Sarah McCoy spent a good deal of her twenties playing piano and singing in fly- ridden, hotter-than-hell New Orleans dives—places whose chaos matched the On the Road life she’d been living since the age of twenty. Now, at 33, she carries on a tradition perfected by Tom Waits, Amy Winehouse, Leon Russell, and Janis Joplin, who turned the wreckage of embattled lives into poetry.
Blood Siren, her major-label debut, captures Sarah’s haunted moan, a sound that both chills and touches the heart. The songs, which she wrote, are as intimate and unguarded as diary entries.
Producers Chilly Gonzales and Renaud Letang create a stark midnight atmosphere. There’s Sarah on piano and guitar, touches of cello and celesta, some electronic sounds, and plenty of silence, along with a voice that sounds just as it does when Sarah’s playing takes on an eerie toy-piano sound that underlines the songs’ childlike despair. “The Death of a Blackbird,” a piano solo, is the sound of loneliness; it bespeaks her early classical training. “I started writing it in art school at fourteen. It was about watching my dad getting sicker and sicker. It’s gained a lot of meaning for me, too, over the years, because it seems I always added to it when I was in pain.” After so many years of living on the edge, Sarah is on friendly terms with the dark, intense persona who appears in the elegant artwork of Blood Siren. “I’d like to let people know that the monster in them exists in other people as well.”
