Interview: Sarah Elizabeth Haines
Sarah Elizabeth Haines
Interview: Emily May
Photo credit: John Carluccio
A woman of many talents, NYC-based artist Sarah Elizabeth Haines is a violist, violinist, vocalist, songwriter, guitarist, and performer. Currently, on tour as a violinist/violist with the Tony Award-winning musical Hamilton, music has taken Haines all around the world, from playing chamber music in China, with orchestras and rock bands in South America and Europe, and to most of the continental US with various theatre productions. She has toured with Les Miserables and Todd Almond’s Kansas City Choir Boy with Courtney Love. Other theatre credits include Jagged Little Pill (sub, viola), Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812 (sub, viola), Beardo (Violin), Iow@(Viola), and Hadestown (2014 workshop, Fate/viola). She also performs with the NYC-based contemporary classical chamber group Contemporaneous, the Brooklyn-based indie-folk band Bellhouse, and with the Brooklyn-based symphonic rock band Emanuel and the Fear. Realizing that in order to have her own voice, she needed to do her own projects, she released her debut solo album of original music, Pretending to Sleep, in 2018. Her sophomore solo record Castaway is due to be released on February 25th, 2022. Due to the pandemic, she recorded a good chunk of the new album in her Manhattan apartment, with guidance via FaceTime from her co-producer Kevin Salem. Having released the first two singles from the album, “Liar” and “In The Morning”, in September and October respectively, she recently released the latest single “Water”, about being powerfully affected by something and making a choice to move forward despite the knowledge that a part of it will remain with you always. Currently, on the road with Hamilton, Haines plans to be back in NY more permanently in the Spring and release more music and play some solo shows! Make sure to connect with Sarah Elizabeth Haines via the following links to stay up-to-date with all upcoming news, tour dates, and music.
WEBSITE | FACEBOOK | INSTAGRAM | TWITTER | SPOTIFY | SOUNDCLOUD | ITUNES/APPLE MUSIC | YOUTUBE | BANDCAMP | TIK TOK | CONTEMPORANEOUS | BELLHOUSE | EMANUEL AND THE FEAR
You have said that you were drawn to making music from an early age due to it being a universal language and having the ability to connect rooms or stadiums of people in a single moment. What can you tell me about your childhood and early musical memories? Did you grow up in a musical and creative family?
Sarah- There was always music around when I was growing up—my mom plays piano and I sang in church choir with my grandfather, my other grandfather was a huge jazz fan and played the clarinet, my dad and uncle played in a band together for a while—it’s definitely a way we all spent time. I think one of my most formative memories comes from my grandmother on my dad’s side, who was an Organ Performance major at the University of Delaware in the fifties; when I was very young she would take me into New York City to see children’s concerts – things like Peter and the Wolf, and Saint-Saens’ Carnival of the Animals. She went into the city a lot and over the years she had developed a friendship with this violinist who would busk on the subway—James Graysek, I still remember his name. One time when I was with her we saw him and she bought me his CD that he was selling of all these beautiful classical pieces, performed for violin and piano, and I think that’s part of where my obsession with the violin began. I begged and begged my parents to start taking violin lessons until finally I wore them down. They wanted me to play piano since we had one in the house, but I wasn’t having it—which, now I sort of regret not at least trying and building some sort of facility on piano at a young age, but it is what it is now.
Music has taken you around the world, to China, South America, Europe, and most of the continental US, performing chamber music, with orchestras and rock bands, and with various theatre productions. What has been the most rewarding aspect of performing in so many different places and what have you learned about other cultures through music? In what ways have your travels influenced the ways you approach making music?
Sarah- It's been a really interesting way to see different parts of the world, and to see how universal music truly is—different cultures may have slight differences in ways they engage with certain things, and obviously there are also differences between the classical and the rock and the musical theater spheres as well, but it’s amazing just to feel the connection of a roomful of people who might not even speak the same language. I’ve definitely been opened up to new sounds and new inspirations anytime I traveled – even the music you hear in stores and on the radio can be wildly different and find its way into the creative process, and I’ve met some amazing musicians I’ve been able to stay in touch with thanks to the weird but admittedly sometimes useful social media platforms that we all find ourselves on these days.
You tour as a violinist/violist with the Tony Award-winning musical Hamilton. How did that opportunity come about and what has the experience been like? What inspired you to start posting videos on your Tik Tok page of you performing live in the orchestra pit?
Sarah- How it happened is a bit of a roundabout story to be honest but the short version is that I had a chance meeting on the subway with a Broadway violinist years ago, and we sort of kept in touch and would check in every once in a while (we even ran into each other randomly on the subway a few more times, which I always thought was part happenstance and perhaps a little bit of fate) until I had finally gotten my first Broadway subbing opportunity, and we got coffee and he told me he was going to put my name in the pool for the Hamilton tour. It’s been a really interesting experience touring with Hamilton – I’ve played the show almost 900 times at this point, and I’ve gotten to visit cities in almost the whole country—I only have 9 states left I’ve never been to including Hawaii and Alaska. The most striking thing that I’ve discovered about doing the exact same thing so many times is how amazing our bodies are with muscle memory – my brain can sort of take a little vacation in the middle of the show and I’ll wake up a few songs later to discover that it’s all still happening and I’m still playing exactly what I should be. It can actually get sort of meditative.
Honestly I resisted TikTok for a long time cause it made me feel old.. haha. But my 20 year old cousin finally convinced me that I should try it and he said he thought people would be interested in my perspective at Hamilton and he could not have been more right about that. I didn’t realize how many folks are interested in seeing the pit’s perspective, and I’m really glad that I am able to offer a little insight into what’s happening beneath the stage on any given night.
What can you tell me about Contemporaneous, the NYC-based contemporary classical chamber group you are a part of?
Sarah- Contemporaneous honestly changed the way I think about sound and music making. I’ve been playing with them since 2012 when they were a student-run Bard College group and it’s so amazing to see how we’ve all grown together as people and as musicians and as an organization—it’s a non-profit flexible-instrumentation chamber orchestra consisting of ~23 musicians and we perform music almost exclusively by living composers. Without getting too technical, cause I could go down a deep rabbit hole here, there are a lot of things instruments and voices can do that are outside the realms of the traditional school of western music as most of us are trained, and Contemporaneous has opened me up to so much of that over the years. I’ve incorporated it into my writing and arranging a lot – for example in my last single “Water” there’s a moment in the transition to the B section where there are these seagull-like noises -- that’s a more non-traditional technique that I’ve learned to play on the viola but I think it’s a really interesting and beautiful sound and I’m always looking for places to incorporate it. That’s just a tiny micro-example of the sound worlds we’ve explored in that group. We’ve also played shows with some pretty awesome indie/rock folks like David Byrne and Jherek Bischoff over the years—there’s a lot of fun indie crossover with new music, and I was excited to see there was a place where both worlds could exist simultaneously. Contemporaneous does have a show coming up at Carnegie’s Weill Recital Hall on February 28th, which I’m really excited about because I was able to get time off from Hamilton so I could come home and play it.
You have said that in order to have your own voice, you need to be able to do your own projects. What can you tell me about the bands you are in, Bellhouse and Emanuel and the Fear, and what was the catalyst that led you to branch out and do solo music, as well? How would you describe your first solo album, 2019's Pretending To Sleep, and do you feel it allowed you to express yourself in a way that you had not previous been able to?
Sarah- Both Bellehouse and Emanuel and the Fear (who just released a new single “Even If We Don’t Get Along” and we’re putting out a new album over the next few months!) were catalysts for launching into writing music myself – as a classically trained musician you sort of learn that the interpretation of music and the creation of music are separate things – you’re either a composer or a performer. When I started playing more non-classical music, I realized that I wanted to participate in the creation process as well, and I was surrounded by these really great songwriters in these bands—Emanuel Ayvas, Jess Clinton, Mackenzie Shivers—they inspired me to start trying to find my own voice. I wrote a little for Bellehouse and have helped with arrangements for EATFear but I began to discover there was a space that I felt like I wanted to explore that maybe didn’t fit in with the already established sounds of those bands. Since they were in many ways my starting points for writing, I wanted to branch out from there as well.
Pretending to Sleep was sort of my starter album—it was the first time I was brave enough to put myself out there. It’s a collection of songs that I had sort of tinkered with and abandoned and came back to as my confidence as a writer grew over the course of ten years, and as anyone who has a limited number of songs, every one felt sort of precious. I needed to make that album in a lot of ways to know what that process even felt like, to learn what laying myself bare to tell my stories felt like, to learn a little bit about killing my darlings. I still love the songs on that record but the album itself felt like the start of a journey into finding my voice and my sound, which I’m still on and hope to be for a long time.
In 2022, you will be releasing your second full-length solo album Castaway. What was the process like for you in writing and recording the album, as well as how you feel that it compares to Pretending To Sleep?
Sarah- Castaway was very different from Pretending to Sleep in a lot of ways, most notably probably being that I ended up recording a good chunk of it myself in my Manhattan apartment because of the pandemic. Before lockdown I didn’t even have a recording interface and ten months in I’m making a bedroom indie rock record which seems sort of ridiculous in hindsight but needs must. I had a lot of guidance from my co-producer Kevin Salem and he was even on FaceTime with me a lot of the time when I was recording, but doing some of it myself and also having somewhat unlimited access to the sessions definitely changed the game a little bit. I would be at home by myself, maybe have had a glass of wine and I’d open up one of the songs and noodle around on a guitar just to see what might happen—one of those moments actually ended up being the guitar solo on “Young and Pretty,” which I still can’t quite believe that I even took a guitar solo let alone that we ended up keeping it. Also, just practically speaking, Pretending to Sleep was recorded in about a weeks’ time, where Castaway took about three months. The writing part of the album was different because most of these songs were fresher, and I just had more material to draw from – there were songs that I really thought might make that album that ultimately didn’t but I think learning to let go is a really important part of the process. A lot of the songs were half finished when we started or ended up getting rewritten as the process sort of realized itself and Kevin and I honed a vision of what the sound should be, and it was a much more interactive way to create something.
Castaway opens with the spoken word track "Body", which you describe as a fun project in sound design that was used to make the listener a bit uncomfortable. What inspired you to do a spoken word track and how would you describe the message of the song?
Sarah- “Fun” might be the wrong word for that track honestly. It’s really intentionally uncomfortable – it’s about existing in the world in a woman’s body and it doesn’t really mince words and I used weird string sounds and dissonance to highlight that discomfort. For a couple of weeks during lockdown I had Patti Smith’s Horses on repeat; and I love the way she so seamlessly drifts between poetry and music, and I guess I wanted to try my hand at something similar. “Body” was a poem I had written years ago in response to one or another of the legal cases challenging birth control access, and unfortunately it’s still really relevant now, and since the sort of thesis of Castaway is about the multitudes of ways to exist in the world as a woman, it felt like the right time to do it. I went back and forth about starting the album that way but ultimately I think it gives the rest of the tracks a bit of an edge that it might not have without opening with those words.
Castaway explores a range of emotions and experiences, with most of the songs written pre-pandemic. Did the pandemic and ensuing shutdowns end up influencing any of the songs on the album? What is the message you hope the album conveys?
Sarah- I think the pandemic really clarified and helped me to distill a lot of the material that already existed on the record—and I did end up doing a lot of editing and rewriting as the project took shape. As someone who has been a working performer for a while now, the pandemic was utterly wild in so many different ways, but one of the most striking ways was in the amount of stillness and solitude. I really had to sit down and be alone with myself for days and weeks on end and it brought about a lot of unexpected things. The song “Razor Line” , which I completely rewrote the lyrics for over and over again while we were recording (it was originally called “Ash and Stone”), is probably most directly about this feeling – it’s not a still song by any means, but the lyrics speak to that feeling of just barely holding on when you look into a mirror or into a big open empty sky for way too long. It’s about finding the edges of yourself and realizing they’re maybe a little blurrier than you knew.
What led you to want to explore the juxtaposition of strength and softness, and how they can be the same thing, in the closing track of the new album?
Sarah- “Castaway” is definitely the song on the record that was probably closest to my heart when we were recording; it was the last song I wrote before we started making the album and it came from a pretty raw place. There’s still a lot of talk even in today’s social climate of softness and sensitivity as “feminine” or “weak” qualities but I’ve always wanted to challenge that. There’s so much power in empathy and love and forgiveness and when we cut ourselves off from that I think the strength that’s left over is brittle and harsh, and I just can’t believe in a world where that’s the only way. This song is gentle and tender and I wanted it in a way to evoke being in the middle of the ocean by yourself, but it’s that the ocean is holding you, not drowning you. You can choose to let it carry you instead of fighting it.
In March of 2020, you released an ambient string and vocal EP as a Bandcamp Exclusive. What inspired the idea for the EP, as well as having it be an exclusive Bandcamp release, and do you plan to do similar releases in the future?
Sarah- As I mentioned before, I didn’t really know anything about home recording or production before the pandemic. Right in the third week of March when we all thought we’d be on break for six or so weeks, I decided to get myself a recording interface and some microphones that a friend was selling, and just figure it out while I waited to go back to work. I was coming off of a long stretch of touring with Hamilton and I think I just wanted to get very far away from that type of sound. I was inspired a little by Brian Eno’s Music for Airports and I think I just wanted to make something that helped me to quiet my own mind a little in a time when things were so uncertain, and I figured I might as well share it with folks just in case it helped them to put them at ease for a little while as well. I’m actually thinking of releasing it everywhere at some point just for the heck of it, but like I said I really had no idea what I was doing so I definitely want to go back in and clean up some of the mixing and mastering on that. I am definitely playing around with some new ideas for ambient music – drones are often my warm up for my viola practice and I do like the practiced stillness of exploring single notes or intervals, so I have been thinking about trying to blend some of my newer production skills with that initial concept and just see what I come up with.
You just released "Water", the third single from Castaway. What can you tell me about the song and how you view the symbolic nature of water? You released the album's first single "Liar", followed by "In The Morning", prior to "Water". How did you go about deciding which tracks to release as singles ahead of the album?
Sarah- I always wanted this song to feel like its subject matter—sound design in the arrangement came into play in this one more than it ever has for me previously, from the bubbling underlying synth track to the washy reverb and the strings and sound effects. Water is so many different things to humans—it’s life but it’s also an unstoppable force. Our bodies are made up of 70% water but it can wash everything in the blink of an eye, or it can carve rivers over the course of centuries. The song itself is about being powerfully affected by something and making a choice to move forward despite the knowledge that a part of it will remain with you always. Just because it's there doesn't mean you have to drown in it--and water is cyclical. The process may always lead you back to the sea, but you'll become rain again soon enough and you can go anywhere the wind takes you.
I think ultimately the singles we ended up choosing were the ones I had specific visual concepts for, at least at first. There are videos in some capacity for each of the songs released and I’m working on some things for the next ones. We actually went back and forth about potentially releasing the whole album as singles for a while, just because in a streaming world for an artist who’s just beginning to establish herself it’s a potential way to gain some momentum, but ultimately the album is still an album with a through line and I didn’t want to totally diminish that either. As it stands we’ve still got two more singles to release, “Belong” on 1/7 and “Better Friend” on 2/11 before the whole album is out on 2/25
What's next for you?
I’m back on the road with Hamilton for now, and just starting to plan out an album release show in New York in late February. In the spring I’ll be coming back to New York more permanently and trying to figure out the next steps for making a career and life with more of a home base than the traveling life I’ve been living since September 2017, and I'll definitely be recording some new music and playing solo shows when I get back. Thanks so much for having me!