SARI SCHORR | INTERVIEW
THE QUEEN FROM QUEENS by Stephen Harrison
Sari Beth Schorr was born in Queens, New York, and now resides in Brooklyn New York. She has one of the finest blues voices that I’ve ever had the pleasure of listening to, both live and in the studio. A voice that grabs you and pins you to the wall, as well as being silky smooth with the deliverance of an angel. I recently caught up with her at her home in Brooklyn via zoom to chat about touring, recording and everything in between.
TOURING COMPLICATIONS The world of touring has changed significantly over the last eighteen months or so, for obvious reasons, affecting all live performances and performers. Sari herself had to cancel her upcoming British tour at virtually the last moment, “We were kind of put in a corner for two months beforehand, it was looking pretty dismal, jumping over hurdles from one country to another, all of who had differing covid restrictions. We couldn’t take the chance of us getting grounded in any one country if god forbid, one of us got covid, it would have bankrupted the whole tour. I have to say that my record label did a magnificent job trying to make all the pieces fit, but there was differing information on the US website about what was happening in different European countries and I wasn’t prepared to put my band or the audience at risk for something that was beyond my control, it just would not have been fair to anyone’’.
NEW MUSIC Sari has almost completed her new album which will be available in the early part of next year, which will hopefully coincide with the UK tour dates that have been rearranged. “March,
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I think will be here before we know it, so that seems like the perfect time to plan to be back in the UK with a whole arsenal of new music. I’ve given the record label (Manhattan Records) enough material to sift through. I don’t want to release an album of really dark songs, so I’ve been writing slightly differently than I usually do. The piano was my first instrument, so I’m a lot more comfortable writing on the piano, but switching to guitar steers me away from complicated chords and I’m much more simplistic, it gives me so much more inspiration. When I run out of ideas on the piano, then switch to the guitar it takes me somewhere else. My creativity finds a new direction. During lockdown I’ve not been as relaxed when I’m writing as I usually am, I’m used to having a room full of people to share ideas with’’. We continued discussing the varying modes and platforms that music gets distributed on and by, coming to the same conclusion that a copy of an album on CD or a vinyl record is far superior in quality to listening to an album via a download. As an artist growing up in Queens, New York, Sari has been exposed to such a massive array of venues and bands of almost every genre known to man. Knowing from a personal point of view just how diverse and eclectic the New York music scene can be, we chatted about early influences and that light bulb moment of realizing what she wanted to do with her life. ‘’The first time I was able to buy my own records, I didn’t buy just one, I bought a stack, I saved up and bought a record player, I’m the oldest in my family so I didn’t have an older sibling to pass records down to me. I went to my local record store and instead of me
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