I saw lovely and enchanting Sarah once again, performing her first two albums in full.
By now I’ve been to a bunch of concerts dedicated to a seminal album, but this was the first time I saw anyone put on a double album show. It worked really well and almost resembled a musical theatre performance: no opener, just two acts with an interval. I love both The Overture & the Underscore and What the Sea Wants, the Sea Will Have, and at this point they have a strong nostalgic pull for me, taking me back to my early twenties and seeing Sarah live for the first time at the Big Day Out festival. I remember that she wore a white dress with big black polka dots, and I found her adorable.
I had some time to mill around the Recital Centre and do some people watching among the fellow fans, who have mostly followed Sarah into the middle age. For the first half of the show, dedicated to her debut album, she wore a short preppy dark grey dress with a white collar. Together with her signature quirky moves and hair pulled up in a bun, it gave her a slight air of awkward adolescence.
I haven’t actually listened to The Overture & the Underscore in a while, and the show made me appreciate what a complete package Sarah was right from the start. There’s of course her utterly unique voice, fragile, grainy, somehow both warm and remote, but the songwriting is just as bewitching and stands the test of time more than twenty years later.
In between the songs, Sarah was more chatty and animated than I’ve ever seen her, often reminiscing about the person she was when she wrote these songs. Among other things, I learned that she got married early and was divorced by twenty-six. She also told a story about a gig she played at a church, where during the Q&A bit some lady asked her if she could sing without a microphone. As it turned out, she wasn’t questioning Sarah’s singing abilities, she simply thought that the microphone was too loud!
Sarah even performed the album’s secret track, which she pointed out is not something you would ever find on Spotify. She made it crystal clear that she wasn’t a big fan of Spotify – a woman after my own heart.
I fully expected a drastic costume change for the second half, to match the more epic and expansive sound of What the Sea Wants, the Sea Will Have. Sure enough, after the interval Sarah was back with her hair down, in a dramatic sparkly long dress.
I loved the lighting throughout the show, but the most breathtaking moment happened during Woman By the Well, with just Sarah and the guitar player onstage. As she sang, her face was lit up by the intersecting beams from the opposite sides, leaving the rest of her body in the dark. It was so simple but so effective, reminding me of Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody video. Sarah definitely has the cheekbones to go with this dramatic, Old Hollywood kind of lighting.
P.S. During the second half, I accidentally kicked my drinking bottle under the seat of the row in front of me, which left me feeling a tad thirsty. I wish the seats at these venues were more like cinema seats, with a designated drink holder.
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