Dunn.
“It was kind of like I was squished so hard it leaked out,” Sarah Dunn said of her first EP, Thank You — coming out this Saturday, June 4, with a release party at Gather on Upper State Street — and the torrent of songwriting that followed, in between shifts in nursing homes during the depths of the pandemic. “I happened upon a very strange way of having silence, and it allowed the space inside my head to put things down that maybe had been festering there for a while. I didn’t have the opportunity before, but suddenly I was provided the time, so I did it.”
Dunn is a clinical psychologist who, for the past seven years, has been working in nursing homes around the area. She works with patients and their families as they deal with mental health issues as well as emotional issues related to having relatives in nursing homes. She does individual and group therapy. She also works with people who are in nursing homes essentially as rehab centers. “It’s really lovely,” she said. “It’s fun, and it’s a privilege, and I meet the coolest people. I don’t know why everybody doesn’t want to do my job.”
But the pandemic made that job a lot tougher. She couldn’t do her job from home, and as a single parent of kids who were 7 and 5 at the time, that presented enormous complications. “My kids had never before spent more than two days with their dad alone,” she said. That had to change, as his job allowed him to work remotely. In an analogy her former husband drew, she said, it was like “World War II when you’d ship your family to the countryside,” Dunn said. “They went to stay with him for months, and I’d test and stay home for two days, and I would get to see them for a day, and I’ve never been apart from them for so long.”
Dunn worked from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Due to a shortage of personal protective equipment, “you’d get those big old dark trash bags and wrap yourself up the best you could,” she said. “You’d see another gurney come in, and another person you have loved for many years go out. There was one nursing home I worked at that had 100 residents and we lost 10 in 72 hours.” Even as “things evened out a bit,” she was reminded of the people the nursing homes lost when she walked by their empty rooms. She found strength in her co-workers, who kept showing up and doing their jobs. “You can’t help but be carried along by that positivity and energy,” she said. “I was so fortunate to work where I did. I don’t know that, without hard-core nurse energy, I could have kept going, but I did.”
“And then,” she added, “I would go home, and it was quiet in my house.” She tried to watch movies but couldn’t keep her mind on them. “What do I do without my kids?” she thought. “What do I like to do?”
The answers were to make music. It started with the violin, which she’d played when she was a child. She started writing songs, and started learning to sing. “My poor neighbors,” she joked.
The first song emerged at the end of May 2020. She just wrote without worrying about whether the music was good or not, “because clearly, if you listen to the radio, you don’t have to be good,” she said. She finished the first couple songs, and the rest followed.
She was initially writing for herself, “like a 13-year-old writes in a diary,” she said. “I wear a lot less dark eyeliner than I did then.” But the songs involved a similar sense of discovery. “A lot of them I thought were about one thing but as I played them a few times I realized they were about another.” For one song, she thought “this is about divorce. Oh, wait, no — this is about my relationship with my parents. Oh, no, wait, this is about my relationship with me. I’m a psychologist so that’s the way it’s going to break down. You have to work on your own stuff.”
By that, she meant “learning to be brave about gender identity and comfort with who I am in the context of a community, and how strange it is to be a parent.” It was also about “messages your parents instill in you as a kid in the South, versus who you have to be now to give that life for them as well as not die from lack of authenticity, having your soul slowly decaying from that.”
In time she had about 30 songs, and her thoughts turned to recording. A friend, photographer Casee Marie, suggested she talk to Steve Rodgers, and she reached out to him. “I feel lucky that I got tossed in the air and landed on a great soft pillow of humanity,” Dunn said.
Rodgers listened to Dunn’s demos. “Learning curve: when you sing around a campfire, or you sing even out on the lovely deck of Best Video, it is very different than singing into a microphone or playing instruments studio-style. I did not know the intense precision involved,” Dunn said. As she worked on her own craft, she found in Rodgers a collaborator who had the chops to play the songs as she imagined them.
“It would go into the crock pot, and out would come a song,” Dunn said. “It’s OK to rely on someone else’s expertise. There’s responsibility to communicate that effectively, but also to find someone who’s making sure that they’re matching you.… It’s like you gave someone your grandma’s recipe, and they’re trying to figure out what a pinch of everything means, then bring it back to you. And it’s deeply personal as well, so there’s a lot of nuance and some compromise to come out with the thing at the end. Did you have this process of dignity and respect and appreciation?” She found Rodgers to be invested in creating the album that she wanted. “His heart really wanted to get it right,” she said.
After recording the first two songs with Rodgers, Dunn also found that she wanted her first recording to go in a different direction, and ended up writing three new songs. Recording all of it in the end took about seven months. “It was so nice. I got to have this very luxurious experience of my timeline being able to be prioritized — if I needed to take a break, or if I needed to figure out something, like learn how to sing a little better. That was three months right there,” she said.
She and Rodgers finished recording a few months ago and Dunn has now put together a CD release party on June 4, at Gather on Upper State Street. It will Grace Yukich, Zach Andersen, Steve Rodgers, Dustin Sclafani and Tristan Powell from Shame Penguin, and the Alehounds. “I will be happy as a clam in beer,” Dunn said. She’ll be playing her set accompanied by Kelly Kancyr on drums.
Dunn is already working with Rodgers on her first full-length album. “I’ve already got 13 of them that I want to do, and I’m sure that seven of them will go right out the window and I’ll just write more,” she said. “So I’m hoping for October, which probably means March, and that’s great.”
“Right now this a proof of concept, and we’ll continue that concept. And then who knows? Maybe we’ll do something weird next time. I don’t know who I’ll be or how I’ll feel at that time, so I’ll just not make plans.”
Sarah Dunn celebrates the release of Thank You at Gather, 952 State Street, on June 4. Visit Gather’s website for more information about the show and visit Sarah Dunn’s website for further information about the album.
