Acclaimed guitarist and vocalist Sarah McQuaid will perform Thursday, Nov. 6, at the Valley Center Public Library.
The event at 7 p.m. is free and open to the public. It marks her return to the venue one year after her initial performance there. The library is located at 314 E. Clay St.
McQuaid is currently touring the U.S. and playing a combination of theaters and libraries. She also recently issued a Bandcamp-only live recording, captured in 2015, in which she performs the entirety of her album “Walking Into White.”
McQuaid recently spoke with KMUW about her current tour and the space near her home in England that she has converted into a recording studio, where she’ll likely track her next studio album.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
You’re currently on tour and, in a way, supporting this new digital release, which is a 10th anniversary celebration of your album “Walking Into White.” You recorded this show in Rapid City, Iowa, back in 2015. What made this the right time to release it, other than it being the anniversary year?
To be honest, it was total happenstance, and it was a shot at making some money. [Laughs.] My last album, “The St. Buryan Sessions,” came out in 2021. That’s still kind of current, and I’m still touring material from that. But it was coming up on four years since I’d released anything, and I don’t have a new studio album ready though I do hope to have one ready by next year. I’m going to start recording after I get home from this tour. In a way, it was just happenstance that while we were on tour last April my wonderful manager and sound engineer Martin Stansbury was going through an old hard drive trying to find something else entirely and came across this really nice live concert recording from 2015 when I was performing my “Walking Into White” album live for the first half of every show. He listened back to it and said, “This is a fantastic live recording. And guess what? It’s 10 years since you released ‘Walking Into White’ and since that recording was made. Why don’t we do a special download-only, Bandcamp-only release? Not send it to streaming services or anything, just a special Bandcamp Friday release?”
I don’t know if you’re familiar with Bandcamp and Bandcamp Friday.
Yes, I love that platform. Back in the pandemic, they would waive their fees one Friday of most months, allowing the artists to take in a little extra when they couldn’t tour. I love it because acts I love will put up archival recordings or one-off recordings, and they sometimes do it without worrying about physical copies. You have something that’s really special and only available there. There’s no cost for manufacturing or any of that.
Exactly. It gives it a level of exclusivity and, as you say, it’s really nice for the artist. It makes it more do-able. You’re not going through distributors. You’re not going through the whole official release process. You’re just quietly putting something out there and giving people the opportunity to download it. Let’s face it: I know from standing at the merch table at my gigs that a lot of people don’t even have CD players anymore. If they’re going to buy anything at all [it’s often something they can download]. If they’re going to buy a download, it might as well be from Bandcamp and especially on Bandcamp Friday when all of the money goes directly into my pocket and not into the vortex of streaming services from which it may never reach me.
I think this recording is a nice glimpse of your live shows.
I’ve added three more instruments since that recording was made, so actually I’m doing even more now than I was then. Then I was already doing interesting things with looping and effects and so on, but at that point I was still only playing an acoustic guitar. But now I’m playing both acoustic and electric guitars and keyboard and a drum as well. I do a couple of songs where I’m accompanying myself just on percussion and then, thanks to the magic of looping, I’m also able to add bits of percussion into a track or two. That’s another really fun thing to do. Even though I’m a solo performer, I always have to explain to people that I have a pretty big stage setup because I’m moving around between four different instruments while I’m on stage.
I saw you last time you came through and played a library show in Valley Center, and it was a really cool experience because once the show was over, a number of us kind of gathered around and talked. At club shows and theater shows, I feel like a lot of times it becomes a race for the parking lot and you might only engage with the people you came to the show with and no one else.
Exactly. It’s really nice. No matter how big the venue is or festival, I always man my own merch table after the gig. A lot of the time I say to people from the stage, “Don’t feel like you can only come up to the merch table if you want to buy merch. You can come up and chat with me, you can ask questions and make comments, whatever you like.” I like talking to people after a show. Sometimes there’s an intermission, and I just leap off the stage and run straight to the merch table so I can talk to people then. That’s the really nice thing about touring on the level that I tour on. We’d all love to be bigger and more high profile and make more money, but I love that at my level, I still get to have personal interaction with the audiences. That’s really nice.
I’ve always enjoyed going to live performances as long as I can remember but there’s something about the last couple of years, maybe it’s coming out of the pandemic, that’s made it more special for me. But also, because I recognize that this is one of the ways that artists are able to make money anymore, so I feel like I’m doing my part to keep somebody on the road for next time.
You totally are and it makes such a difference, and it’s so important. These are really tough times for artists in terms of getting people out to shows because I think an awful lot of people, during COVID, just got out of the habit of going out to hear live music. Also, I recognize that a lot of people are feeling the economic pinch, and I recognize that hotel prices have gone way up. If you want to see an out-of-town show, you’re going to be paying more money in fuel to get there, you’re going to be paying a higher hotel price and everything. I really am grateful to the people who make the effort to go out and hear our music because these are tough times.
This morning, I saw a Facebook post by an absolutely brilliant blues artist Chantel McGregor. She’s much bigger than me and would play much bigger rooms than I’m playing. She was talking about having her shows canceled by venues due to low ticket sales. That’s something that’s happened to me as well. Not so much in this country because I’m playing a lot of libraries where it’s a free concert, but other venues, especially in the UK, will, even six weeks ahead of the show, they’ll want to cancel the gig, which is awful for the artist. If you’re out on the road, you’re going to have to pay for a hotel room no matter if the gig happens or not. You’ve got expenses you’ve got to cover, and it can be really disastrous. I just hope people get more in the habit of coming out to shows so that venues don’t get so twitchy.
I think the last time we spoke you were working on putting a studio in a garage?
Yeah!
[Laughs.]
Yeah, and I’ve done it now. The doors and the windows and the insulation are all in. All we have to do is seal the floor and paint and seal the walls and then it is ready to record in. I am so excited I can’t tell you. It was an expensive process because we had to rewire and all that kind of stuff, but it’s done now, and I can’t wait to get started working there. Not just recording albums. Even before we had everything finished, when there were still big gaps in the windows and so on, we were already using the space to rehearse in, which made a huge difference. Just being able to go in and set up full PA and lighting and rehearse a whole concert set and see how it works as a concert rather than just sitting in my living room and playing songs. That made a massive difference. I think it’s really going to transform my working practice from here on out.
I think it’s so important to have a space, if one can, where they can go and work on whatever art they practice, whether it’s a writing room in a shed in the backyard or whatever, something separate from the house.
Exactly, exactly. This is it. I know my husband and kids, even though the kids have kind of flown the nest at this point, but when they’re around, they’re going to be really glad to see that some of the stuff that’s been cluttering up the house [is gone]. I’ve got boxes full of CDs and LPs stacked into every inch of space I can find in the house, and then I’ll be sitting there trying to work on a song, and they’re having to hear it over and over and over again, which can’t be much fun for them. It’s going to be really nice to have that dedicated space.
