Sarah Shook’s rawboned country shudders and shakes with desperation and unquenched longing. Like the face staring back from her Bloodshot debut Sidelong, there’s an unvarnished severity that belies the smoke she’s blowing, face half-hidden in hair. There’s something cagey in her expression as well as the music.
Shook’s been playing around North Carolinas’ Triangle (Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill) for maybe a half-dozen years, first with a stringband called The Devil, then short-lived follow-up act Dirty Hands, and finally the Disarmers. As she explains in the conversation that follows, she had little ambition to do more than be a band around town, but her bandmates didn’t share that feeling, and Shook was forced to consider their perspective before ultimately relenting.
The result is Sidelong, a harrowing self-deprecating, denigrating 12-cut trip through frayed circumstances and bad intentions, keenly characterized by the track “Nothin’ Feels Right but Doin’ Wrong.” In it, Shook mixes the bare-wire emotion of Patsy Cline with the rugged individual spirit of Loretta Lynn and washes it down with a husky rock-inflected swagger that’s straight whiskey, no chaser. Initially self-released in 2015, Sidelong has been re-released for wider distribution by Bloodshot Records, who recently signed Shook.
Chris Parker: The last time we spoke you were doing Sarah Shook & the Devil. How did we end up here?
Sarah Shook: [Sarah Shook & the Devil] was my party band project. That was all about having fun with good people and drinking and getting into mischief. As you know, the Devil broke up after a pretty good run. We were together for over three-and-a-half years without any lineup changes, and when that band kind of fell apart, Eric Peterson, my guitarist, stuck with me and we continued to meet and kind of plan what we wanted to do next and where to go from there.
And this led to the Disarmers?
I had been wanting drums in a band for a while. I wanted to go for a harder, darker, more punk rock sound. So that was going great. We got an upright bassist, we got John Howie Jr. (Two Dollar Pistols) on drums, and aesthetically it was going exactly in the direction I wanted it to. It was the sound I was looking for, for a while.
I was really happy with that but mentally I was still treating it like I treated the Devil. I was getting wasted at every practice and every show. I just didn’t care. I’d never been ambitious about my music. I never really wanted to push it as far as it could go. And so after six-to-eight months of playing a lot of local shows and doing that kind of thing just like with the Devil, Eric sent the band a very lengthy message.
It was very nicely written. It was diplomatic. But it was very no nonsense: If you want to be a local band that doesn’t make a record that doesn’t make merch that’s not really going anywhere, that’s fine, but I need you to tell me so I can adjust my expectations.
I knew quite the opposite. I knew that I didn’t want that. I did not want to be in a nationally touring band. That was not something I aspired to. I’m a single mom and I have my son half the week. To me it was good enough to play these weekend, one-off deals and maybe branch out a little bit and go up to Roanoke and Richmond.
It wasn’t even something as passive as disinterest; it was activ,e like I don’t want this. I’ve seen it ruin people. I’ve seen it tear families apart. And I’m introverted by nature and the idea of being kind of in the public eye to any degree was totally unappealing.
I was in my happy place and it was not sitting well. That message was like a big glass of ice water in the face. I read it over and over. I didn’t even consider the fact that here’s this person who has been my friend and this person who, from a musical standpoint, has stuck with [me] through the lowest times, and this person wants more out of this band.
Tell me about recording Sidelong.
We recorded five songs Easter weekend, the first weekend of April in 2015 and … it could’ve been a disaster. I had been in the hospital, in the ER twice the last two weeks before we went in to record, with severe tonsillitis. I wrote the doctor a note [saying,] “I have to record in six days. Tell me what to do. Give me the magic shot.” The doctor looks at me and is like, “You don’t don’t talk for five days. Do not use your voice at all for five days and take this medicine, you should be ship-shape by the time you go in the studio.” Then [we] went into the studio eight hours a day of scratch vocal recording and then on the fourth day laid down the final vocals. It was really intense. I think I went through six bags of cough drops.
I understand just making the album itself was sort of upsetting to you.
Shortly before we released Sidelong, in October 2015, I was in the ER twice with panic attacks. I had never had a panic attack in my life and so I didn’t understand [that] it was an anxiety and stress situation, that the organs in my body weren’t shutting down. I was not dying. I was just really really freaked out.
There was really no telling where the cards were going to fall. There was really no telling what was going to happen, how successful of a record it was going to be. And I had a really good conversation with Howie about a week before the album came out. He was like, “Man, you have all these issues that you really care about and just kind of think of it as using the system against itself and the bigger you get, the more of a platform you have to affect change.”
It was exactly what I needed to hear and other things really started falling into place for me. [I started] understanding that, as a band leader, I had a responsibility to my bandmates to work really hard to make it successful. So for me, any success that is coming from Sidelong or future releases, I have a totally different approach and angle to it now. It’s like I have to look out for my bandmates. I have to make sure that my bandmates are getting paid and living comfortably, and that’s my motive at this point.
How did being homeschooled inform your perspective and outlook? Did it help make you independent?
The homeschooling thing is a really interesting facet of my life and one of the things I really like about Lydia Loveless. She was homeschooled too and that was something that we sorta talked about, and [we] could totally relate to each other. I think that my experience was a lot more religion-based than hers. I was literally raised to believe that because I am a woman my sole purpose for existence is to be a wife, a mother, and a housekeeper. That was my upbringing. Fast forward to me at 20 basically running away and getting married to a complete stranger, pretty much.
I got pregnant two months after I got married to this guy and my son is the best thing that ever happened to me. He’s 10 now. It’s mind-boggling. But it’s interesting because I genuinely feel that my parents were doing the best that they could with what they had and what they knew. They weren’t intentionally misguiding me. They really thought they were doing the right thing.
My dad spent a lot of time with my older sister Kathryn and I teaching us to self–analyze and teaching us critical thinking. That totally bit him in the ass! [laughs] But he has always been gracious about that. I don’t get to see my folks as often as I like but typically anytime I’m visiting my dad, I end up staying up pretty late and having great conversation about all kinds of different things.
You’re admittedly a shy person. I remember talking to Dave Alvin and he talked about closing his eyes while he sang to kind of transport himself to the place where and when he wrote the song. How do you approach the performance aspect of songs that are apparently often pretty personal.
I write from my heart, and because I’m the same person and those experiences are still my experience, they’re really very real to me even after all this time of playing these songs. They’re still very near and dear to my heart because they came from an honest and pretty vulnerable place.
Talk about closing your eyes, when The Devil first started out, I got a music stand. I knew all the words. I didn’t need it. It was my crutch: If I can stand here and pretend like I’m reading this music, I won’t have to look at anybody. And then after a while I was watching other performers and I was like, well, it’s so much more special when the person that’s singing is making eye contact with the audience and they’re very present. It’s a lot more powerful. So I graduated from playing every show with my eyes closed to looking at them the whole time. It’s taken me a long time but now I go up on stage and think, “This is mine tonight and we’re going to have some fun!”
Tell me about the song “Misery Without Company.”
That was definitely more of an autobiographical song, than [being] written in the context of someone else or parallel with some story or dream. [I’m really] the same way. That’s one of two songs off Sidelong [the other was “Heal Me”] that are not about other people or experiences. … It’s sort self-deprecating, self-denigrating, [but] this is where I am. Like I’m on my porch with the only pint in the row, drinking whiskey and smoking cigarettes and I got to quit drinking at some point.
There was a really great moment where I was working on that song on the porch and I reached over and took the top off the whiskey bottle and went, “Oh shit.” Literally the only thing keeping my head up was this goddamn bottle. It’s a fact folks. [laughs]
Did you hear anything from Dwight Yoakam about your song “Dwight Yoakam”? Where did that come from?
I had been on a Dwight Yoakam kick for a while. I had Guitars and Cadillacs on very heavy rotation and I was going through a really bad spot in a relationship I was in at the time. I don’t even know. I’ve probably written over 300 songs in my life. That is the only song I’ve ever written that I cried like a baby the whole time I was writing it.
It was the most intense songwriting session I’ve ever had. I just had this idea that … people can be really shitty to each other and I wanted to capture that feeling of how desperate you can go, like how low you can go. So it’s just the idea of a woman [who] went up to the bar and fell in love with, not Dwight Yoakam [but] somebody that just kind of seemed like him, you know what I mean?
A poor facsimile.
Exactly. That was a really brutal time and I feel like I kind of captured the essence of the harshness and the brutality of that time.
One of the things I like about your songs is that, while downcast, they’re not defeated, not resigned. There’s a dark sort of acceptance but refusal to surrender. Where does that come from?
I’ve always been a stubborn motherfucker. That is just part of who I am. If I want something, I go after it really hard. Sometimes there is a danger. Stubbornness can obviously be a really good thing if it’s put to a worthy cause, but being self-aware of the fact that I’m stubborn and that I don’t know everything, and I’m still learning about the lives and experiences of other people whose lives and experiences are wildly different from my own … that’s something that I do pretty religiously, for lack of a better term.
So is writing songs more about the catharsis?
Yes. I started songwriting when I was nine and it was basically a way to escape and a way to kind of – when you are a little kid you don’t have a lot of control over your life. You kind of have to get in the car when its time to go someplace. So at that age it was like, I was really into drawing and just writing in general and my parents had a terrible, old, out-of-tune, upright piano in our hallway. I was like, “If I can figure out how to make this thing– it’s never going to sound good – but if I can figure out how to play chords and how to write a basic melody on this thing, I can do any words I want, to tell any kind of story I want.” And that, at that age, was very empowering. [I was] some kind of master of [my] own fate. Especially growing up in a strict household, this is a world where nobody gets to make rules except for me.
So what are the plans for the next album?
We have recorded the next full-length album already. The week before we left for our SXSW tour we went into the studio and made the next record. That will be coming out on Bloodshot in Spring 2018. … It’s weird touring on an album that has been out so long, but what I’m most excited about is that we’ll soon have Sidelong on vinyl. I’m so over the moon on that. So we’re sitting on this record for close to a year and in the meantime with any luck we’re putting out a 7” in the fall. I wrote both songs for that yesterday and sent them to the guys and they’re pretty stoked on them so that will be something before the next release.
