Acclaimed guitarist and vocalist Sarah McQuaid will perform a free show at the Valley Center Public Library on Wednesday, Oct. 23, at 7 p.m.
The stop is part of a U.S. tour that will continue until late November and find McQuaid playing a series of libraries, churches, house concerts and theatres. The Valley Center library is at 314 E. Clay St.
Born in Spain to a Spanish father and American mother, McQuaid grew up in Chicago, where she sang in the Chicago Children’s Choir and learned piano and guitar from her mother. She moved to Ireland in the 1990s and established herself as an author -- via “The Irish DADGAD Guitar Book” (1995) -- and recording artist.
She eventually moved to Cornwall, England, and from there has released a series of acclaimed albums including 2018’s “If We Dig Any Deeper It Could Get Dangerous,” which was produced by legendary cult guitarist Michael Chapman (1941-2021), whose playing influenced present day masters of the instrument such as William Tyler and Ryley Walker.
During the pandemic lockdown, McQuaid ventured over to a church near her home to make a live album, “The St. Buryan Sessions,” which stands as testament to the myriad facets of McQuaid’s musical gifts, from guitarist to vocalist and composer to interpreter.
She recently spoke with KMUW about her current tour as well as her plans for the future.
The following interview has been edited for clarity and length.
This current tour sees you performing in some less conventional spaces, such as churches and libraries. What’s attractive to you, as a performer, about those venues?
They’re willing to have gigs on a Tuesday! [Laughs.] The libraries, anyway. The libraries are absolutely brilliant for filling in weekdays between what I’ll call anchor gigs. Actually, the churches tend to be more on the weekend. They’re beautiful spaces to play in because they’re just so gorgeous acoustically because churches were built for sound to carry. As a general rule, especially over in England and Europe, they were built before PA systems. They were built for somebody to sing or speak and for that sound to reverberate through the whole building.
The wonderful thing about libraries is that they have a mandate to provide community events, to host free events that the local community can come to that gets them engaged and involved in the library and draws them in and maybe makes them realize what the library has to offer. They’ll pay an artist to do a concert at six or seven in the evening on a Tuesday or a Wednesday. That is absolutely amazing for a touring artist to be able to avail of. When you’re trying to get from a gig in Missouri on one weekend to some gigs in Texas on the following weekend, the fact that you can bridge the gap with those library shows is fantastic.
For a lot of people, myself included, the public library was a hugely important space not only for books but also for music. There was so much music that I encountered because you could check out records. In a way, you’re carrying on this tradition.
Yeah. Do you remember listening booths in libraries? You used to be able to go and put on headphones and put a record on the turntable. I’m showing my age here! [Laughs.] But I remember that so well, as a kid, to be able to go and listen to all these records that I would never have been able to buy. You could listen to them on headphones, which always felt so cool and grown up to be able to do. [Laughs.]
Libraries are great spaces now, too. There are so many things they offer. Just yesterday I was doing a show at a library here in Indiana. I had to do a radio interview right before the show. I was going to sit in the rental car and do the interview and then I thought, “You know, I bet the library has a place where I can sit and do this.” I went in and said, “Do you have a space where I could do this radio interview before I start setting up for the show?” and they said, “Why, yes!” They showed me to one of these lovely little rooms called study rooms where if you just need a quiet place to do something, you can go in there [and have a private little space]. They’re so great! I could talk about libraries forever.
There’s also a lack of a barrier with the audience. If you were playing a club or something, there’s an age requirement or maybe it’s a space some people don’t want to go to for one reason or another. People of all ages can gather in these spaces.
Exactly. Exactly. At last night’s library show, I had small little kids in the audience, and I also had people who were clearly retired in the audience. A whole segment of the population. I find that libraries are a great resource for new names for my mailing list. People will come to see me at a library because it’s a free concert, and they might never have heard of me, but, hey, it’s free and it’s something to do at six or seven in the evening on a Tuesday or a Wednesday. So, they go along and they like what they hear, and they sign up to my newsletter list, and they buy my CDs, and they keep in touch, and they come to other shows in other places. They’re great for building the following in whatever area you’re going through. Then, if you come back to a music venue, maybe you have a better chance of getting a good audience there because people have come to see you at their local library for nothing.
Your most recent record is “The St. Buryan Sessions,” which you recorded at this church in Cornwall, England. Tell me a little bit about going into that space to make the record.
This was just at the tail end of lockdown. I had been in Germany and had to cut the tour short and rushed home before they closed all the borders. We were all sitting at home, wondering what on Earth to do and when we were going to be able to get out and perform live again. My wonderful manager and sound engineer, Martin Stansbury, who’s also on tour with me here in the U.S., had the brilliant idea that we could finally get around to making the live album that we’d always wanted to make. Only, since we couldn’t have an audience, what we could do was bring a film crew in with us and film the entire album as we were recording it live.
That gave us two things: It gave us a new live album to put out, it gave us a live performance to put out, it also gave us tons of live performance video content. I did a crowdfunding project to get the money to get the film crew in. Film editing is an incredibly slow process, as you may well know. It would take him a month or two before he would have each song video ready to put out there. While I still couldn’t get out and perform live, I would do these little premieres on YouTube when we’d release another song video from the series. I was dribbling out these videos one by one, and that was a great way of keeping in contact with people through the whole COVID thing.
Because we did it in this beautiful medieval church, visually the whole thing was really lovely. It wasn’t just me playing instruments. The camera would pan away from me and pan to all the beautiful wood carving and stained glass and stonework. It’s just a gorgeous, gorgeous space. It was so nice to have that and then when it finally did look like I was going to be able to get out and perform live again, I did a big album release concert in the church with all the ticket money going to the church for their ongoing roof restoration as a thank you for letting me record in there. The whole thing was this lovely process that involved a lot of different people and benefited a lot of different people.
I know you’re on tour at the moment, but have you given thought to a new studio album?
Big time, big time. I’ve been talking about it nonstop. I’ve been doing two brand new songs that I’ve just written as part of my current tour, and I can’t wait to record them. What I really want to do is renovate the garage next to my house into a recording studio. It’s got a high-pitched roof; it’s not like a typical squat, small little building. It’s got a big, soaring space with a pitched roof with wooden beams going across it. I don’t know. Maybe it used to be something else before it was a garage. Anyway, it’s derelict now and the walls need damp proofing and the roof needs repairing, and the windows and doors need repairing. [Laughs.] But once all that’s done, it’s going to be beautiful! There’s a little video up …I think it’s on my website, it’s definitely on my social media… of me just going up and singing in the space. You can already tell [it’s great]. It’s got a lot of those characteristics that I like about churches. It’s a big, luscious, reverberant space to sing in. I know it’s going to be a beautiful studio when I can get the renovation done, so hopefully this tour will help me get the money together, both through gig fees and through donations.
After you visit us in Kansas, you’ll be back in your hometown of Chicago for a few performances. But one of them is at a venue that’s especially important to you and your career.
It’s going to be really emotional because it’s in the First Unitarian Church of Chicago, which is a church that I spent so much time as a kid because I was a member of the Chicago Children’s Choir. We rehearsed in that church three days a week. It was a pretty intense schedule when I was with the choir. That was my whole introduction to touring because we used to go out and do tours for about 10 days at a time, where it was quite a schedule. We’d be doing school concerts and then local TV tapings and then we’d have an evening concert that was sometimes at a church, often at a concert hall. That was fantastic. My family weren’t big church-going people, but we used to go to Thanksgiving service and things like that and that was always at the Unitarian Church. I went to school just up the road from there. In fact, I started my school years in an alternative school, kind of a parent-led alternative school based in the church as well. So, much of my childhood is wrapped up in that place, and it’s going to be quite emotional going back and performing there for the first time ever.
