13 March 2024
Live review – Mut zur Langsamkeit (The Courage to Go Slow) (English translation follows German original). “Sie modelliert jede Silbe, jedes Wort, jeden Gedanken, jede Emotion mit der enormen Kraft und Spannweite ihrer Stimme. Und diese Stimme füllt das vollbesetzte Café „liebevoll“ aus. Mit geschlossenen Augen könnte man das Gefühl haben, dass sie für einen ganz persönlich singt.” (She articulates every syllable, every word, every thought, every emotion in her enormously powerful and wide-ranging voice, effortlessly filling the packed Café liebevoll. With closed eyes, it’s easy to believe she is singing for each one of us personally.)
Thanks to Alison Moffat-McLynn for the translation below!
The courage to go slow
At her concert in Café liebevoll, Sarah McQuaid takes the audience along from the start
Fehmarn – The evening opens with “Guten Abend, meine Damen und Herren” as Sarah McQuaid explains in German that she is trying to learn the notoriously difficult language and rattles through noun genders and adjective agreements in a series of schoolbook sentences: “The elephant is big, the mouse is small, the book lies on the table, the dog bites the man. That’s all. I don’t know any more!” As the voice of the Cornwall-based artist resonates through the room, this delightful opening has the audience firmly on her side from the very start.
Her first song of the evening is sung a cappella. Around 200 years old, “The Wagoner‘s Lad” has already been covered by many, many well-known musicians. Does she remind us of Joan Baez’ version from the 70s? A little, perhaps. But most of all, she entrances the audience by showing the courage to go slow. She articulates every syllable, every word, every thought, every emotion in her enormously powerful and wide-ranging voice, effortlessly filling the packed Café liebevoll. With closed eyes, it’s easy to believe she is singing for each one of us personally.
The song finishes, and Sarah’s eyes glow. In a mix of English and German, she praises the venue as “echt gemütlich” and tells us that “gemütlich” (cosy) is her second favourite German word after the useful all-rounder “genau” (exactly). Sarah explains that although the venue publicity announced her as Canadian, she is not from Canada; her father was Spanish, her mother American, and her husband is Irish. In telling us, she extends the first syllable of “Ire” to avoid any repetition of a misunderstanding she once caused by inaccurate diction (“Ire” is German for Irish, while “Irre” means “mad”). Another misunderstanding is cleared up in passing: in Cornwall, where Sarah has lived for many years, nobody has heard of Rosamunde Pilcher except Germans, who adore the 20-plus films of her novels that are set in the region.
Sarah announces she would like to be composted when she dies, to return to the earth. And to be on the safe side, she made her wish absolutely clear by writing a beautiful and very moving song. Her son is also the subject of two songs; one tells of how she once watched him digging in the garden and found him in a hole which completely hid him from view. This was the inspiration for the song “If We Dig Any Deeper It Could Get Dangerous”, for which her sound engineer uses sampling to create a backing trio from her own voice. A further song was inspired when her son learnt about underground volcanoes and became terrified that the world could be destroyed.
Sarah accompanies herself on piano in a number of songs, including a cover of Radiohead’s “Fake Plastic Trees”. And a large floor tom, its drumbeats multiplied into an endless loop by the sound engineer, complements Sarah’s voice and guitar to immerse the audience in a very special atmosphere, uniquely personal to the artist. The audience is so absorbed, and the music so ethereal, that you could almost hear a pin drop.
Sarah repeatedly surprises the audience with further German words and sentences. The concert is a textbook example of a close relationship between artist and audience. So close that there is no need for special lighting or sound effects. Just a guitar in DADGAD tuning, which allows unusual chord variations to be played and strings to resonate in sympathetic harmony, alongside the artist’s multi-faceted voice and expressive eyes. Nothing more is needed to fill an evening, to fill the space. Should she be invited back? The unanimous audience response at the end of the evening is a resounding Yes. – eak