My Interview with Sarah McQuaid

Added on Sunday 23 Sep 2012

I got a chance about a week or so ago to speak with an absolutely wonderful singer/songwriter and musician, Sarah McQuaid, before she goes on her US tour! Her latest album The Plum Tree and The Rose is a magnificent cd and definitely worth picking up. And so is having a look at her US tour schedule! So if you’re in the States and looking for a good concert to go to, I’m sure Sarah would be more than happy to see you there. You can check out the places she'll be playing at http://www.sarahmcquaid.com/calendar.html.

To give you a little background on Sarah, she was born in Spain to a Spanish father and American mother and was raised in Chicago. She moved to Ireland, lived there for about 13 years and worked as a music journalist in Dublin for the magazine Hot Press. I was rather happy to hear she was a music journalist as wellJ!

Now she's settled in Cornwall, England, with her husband, who is Irish, and their two children, ages 7 and 9, girl and boy, who attend school and "absolutely love it," says Sarah.

As a wife and mother, she loves being with her family. She plans her tour schedule around her children’s school terms so that she has time to be with them. She says she actually has more time now than when she was working as a magazine editor: “I was spending really long hours in the office, and when my kids were tiny I was having to drop them at daycare early in the morning, drive to work, get home from work and collect them. I felt like I was missing their childhood.” She also says Skype is brilliant! Amen to that. “I Skype them pretty much every day, and that’s great, especially if I can get a good enough internet signal to use video. They can see me and I can see them, so they can hold up little drawings that they’ve done or things they’ve made at school and show them to me. It’s great.”

Even though one doesn’t make a lot of money as a music journalist, she immensely enjoyed doing it. She even got to interview Alison Krauss! Amazing!

Sarah has always seemed to have a deep love for music as well. Her earliest memories were of singing songs with her mother on long car rides. When she was 7 years old she joined the Chicago Children’s Choir, which Sarah says was a huge influence on her musically. “It introduced me really early on to a level of professionalism in performing and rehearsing and touring that kids that young wouldn’t normally get access to.

But does she get nervous now being up on stage? “I think it’s a good sign if I’m nervous before I go out on stage, because once I get there it's okay. If I’m too relaxed beforehand, then those nerves can hit when I’m on stage ... and that’s not good.”

When she gets some downtime she loves to read. She’s read all the Thomas Hardy books she can get her hands on. She is also hoping to work a little on the novel she was writing a few years ago. She does also enjoy taking photographs and putting them together in books when she can. But right now, she says, "it’s all about the music and my kids!" Even though she does wish she had a little more time to listen to music. “My manager and sound engineer is a huge music fan. He has a huge collection of music on his iPod which he has in the car, so I wind up listening to music all day when we’re touring and that’s kind of my musical education.”

She does enjoy touring, but there’s a lot of work to be done before she takes off. And she’ll be going back to a few places she really enjoys. “There’s this one gig that I’m looking forward to on this tour, The Iron Horse Concert Hall in El Dorado, Kansas. This will be my third time playing there. it’s a fantastic little venue, run by a really nice fella, and I can’t wait to go back there. I'm really looking forward to seeing all the people there, it’s always just a really nice gig. It’s got all sorts of old instruments hanging on the walls, sort of a funky atmosphere.” And of course a lot more to come. She has never been to Canada or Australia and hopes to be able to tour there soon.

Sarah also authored The Irish DADAGAD Guitar Book, a great book to learn from. Self-taught, when she teaches workshops, “What I say to people is look at the stuff I’m showing you today, go home and play with it and you’ll start discovering new things. Just have fun with it, make up your own stuff and don’t focus too much on trying to copy anything that’s existing.”

As for new material, she feels that every two years is a good time to do another CD. Which of course we can’t wait to hear, Sarah has done amazing work and has a beautiful voice to accompany her guitar, almost as though the two were made for each other. Sarah is a truly gifted artist. And you never know, maybe there will be a novel on the way as well!

You can check out Sarah, her music and her tour at the website http://www.sarahmcquaid.com/home.html.

Interview

(Helen) So tell us a little bit about yourself please Sarah.

(Sarah) Well, I was born in Spain which was where my father was from and I was raised in Chicago which was where my mother was from. And then we moved over to Ireland which is where my husband is from, and now we live in England. So there you go, multinational background. But we’re happily settled in England now. It’s kind of nice, because I tour all over the world and everywhere I go I to feel like I’m coming back home again.

(Helen) So how is it living over in England?

(Sarah) It’s lovely, I love living here! I live in Cornwall which is a very out of the way rural part of England, relatively low population density. We’re right out in the country -- we can’t see any other houses from our house. And our kids go to a tiny little school with only about 20-odd kids in the whole school ranging in age from 4 on up to 11. So it’s really nice, it’s kind of like a family. And it'd be kind of hard to find that kind of lifestyle in the USA, so you feel very lucky to be living here.

(Helen) So you have children that go to school.

(Sarah) Yup! I have kids. My daughter is 7 and my son is 9.

(Helen) I bet they're adorable!

(Sarah) Yeah, they are.

(Helen) So are they liking school then?

(Sarah) Oh yeah, they love school! They’re really looking forward to going back to school; they’re on their summer holidays now. They start back to school next week. And they can’t wait to go back to school and see their friends again. My daughter goes to stage school as well, she’s really into her singing and dancing and acting, so she goes to a thing called StageCoach every Sunday and she just loves that. And she’s already performed in bigger halls then I ever have!

(Helen) That is amazing! That’s nice too. So do you feel your children have better opportunities there in England then they would in the US?

(Sarah) Certainly for me as a musician I’m able to give them access to more opportunities, because in England at the moment we’ve got free health care, we’ve got practically free education, there are fees at college level but you can get grants to pay for them. So things like health insurance and college costs which are a big worry for parents over in the States, just aren’t such big worries here. So I can do things like send my daughter to stage school, which does cost money, which I probably couldn’t do living on a musician's income in the USA. So that’s one good reason for living here for me.

(Helen) Yeah I know I just started back to college and wow!

(Sarah) Yeah. My husband's just going back to college in September. In fact the document that I was printing out there was the application for students' childcare costs, so that while I’m away the kids can go to a childminder after school. We’ve arranged with a friend of ours whose kids are also in the same school and who's also a student at the same college, that her kids and our kids will be going to the same lady’s house after school. So it'll be more like they’re just going to another home after school. They’re not going to a day care center or anything. So that will be nice. So again there’s a grant to pay for that, so lots of form filling in but it’s great to have.

(Helen) Yeah that is nice and it’s convenient too.

(Sarah) Yeah. It’s great, the woman that we’re getting, we know her because she’s looked after our kids before in the past and she works at the nursery school where both of my kids went to preschool. So she’s known the kids for a long time and she’s looked after them before. We’ve been to her house, we know what it’s like, and she’ll go and pick the kids up from school and bring them back to her house and have them there till my husband and our friend both get back from college. And they can both go and pick up the kids from her. So it’s great!

(Helen) So did you move to Chicago to Ireland?

(Sarah) I actually moved away from Chicago when I was 13 years old, because my parents were moving to Washington, DC. So we moved to Washington and I went to secondary school in Washington and I went to college just outside Philadelphia and stayed on living in Philadelphia for a little bit after college and then moved over to Ireland in 1994.

(Helen) And you were actually a musical journalist?

(Sarah) Yeah! In Ireland! I wrote CD reviews and also interviewed various bands and so on for two different publications: for a daily newspaper called the Evening Herald and also for a biweekly magazine called Hot Press.

(Helen) Yeah! Okay, I’ve heard of Hot Press.

(Sarah) Yeah. I did a few different things for them. I wrote a folk music column that ran in every issue and I also wrote CD reviews, particularly folk music. And I used to do occasional profiles of other artists, like for example they sent me to interview Alison Krauss. So I did a big long interview with Alison Krauss and wrote a big long article on her and also Jah Wobble and the Stereophonics, those are the ones that kind of jump to mind that were really interesting interviews that I did when I was working for Hot Press.

(Helen) So did you enjoy doing that?

(Sarah) Oh yeah, I enjoyed that immensely. But the thing was, while I was working as a music journalist I was also working full time as a magazine editor. Again, I couldn’t make a living working just at music journalism; I had to do the more commercial magazines as well. With the music journalism I was writing stuff people would want to read, but with the magazine work I was just creating stuff to fill the pages opposite the ads. I don’t know if you know that phenomenon yourself, you’re a journalist too and you’re acutely aware that the whole reason for being of the publication you’re working for is to sell ads. And if it doesn’t sell ads the publication doesn’t exist. And you’re there just to create stuff to fill those pages so that they have something to sell the ads around. And you just don’t feel like you’re doing anything really good or useful in the world. And it also was a very time consuming job and I was spending long, really long hours in the office, and when my kids were tiny I was having to drop them at daycare really early in the morning and drive to work and then get home from work and collect them. I just felt like I was missing their childhood, and I know that sounds strange, probably, coming from somebody who spends so much time on tour, but actually I see a lot more of my kids now as a musician that occasionally goes away on tour than I did when I was working full time in an office every day. I’ve just been home for the whole summer, I’ve been home for three solid months while they’ve been off school, so I’ve been able to be around them all day every day. And that’s just great. And now I’m going off on this tour for 8 weeks and then when I come back I’ll be back for one week when they’re off school at the end of October, then going on tour for another month, back for three months -- December, January, February --, away on tour for March, back when they’re on their Easter holidays for 2 weeks in April, away on tour for six weeks and then back for the summer again and that’s my year. I think I spend about six months of the year on the road. But whenever the kids are off school I’m home, and I feel like I get to see a lot more of them. And Skype is brilliant when I’m away, too -- I Skype them pretty much every day and that’s great, especially if I can get a good enough internet signal to use video. They can see me and I can see them, they can hold me up little drawings that they’ve done or things they’ve made at school and things like that and show them to me. And it’s great.

(Helen) Yeah that is. Skype is quite amazing. It’s really amazing what they’ve done with technology now and everything else. And you seem to have that planned just right so you can be with them.

(Sarah) Yeah, I build my tour schedule around their school holidays.

(Helen) Okay.

(Sarah) I get the school calendar a couple of years ahead of time and start planning tours. And I go, okay, they’re off school this week so I’m going to make sure I’m home that week.

(Helen) So spending time with your family is really important?

(Sarah) If I was still working at a full time office job, I would be limited to a couple of weeks of holidays a year and the rest of the time they’d be in school or else in childcare or something, you know. So it’s a lot better now.

(Helen) So you’re touring now and you’ve got a new CD out, The Plum Tree and The Rose.

(Sarah) Yeah.

(Helen) Tell us a little bit about it.

(Sarah) Well it’s the first CD I’ve made that really focuses on my own songwriting. My first album was basically traditional Irish material with one of my own songs. My second album was mostly American traditional Appalachian material with two of my own songs. But on this new one, nine of the songs on the album are songs that I wrote. So it was a little bit scary for me, it was almost like I was kind of relaunching myself, there were a lot of people out there that thought of me as more of a traditional folk musician, whereas now I’m kind of putting myself out there as a singer/songwriter and that was a little bit scary. But the reception to the album has been amazing. I mean all my albums have had good reviews in the past, but this one -- you’ve probably seen some of the press quotes that were in the press release about the tour, "should feature on many end-of-year best ofs", and "impeccable" and all sorts of superlatives. And so that's really heartening and nice to see.

(Helen) It’s a lovely album, it is beautiful. You did an excellent job with the songwriting.

(Sarah) Well thank you very much, thank you.

(Helen) So just out of curiosity, where do you get inspiration from when you work on an album? What was your inspiration behind this album?

(Sarah) Well, the individual songs on it were all inspired by different things. There are a lot of songs on the album that were inspired by buildings -- , a kind of result of an extended muse about the relationships between people and places, people and buildings. I wrote a song about Hardwick Hall and the woman who built it. And then I went to see her grave in Derby Cathedral and that led to the song In Derby Cathedral. And Kenilworth was just sparked by reading a magazine article: I was reading about the reopening of the Elizabethan Garden at Kenilworth Castle, and the article talked about how it was created by Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester, in order to try to persuade Queen Elizabeth I to marry him by making this lovely garden for her. And I just thought, “Wow, what a thing to do, to make somebody a garden!” So I wound up writing a song about that.

(Helen) That is quite amazing to build someone a garden.

(Sarah) Yeah.

(Helen) So what attracted you to music? To going into it?

(Sarah) Well I’ve been involved with music one way or another all my life. And my mother use to sing and play the guitar just for fun. So my earliest memories are of singing songs with her in the car, especially on long car trips -- we used to while away the time by singing. And then when I was 7 I joined the Chicago Children’s Choir and that was a huge influence on me musically. It exposed me to a whole variety of music, because our repertoire included everything from classical music, old lovely Monteverdi and people like that, to folk songs, arrangements of folk songs, and gospel music which I really liked and a lot of different kinds of music. And it also introduced me really early on to a level of professionalism in performing and rehearsing and touring that kids that young wouldn’t normally get access to. But because I was touring with the choir, quite early on we used to go on these ten-day tours, we’d be on the tour bus going all over the States. We went to places like Kansas and Georgia and Texas and just all over the place. And we had a pretty hectic schedule. Like during the day we’d do a couple of different appearances in schools where we'd give short presentations for the kids in school and then there might be a TV taping for promo in the afternoon and then we’d have a big concert in the evening. A lot of the time it would be in a church, or in concert halls, or wherever, but it would be an evening concert, a two hour concert, and then we’d go back to our host families and go to sleep and then get up in the morning and get back on the bus and do it all again. And I guess I started touring with the choir when I was about 9. So that was a pretty early age to get into that level of touring and performance. It was a good education.

(Helen) Wow, oh yes definitely. So with your touring coming up for the new album and everything are you excited?

(Sarah) Yeah. Coming up to a tour I'm so focused on all the things I need to do before I leave, that I barely think about the actual tour itself. I’m just thinking right now about all the bills I have to pay before I go, all the stuff I have to get done, the packages I have to send off, the forms I have to fill out, you know. So I don’t think it will hit me until I actually go out. But I have been touring for a while. I’m going to a lot of the same places I’ve been before, lots of new places too, but a lot of places on this tour will be return visits and that will be lovely. And I’ll be traveling with the same person I always tour with, my manager, who is also my sound engineer, so that’s a known quantity. And I just know we’ll be doing lots and lots and lots of driving. And then lots and lots of performing. Sometimes a few different things in one day. There are interviews scheduled, I’m going to be performing live on television, which is a little scary. I’m doing the WoodSongs Old-Time Radio Hour, which I think is broadcast on about 90 different PBS channels. So I’m nervous about that, I can tell you! But I’m sure it will be fine.

(Helen) So what’s it like being up on stage? Do you get nervous or butterflies in your stomach before you have to go out?

(Sarah) I think it’s a good sign if I’m nervous before I go out on stage, because once I get there it's okay. If I’m too relaxed before I go on stage, then the nerves can hit when I’m on stage and that’s not good. But I've been performing for a long time and it’s always been like walking a tightrope, there’s always a big adrenaline rush kind of thing, you know, you never know what the audience is going to be like and you never know what you’re going to be like. I mean, sometimes I can surprise myself on stage. I can surprise myself by for no particular reason singing a particular song really well in a way that I’ve never sung it before. And I can also shock myself by suddenly in middle of something that I know like the back of my hand, that I’ve been performing for years, just suddenly forgetting where I am. It’s always scary, but it’s also great. What I really love about performing is the connection that you get with the audience. And when it really happens and when you really sort of feel the audience with you it’s just amazing, there’s nothing else like it.

(Helen) So when you’re on tour is there a favorite place you like to go, or like to go back to?

(Sarah) Oh, there are lots of gigs that I love! There’s this one gig that I’m looking forward to on this tour -- The Iron Horse Concert Hall in El Dorado, Kansas. This will be my third time playing there and it’s a fantastic little venue and it’s run by a really nice fella and I can’t wait to go back there. Really looking forward to seeing all the people there, it’s always just a really nice gig and it’s a really nice little venue. It’s got all sorts of old instruments hanging on the walls, sort of a funky atmosphere and it’s really nice. And the Fiddle and Bow in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, that’s another great one. I played in the Fiddle and Bow years ago with a band I use to play with when I lived in the States, that would have been back in the early 90’s that I played at the Fiddle and Bow. And then I came back a year or two ago and I played there for the first time as a solo artist and that was just great to come back years later and the same guy’s running it, Sonny Thomas, who's a lovely fella, really nice guy. And it’s really nice because the people that run venues get to be friends over the years. This venue in Ireland -- a little club called The New Music Club in Clonmel -- the guy who runs that, Liam Condon, he’s a lovely fellow. I think I’ve played there every year for the past 6 years.

(Helen) Yeah, that has to be nice.

(Sarah) Yeah.

(Helen) So is there a place you haven’t toured that you would like to?

(Sarah) I’d love to get to Canada; I haven’t been to Canada yet. And next year the Folk Alliance Conference is on in Canada and I’m hoping to go to that conference. Canada’s tricky because it’s so much more spread out then the US. The US, we just drive from gig to gig and yeah, the drives are long but you can do it. Whereas Canada, there’s the Toronto, Montreal area, but then once you start heading west it’s really, really spread out. There are lots and lots of space you’ve got to travel across from one gig to another. I don’t know quite how it’s going to work, but I’d like to go to Australia. That’s one place I’ve never been.

(Helen) What advice would you give to someone who would come to you and say “I’d like to learn guitar or start performing? What advice would you give to them? Because I know you also have a guitar book out.

(Sarah) Yeah, the Irish DADGAD Guitar Book. The guitar book that I wrote is about playing in the open tuning that I play in all the time. I play all the time in what’s called DADGAD, D-A-D-G-A-D, rather than standard tuning, which gives it a lovely sound. What I find particularly good as a solo artist is that because you have three different strings tuned to D and two different strings tuned to A, you get loads of what’s called sympathetic resonance. The strings you’re not playing will still sound if they're tuned to a frequency that matches the string that is sounding. So you get this lovely big full sound It’s kind of what happens with a sitar or a viola d'amore. So you get this lovely really big full rich sound which you just don’t get with a standard tuned guitar.

(Helen) So then there’s difference in tuning then?

(Sarah) Yeah. Standard guitar tuning is E-A-D-G-B-E. Whereas DADGAD is D-A-D-G-A-D. So the strings are tuned to different notes and therefore the chord shapes that you use when you’re playing chords are all totally different shapes. And it takes a bit of getting used to, but what I’ve found is that once you get used to it, it’s great.

(Helen) So what advice would you give to someone who is starting out in music or who says I think I might like to try guitar or try singing?

(Sarah) Mostly, just do it! With singing I think it is useful to have some lessons. I was very lucky in that I got voice training as part of my training with the choir, I was able to get training in how to use my voice. I’d like to get more voice training; I think you have to never stop learning. I can’t afford it at the moment, but hopefully I’ll be able to at some point. With guitar I’m pretty much self-taught and I do give guitar workshops. When I give the workshops, what I say to people is look at the stuff I’m showing to you today, go home and play with it and expand on it and you’ll start discovering new things and just have fun with it and play with it, just make up your own stuff and don’t focus too much on trying to copy anything that’s existing, just improvise and expand on it and have fun with it.

(Helen) So is the idea as well listen to music, does that help?

(Sarah) Yeah, oh yeah! Listening helps enormously. Which I don’t do nearly enough of. That’s the good thing about going out on the road. My manager and sound engineer, he's a huge music fan. He has a huge collection of music on his iPod which he has in the car, so I wind up listening to music all day when we’re touring and that’s kind of my musical education is when I’m touring. When I’m at home I suppose I’d love the time, I’m just too busy doing stuff to listen to music. I’m working at the laptop or I’m actually playing music, and obviously I can’t listen and play at the same time or I’m doing stuff with the kids, so.

(Helen) When you do have time do you have any hobbies that you enjoy?

(Sarah) Hobbies? I read a lot. I like reading. I like taking photographs. I like making little books of my photographs if I get time, too. But pretty much these days it’s all about the music and spending time with my kids, so if I can get those things done I’m really happy.

(Helen) When you do have time to read do you have a particular book you enjoy?

(Sarah) Oh, I’m reading an endless succession of books right now. I was kind of in a Thomas Hardy kick earlier this summer; I’ve read everything by Thomas Hardy that I can get my hands on. But right at the moment I’m reading a book called Clochemerle by a French writer, it’s a very funny book. I just found it in the bookcase here. I’m living in what used to be my parents’ house, so I’ve got access to what used to be my mother’s collection of books, so it’s been great fun to discover new books.

(Helen) Growing up in Spain like you did do you speak multi-languages? Do you speak Spanish?

(Sarah) I speak a tiny bit of Spanish, but not particularly well. I did live for a year in France and I speak pretty good French. And when I'm touring in different places I always try and learn a decent amount of the language of the country I’m going to be touring in so that I can introduce at least some of the songs in the local language, so I’ve learned to speak a little bit of Dutch, and I’ve learned to speak a little bit of German, I can speak a little bit of Italian, and I’m pretty much fluent in French, that’s fine, and Spanish.

(Helen) Yes that can be helpful. I know living here in the US we have a lot of emigrants from Mexico and learning Spanish now seems to be the big thing?

(Sarah) Oh yeah. And I think especially when I’m touring in Europe, nearly everybody there speaks English, but that doesn’t make it any less important to learn their language, because they view that as a really nice gesture, you know, that you didn’t have to learn their language but you are doing it because you want to. I remember the first time I played in Holland I just went out on stage and said “goeden avonddames en heren”, that’s good evening Ladies and gentlemen but I said it in their language and they immediately gave me a standing ovation and I started laughing -- I said haven’t sang a note yet and you're already applauding. They were really touched. They gave me the standing ovation because I had said good evening ladies and gentlemen in their language and many artists don’t do that, which astonishes me. I can’t believe that all these other artists go to these places and don’t even bother learning how to say “good evening ladies and gentlemen”.

(Helen) So you do think it is important at least to show respect by learning knowing some of the language then?

(Sarah) Exactly. Yes, it’s about showing respect, yes.

(Helen) One last question. Do you think you’ll have any future projects you think you’ll be working on?

(Sarah) Oh well, I think I’d like to keep making CDs. I’m already writing some new songs. I don’t know, I’ll probably aim to make another CD about 2 years from now, I think 2 years is kind of a good gap between CDs. So I’ll be working on songs for the next couple of years and then start thinking about putting them together into an album. I have a book I started writing, a novel, a long time ago and I’d really like to get back to it, so maybe I will one of these days.

(Helen) Oooohhh that sounds interesting. Is it like a mystery novel?

(Sarah) No, no. It’s a literary novel, I guess you’d call it. (Both of us laughing now). It’s a book about a child but it’s not a book for children. It’s a grown up book about a little boy.

(Helen) Okay. That sounds interesting. Writing can always be fun and very relaxing.

(Sarah) Yeah.

(Helen) Yeah, I would love to read it and I’m sure other people would be interested too.

(Sarah) Here’s hoping.

(Helen) But thank you so very much for doing the interview and taking the time because I know how busy you are.

(Sarah) Okay, well, thank you!