An Interview With Sarah Larsson
This spotlight interview is with Sarah Larsson. A well-loved local artist, known for her beautiful folk vocals, deep investment in learning more about folk songs and culture, and cultivation of community spaces. She spoke with Cedar Commissions program manager, Robert Lehmann, about her mixed Jewish roots; making music in community; and the meanings of the poems she used to compose her original Yiddish folk music.
You can listen to Sarah Larsson live Saturday, February 10th during our Cedar Commissions concert.
BUY TICKETS
RL: How would you describe your roots?
Sarah Larsson: Yeah! I come from a mixed family where my mom is Jewish and my dad is a mutt of Western European backgrounds, and I grew up in Excelsior, Minnesota. So as a child I had a small-town-street-kid running-around-with-my-friends kind of life. I came from a special context where both sides of my family were really connected to ancestry and family stories, so I heard a lot from my parents and extended family on both sides about relatives' names and their stories of moving from Europe to North America, and their experiences and our connections to them. I also heard a lot of guilt [laughing] about not doing a good enough job preserving connections or stories of those people.
I definitely internalized and picked up a very clear message that having those stories and having those connections is very important – whether you have them and cherish them or you're feeling like they're absent, they are an important thing! Culturally my mom’s side are Eastern European rooted Jewish folks from places like Hungary, Romania, and Poland – the most recent spots they lived – and then they moved to eastern Canada and the northeastern U.S. Each of my grandparents on that side grew up in Massachusetts and New York, and on my dad's side, each of my great grandparents are a different western European nationality: Swedish, Irish, French, and Scottish, all of whom have now lived in North America for generations. The Swedish relatives immigrated around the turn of the 20th century, right around the time my most recent Jewish ancestors immigrated, too. On that side in particular, we have very strong roots in a couple particular towns in the northeast like Geneva, New York for my Grammy and her fam and then Gloucester, Massachusetts, right on the coast for my grandfather's family – essentially an entire community of stonecutters from Sweden all up and moved to the same town on the coast of Massachusetts, and my family has been there ever since. Lots of very specific connections.
RL: I like how you talked lineage, but then culturally and also geographically as well. It's cool to hear stories of people with mixed European ancestry – my dad has that and I have that too now – because so much on my dad's side has just been lost. And it's not always like that, but in my life, I’ve found it’s like that for many white Americans - that fully-Americanized erasure of past cultural identity.
That's so frequently the case. I do find more and more very frequently that people do have very strong stories but it's kind of either or – there’s plenty of folks you know who will say, “We're Italian and we're from Naples, and our people spoke this dialect and then they moved to New York and then we lived in this borough of New York,” or “We're Swedish and we moved to this town in Iowa… and here's the plate your grandmother got from her great aunt who brought it from Sweden” – and then on the other side of the spectrum there are people who don’t associate with those places or identities at all. Honestly for me growing up in Minnesota, I felt other-ed by the quantity of Scandinavian-descended Christian kids among my peers who seemed extremely rooted and connected to that identity, and my family felt much more disconnected, not to mention being other by virtue of also being Jewish.
I am embracing more and more that the people who are invested in culture and roots aren’t some kind of professional cohort of folklorists and artists; it’s a huge cohort of “everyday folks” who are all about preserving culture but maybe don’t describe it that way, and certainly doesn't get represented in the mainstream [of European-descended culture]. That’s one of the questions I’m working with – I think about the real everyday towny folks who do a lot of this labor of keeping stories and people connected. How do we celebrate that a little bit more? How do we make it more of our mainstream culture.
Can you tell us about yourself as an artist?
I’ve loved music and loved to sing for many years. I sang in choir as a young person, and I was originally signed up for choir by my parents because I was singing a lot around the house. I’d been doing a lot of music in high school and was early on very interested in family history, immigration stories, and culture. Then, I started on the path that is most resonant right now when I went to college.
My freshman year of college, I went on a whim to an a cappella concert and there was the Yale Slavic Chorus, which is a group that sings all Eastern European folk music. They came walking down the middle aisle of the space and it was this big, echoey, resonant, chapel, and they're two-by-two, arm in arm – wearing embroidered skirts, and blouses, and vests – and they’re singing this folk music from Eastern Europe. I thought, “Wow, that's amazing,” and instantly, I knew I had to do that – to be a part of that group.
That became a huge part of my life in college, and then very coincidentally, three of us members from that group became my group, The Nightingale Trio. After we finished school we felt like, “Oh I miss singing together so much; we should get together, and you know sing the old songs!” And because that group ended up being so well-received, it opened my eyes to feeling like, “Oh, I could be doing this.” I was not on a path thinking I wanted to be an artist as my career, or even like my Work with a capital W; we were just singing and playing shows and the response from people was so strong that I started to lean into it.
And when I say response, I'm also a big people person so it was all about folks talking to me after the show. I’ve never been the kind of like artist’s artist where I'm really thrilled or moved by being in the studio by myself and creating things, figuring out sounds, and writing. I'm much more connected to being with other people. Already, in this conversation, we talked about how we started the trio because we three pals just missed singing together.
It's so much about both the people who are together making the sounds and the connections with the people in the room. And I embrace more and more the connections with people who aren't in the room, whether that's other relationships, getting to know other neighbors, members of our shared communities, or connecting to the past generations. The Nightingale Trio was performing all kind of contemporary arrangements of this traditional vocal music from various lineages in Eastern Europe. It’s both extremely beautiful – a purely aesthetic response of “this is gorgeous” –and I was constantly hearing people say things like, “You sang that song and it reminded me of my grandmother,” or “You sang that Ukrainian song, and I'm Ukrainian, but I don’t speak Ukrainian and it made me want to go learn more songs in the language that's in my family.”
Or there’s even this whole other level that could be an entire interview unto itself, but something about just the sounds themselves evokes certain responses in people and those responses being very much about a kind of, not literal material connection, but an experience of connection, where someone will say, “You know those particular harmonies brought me to a place,” or, “You really sound like, ‘fill in the blank,’” and the thing that they fill in the blank with is a real strong association of background and culture. I’m skipping over the specific words because my point is to be reading between the lines for what those specifics are pointing me towards. As a paraphrase of another person’s words, someone might say, “The Eastern tones you used, sounded like a cantor singing in the synagogue,” and I'm really interested in that. Not because I’m talking about cantorial music, but it's that person making a connection and by virtue of them feeling moved enough to say it out loud, it indicates to me that this experience is something very special and important to them or might be something they're deeply longing for.
This is where it goes into a whole other conversation. What are the specific aesthetics that evoke that elusive thing? And what is actually going on for people in that moment where they're making those associations? What is it about those associations that are so important to people that they're worth bringing up after the concert? It's all about connection, so the work that I do is directly oriented around making those connections for myself and for others.
Could you give an overview of the poems?
I want to give some credit; it wasn't just me alone going out and selecting them, so I got help from three super, duper awesome folks who are organizers of Yiddish cultural stuff mostly in Canada. Avia Moore, Jessica Gutteridge, and then Faith Jones, who are in Montreal and Vancouver. We had all been talking about being involved in music projects, so they selected the poems, which was awesome, because I am not a scholar of Yiddish poetry! Faith in particular is a translator and she pulled out a big selection of poems written by female poets from Canada.
The first piece that people will hear is a poem by a poet named Ida Maze, and it's called “fun vanen nemen zikh di mayses” which means, “where do stories come from?” And it's this folktale, pretty simple on the surface, that almost rings like a children's nursery rhyme, or a children's song:
“Far off in the woods there's a little house that everyone knows is abandoned and no one lives there. But some nights, if you're looking, a light comes on in the house and if you peek through the window you'll see that there's a grandfather and a grandmother inside, and children with their eyes alight listening to stories. And the smoke coming through the chimney takes the stories and sends them off onto the wind for everyone to hear.”
Such a cozy and magical image.
It's so cozy! It's a nice introduction to the work overall, and provides an offering to the questions, “Where do stories come from? Where does folk art come from? Can you learn it?” One of my first impressions of this poem was, “I hate this poem,” [laughs] because it's so sugar, sweet, simplistic; that’s not how I get access to stories. I just don't, first of all, because my grandparents are no longer living, and we never sat next to the fire with them telling us tales. I had to go looking for this stuff, and I had to work really hard! I have this feeling of being up against the tradewinds of macroculture that is not about this stuff - it’s very much a countercultural thing to go gathering, and connecting with stories, folk music, and all these different parts of our roots cultures. I felt like, “this poem sucks” because it's just too nice! What about all the people who don't have grandparents? Or didn't grow up connected to their family of origin? Or don't talk to their relatives? I don't want to portray that the way to be connected to your stories from the past is by having a literal grandfather and grandmother tell you stories.
But I kind of came around to it? Because I later had conversations about this poem with a handful of people, and everyone's response was, “Yeah, but… a kid can dream can't they?” So it does seem that for a lot of people I really care about and respect, their first impression of this poem is, “Why not appreciate that image? Why not let ourselves live in sweet fantasy sometimes?” There's like this joyful part (in movement work, too), where we have to be able to have dance parties otherwise it's not worth fighting for. There’s an Emma Goldman quote, which isn’t actually a correct quote but people love the idea: “If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your movement.”
The poem planted itself and it now has fully grown roots in my mind, because I did create a rendition of this tune, earlier this fall at a camp for kids. I was singing with all these kids who were mostly of a Jewish background, and they were the cutest. And so I we decided we’re doing this for The Cedar Commission, but a fully fleshed out band arrangement. I hope people ask questions about it too.
The second one is also a poem that I initially had problems with – huh, this is interesting – this is by Esther Shumiatcher-Hirschbein who lived in Calgary and New York most of her grown life, but she was born in what is today Belarus, and this poem is called Homel 1905-1928, referencing the city of Homel, which is her hometown in Belarus. The important context is that this was a horrific time of pogroms and abuse of Jewish people in that part of the world. So her family left, and they made a life in Canada, and this poem, on the surface, is a poem about pogroms. My initial reaction when I first read it was, “Oh, yuck; I don't want to make music about pogroms; I'm over it.”
And this could also be a whole conversation unto itself, but as a person of a Jewish background I am personally part of the crew that is asking, “Can we make some new stories? Can we make our community cultural history not be so centrally fixated on the Holocaust?” And this comes up, and you know these are pogroms that preceded the Holocaust, but can we make our story not so fixated on the abuses that we experienced in the last century?
And to be clear, my experience of life as a Jewish person in America is a total crapshoot of luck that led to my great-grandparents happening to immigrate here. It’s off the rails. Both sides of my family have stories like, “This person coincidentally got a ticket on this boat and didn't know where she was going.” Nobody planned it or had a strategy – it's just really dumb luck. Then huge other chunks of my family don't exist, because they were killed in the Holocaust – that’s another huge part of my family story. I’d like to be part of a journey of collective healing, liberation, growing – to be part of building new stories.
Being stuck in that time in history just doesn't lead us to being good to other people either. It's just living in brutal, terrifying, bad, history forever - it’s not good for ourselves or anyone we interact with.
So, my first reaction was we're not doing a pogrom song, but then Cesario, the visual artist that I had been working with, said, “Look at the refrain,” which is “enough of you, my ever repeating words.” Cesario was also sick of talking about pogroms, and being a visual artist, he’d started working with this poem, playing with it, and had created all these images of Esther, the poet, running. At first, she's running from violence, to North America. But then, it turns into her running away from the never-ending cycle of having to repeat those stories.
And I felt a realization that she wrote this as an adult – it's reflecting back on the past, and that became really interesting to me. This totally is her story – it’s the voice of a woman trying to get out of the vortex of constantly repeating these words – and that’s why she said, “Enough of you my words, always repeating.” The song I wrote for that one is just an unaccompanied vocal piece, which is very much a Yiddish folk-song-style, like if we were sitting in the living room telling stories. Where everyone's doing a bit of their knitting and mending, and one person says, “Hey, sing us a song!” So in that context, this would be the ballad song that somebody would just raise their voice and sing.
Then the third one is by a poet whose pen name is Yudika. She was very much a labor movement, worker’s issues, leftist poet. A bunch of her work are poems that take place in factories, or really speak to that struggle, but also very loving. She has this very loving touch, in regards to people, and places. This poem is called Farnakht, which means “evening,” and the speaker is out somewhere that's very much not a factory, they're in nature somewhere watching the last rays of light cross the grass, and play games with the light and shadows. She says, “How good it is to sit like this with eyes closed and be alone just the world and me.”
For this one, I really wanted to make it a gift, an offering. Here’s something beautiful, relaxing, or a comfortable space. I would love for this to be a song that transports people a little bit to that feeling. I wanted it to not only live in a concert setting, but wouldn't it be really nice if I wrote a tune that was actually one of those songs that you could sing with your friends? When I'm on a hike with people, we always end up singing tons of songs. Or you have lunch, and then all of the sudden we're all singing a song. Or even just hanging out in the backyard in the summer, and someone's got a guitar. I wanted to write something that also would be really nice to sing with friends, so we’ll see how it goes!
Let me know if it worked; you’ll hear several different vocalists in the ensemble for my piece. You’ll hear us singing together the three parts, in the way you could sing them in a community sing, or when you set up to have lunch in the middle of your hike and look out on a vista somewhere. That's my hope. Everything else is interspersed with some of these little instrumental pieces, and there are also things that I tried to write in a Yiddish folk style.
People will hear Colleen Bertsch, who's the fiddle player who’s one of my heroes. She’s a totally amazing fiddle player, and for many years, she studied string band music from Transylvania, so that's the region bordering Hungary and Romania. That's also a place with really strong roots of Jewish folk music and so her playing really has that connected, rooted, style. You're gonna hear her showcased in those instrumental tunes.
McKain Lakey will be pulling double duty on The Cedar Commissions. They’re going to be playing guitar, with Jacqueline Ultan on cello. Three real heroes of mine personally, and I'm beyond flattered that they all want to play on my piece. Then, we'll have several vocalists singing in harmony with myself, Sophie Javna, Julia Hobart, who's also a Cedar Commissions alum, and Erika Lantz. Four voices singing, and three instrumentalists.
How have you grown during this process?
I’ve grown in feeling clearly pulled towards playing. Just being out and sharing music with people. I do hope that in this next year there's going to be a lot more of me, and assortments of this personnel playing shows and sharing music. It’s kind of exciting, because it feels like the Cedar Commissions is the kickoff show? It's like the first show of the tour of this music, and other music that I've been writing, and recording, over the last couple of years.
Right around the time of Cedar Commissions, I am releasing an album. My hope is that people the night of the Cedar Commissions could buy copies or downloads, but that'll be in advance of the “official” release. I hope folks who are there can get hyped about that and that it really serves as a kickoff to being able to tour the whole project. I’m excited that it's part of an ongoing, extending outwards thing and not just a one-off.
I love that too. I think a lot of Commissions artists aren’t certain what to do once they have their Cedar Commissions done. Because for quite a few of them, this is the biggest thing that they’ve done to date. And yes, you do want it to be big and you do want it to go well – but also, for so many people it ends up being just the beginning, you know? It's not the ending thing.
The Cedar Commissions is a culmination of something; a significant markingpoint, but it doesn't have to be an end!
No, it doesn't have to be that way. I would love for each artist to continue taking their projects forward in new ways, in some of the same ways, reinventing themselves.
Yes! And for folks who would love to connect in this journey of reinventing myself, please look up our recorded music and tap in on socials with me at Red Thread Sings. Looking forward to seeing everyone very soon!
Catch Sarah Larsson’s performance of “Kholemen In Zikh Arayn” (Dreaming into ourselves)” premiering live at The Cedar on Saturday, February 10th as part of the Thirteenth Annual Cedar Commissions.
Buy tickets
The Cedar Commissions is made possible in part by a grant from the Jerome Foundation.
