Born out of the pandemic, The St Buryan Sessions is the sixth solo album by award-winning multi-instrumentalist and singer/songwriter Sarah McQuaid, and is her most powerful and emotive offering yet. The St Buryan Sessions will be released Friday, October 15 on CD and limited-edition double LP.
The album had its genesis in the spring of 2020, when Sarah’s gigs and tours were cancelled due to COVID-19. Thanks to a successful crowdfunding campaign, she was able to finance a live solo recording (sans audience) in the lovely medieval church of St Buryan, not far from her home in rural West Cornwall.
Sensitively captured by her longtime sound engineer and manager, Martin Stansbury, with the aid of ambient microphones placed throughout the church, the sound of Sarah’s voice and music soars through the stunning acoustic space as she moves between acoustic guitar, piano, electric guitar and floor tom drum, performing songs that span her 24-year career – from “Charlie’s Gone Home”, originally recorded on her 1997 debut album When Two Lovers Meet, to electric guitar based pieces from her most recent studio album If We Dig Any Deeper It Could Get Dangerous — plus a pair of previously unrecorded covers.
Conceived as a concert set and including such fan favourites as “In Derby Cathedral”, “The Sun Goes On Rising” and “Yellowstone”, the album is a journey not only through a wide range of instrumentation and styles, but also through the spectrum of emotions that Sarah evokes in her performance and invokes in the listener. This is never more evident than on the album closer “Last Song”, a poignant tribute to her late mother that expresses deep sadness mingled with joy in the way the spirits of our loved ones travel with us – and proves the depths of feeling to which a songwriter can move an audience.
The recording was filmed by Cornish filmmaker and director Mawgan Lewis of Purple Knif with the aid of Eden Sessions veteran camera operator John Crooks, and the album release will be accompanied by a full concert video. In the meantime, Sarah has been releasing a series of videos of individual songs to her YouTube channel, where Lewis’ short documentary “The Making Of The St Buryan Sessions”, featuring interviews and song snippets, can also be viewed.
Today Glide is premiering one of those videos with Sarah’s performance of “Yellowstone,” a song that speaks to our precarious times where it seems there is a disaster around every corner. Inspired by thoughts of her young son many years ago, the song is a dark yet moving work of gothic folk that is also strangely informative.
My oldest child Eli is 18 now and getting ready to head off to the University of Durham, but I wrote this song back when he was 10 years old and struggling to sleep because he was worrying about so many things. I said to him “Why don’t you try writing down all your worries on separate bits of paper, and then once they’re on the paper they don’t have to be in your head any more and you’ll be able to sleep.” Amazingly, it worked, but of course I had to go and look at what he’d written, and one of his biggest worries was about the underground volcano beneath Yellowstone National Park — he’d read somewhere that there was a danger that the volcano could someday erupt and set off a massive chain reaction of volcanoes all around the globe, thereby triggering the apocalypse. It struck me as a really lovely metaphor for the way so many of us have these seething situations bubbling under the surface that we’re tiptoeing over and hoping they don’t erupt anytime soon. When I recorded the song originally on my 2015 album Walking Into White, my cousin Adam Pierce who produced that album got a fantastic classical guitarist, Dan Lippel, to guest on the track, and Dan’s guitar was so lovely that we ditched the guitar part I’d originally recorded and just left Dan’s part on the track. But then when I started playing the track live in concert I managed to work up a vague approximation of what Dan was doing, all that nice kind of flamenco stuff (I’m using that term VERY loosely), played in DADGAD (which is the tuning I always use) on steel-string guitar, and the whole song kind of developed into something a little bit different to what it had been on the Walking Into White album. So when Covid hit and we decided to make a live album in St Buryan Church sans audience and film the whole thing with a really good camera crew, I thought it was a good opportunity to make a recording of “Yellowstone” in its revised incarnation — plus the whole central metaphor that underlies the song still felt pretty relevant. – Sarah McQuaid
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Photo credit: Phil Nicholls
