound. Recorded and mixed in just under three weeks, Walking Into White is by far the most personal and emotional album Sarah has made to date. Already out in Europe and England the album's been garnering great reviews, a few of which I include below.Here's a video of her performing Ewan MacColl's classic "First Time Ever I Saw Your Face" [this year marks MacColl's centennial]
Sarah McQuaid's journey is an atypical one. Born in Spain to a Spanish father and an American mother, she now lives in the English countryside (Cornwall), after having spent thirteen years in Ireland (but having also, when she was 18 years old, studied philosophy for one year in Strasbourg). A talented guitarist, she wrote The Irish DADGAD Guitar Book and has published three albums since 1997, unsurprisingly very marked - especially the first two - by Celtic influences. A change of décor for Walking Into White, as Sarah travelled to Cornwall in New York State in order to work with two local co-producers, Jeremy Backofen and Adam Pierce (her cousin).
The two men don't come from the world of folk, and were working for the first time with Sarah, which gives the album a very different colour from its predecessors. Sarah's guitar has an unusual sound, no doubt owing to the unorthodox recording techniques, and the voice has a freshness and spontaneity that never fail. One no longer thinks of Ireland while listening to this album, even during the cover of Ewan MacColl's standard, The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face. A veritable atmosphere, of a completely modern aesthetic, has been created and subsists despite the changes of register. The jazz trumpet (Gareth Flowers) of Walking Into White, the classical guitar (Dan Lippel) of Yellowstone merge perfectly within the ensemble, as does the traditional hymn Canticle Of The Sun. Sarah has succeeded in modernising herself without disowning herself, has dared to be different while at the same time remaining herself, renewing herself with talent.
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