With a voice that skips and soars, Ontario (Uxbridge, via Hamilton) based Sarah Beatty is one hard artist to pin. Consumable by firelight, hers is a show and tell for the perpetually curious and equally incredulous. Thoughtfully confrontational, a spoonful of honey sweet syrup is all that accompanies the idiosyncratic insights, hard won sentiments, and possible sage advice she’s been working into song over the last 15 years. Her debut solo record Black Gramophone came a decade after a variety of Southern Ontario collaborations (My Son the Hurricane, The Marantz Project, Mike Lynch, Screaming Black Cadillacs) - as did the record’s Hamilton Music Award nomination and Top 10 roots charting. With Bandit Queen, fact, fable, fiction, folklore and make-you-wanna-move-grooves got soaked in subconscious landscapes. And more was revealed. The record brought her to Europe several times, earned her the Ontario Independent Recording Artist award from the Jack Richardson London Music Awards in 2018, and received praise from audiences and critics alike, with listeners hearing something new in every listen.  —

For Sarah, Bandit Queen (released February, 2017), offered anchor to an exceptionally difficult time. “The recording began during a big transition for me and my place was quite empty. Literally and figuratively. Important people that had been in my life were moving on or passing on. So I leaned on music. It seemed a better idea to fill the place up with music than with furniture.”

The critically acclaimed album is a genre-defying 13 track sonic adventure that recounts tales of truck drivers, religious figures, prehistoric geology, upside down turned around folk tales, millennial graduates, and other characters Beatty’s met or made up along the way. But the root line is one woman’s stories, vitality, and wisdoms passed on in the most musical ways she could bring to bear, with friends and musical allies.

Wires were snaked through her house during a snowy December when Justine Fischer (upright bass), Matty Simpson (electric guitar), Dave Clark (drums), and Joe Lapinski (production, engineering) parked on Beatty’s snow-covered lawn. All with notable and fabled music histories of their own (incl. Matty Simpson Band, The Fred Eaglesmith Band, The Rheostatics, The Woodshed Orchestra, Bronx Cheerleeder). With Beatty’s songs at the centre, 12 live off the floor songs were recorded in two days.

In the months that followed, some of Hamilton’s most active players added tracks, including Greg Brisco (keys), Steve Deeps (keys), Troy Dowding (trumpet), Sal Roselli (saxophone), Steve Collette (trumpet), Bob Doidge (euphonium), Ross Wooldridge (clarinet), Michel Dequevedo (percussion), Chris Skrzek (trombone), and Mary Simon (backing vocals). And what began as an intuitive transition reappeared as a sonic expansion machine calling “for all to dance upon the everyday mythologies that bind us to our perceived identities and to be whoever the hell we want to be” (A Journal of Musical Things). The folk-fabled, “striking mashup of psychroots left-field countryfolk” (Cashbox Canada) shines a light on looking deeply at what has come before, and quite bodaciously looking at what could come. 

Though born in Canada, Sarah had hometowns on both sides of the border. Feeling at home in both and neither country quite entirely, it’s rumoured that a wayfarer’s notch was written into her DNA. In parallel with her songwriting Sarah became a physical scientist and geographic information systems technologist, eventually earning a PhD in Environmental Science from McMaster University. She’s presented on her experimental soil physics research and unconventional science communication work at international scientific conferences and published in peer reviewed journals. She’s also developed and run song workshops for youth, supporting their writing, performing and recording original science songs, most adventurously with students in Vienna, AT.    

She’s shared bills and stages with big time troubadours, young up and comers, and road-honed small timers wowing audiences and turning passive music listeners into tried-and-true song spirit believers (in spite of a terribly disrupted music economy). Along the way, she’s played premiere clubs in Ontario and beyond (The Cameron House, Rivoli in Toronto, ON, Molotow in Hamburg, DE Lido in Berlin, DE, Babeville in Buffalo, NY), soft seater theatres (St. Lawrence Acoustic Stage, Moccasin Creek Festival), wine bars and cafes (Café Book, The Bridge Social), house concerts, festival stages (Springtide, Home County, Winterfolk, Falcon Ridge, Summerfolk, Mariposa Folk Festival, Eaglewood Folk Festival, Festival of Friends), and a barge on the Humber River (Toronto Adventures), dropping jaws and invoking smiles and shared sentiment in those who go lightly or fearlessly with her. Known for engaging and spirited live performances, she takes audiences to new places, exploring and examining life’s peculiar offerings with warmth and curiosity.