Track listing:

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All songs written by Sarah Dashew
Produced by Chuck Plotkin
Engineered by Ryan Freeland
Mastered by Stephen Marcussen

Sarah Dashew: vocals, acoustic guitars, harmonica
Mark Goldenberg: electric guitar
Jennifer Condos: bass
Gary Mallaber: drums, percussion
Marty Rifkin: pedal steel
Dan Bern: cello
Ryan Freeland: keys
Chuck Plotkin: lap slap, piano

Photography by Giselle Macfarlane
Album cover design by Nico Scapel

In her own words...

Well, making this album has just been the damn pinnacle of my life so far. This cheesy guy in a wannabe Don Johnson suit in Beverly Hills in a lame bar tried to tell me that there is no such thing as an album anymore, that I'm supposed to only call it a CD, but if he'd been along on the journey he would have understood that there ARE still albums...Man, the first day I walked into Ryan's studio for tracking, I ran into the kitchen and broke down sobbing from the bigness of it all. I'd just met Gary Mallaber outside--who drummed on some of my favorite stuff ever, like Van Morrison's Moondance record--and he had said he really loved my tunes. It was so hard to believe...

The whole summer went like that. I would be sobbing in the kitchen one minute, and the next we would be laughing and throwing everything we had into "Hash it Out". We went to church so hard in that song that we ended up having to throw away 84 bars of outro...Everytime we'd stop, Gary would shout "One two three FOUR!" and away we'd go again. When I overdubbed harmonica on the song, I almost passed out from going on so long. It took about an hour for my face to go back to a normal color. Then Mark Goldenberg (the lead guitarist) said something like, "Oh, that reminds me of the time I was on tour with Jackson Browne and we were playing this show in Hawaii..." And off I went into the kitchen to cry. It was all so great and unbelievable and everyone was so nice and the best musicians I'd ever heard. It was hard to accept that it really was happening...

But eventually I got into the groove, and it became just good solid work; we would mix for a few days, take it home, get together at Chuck's house and spend hours making notes on changes, come back in for a few days, mix again, repeat, lather rinse repeat...

One night one of my all-time favorite amazing songwriters came by to throw a little cello down on "Cannot Make the Call". Dan Bern came strolling in and we'd rented him a cello, since he had driven in from New Mexico and wasn't planning on needing one, and I was running around trying to make sure he was happy and wanting him to like me and making a total fool of myself and drinking wine to calm down which made it worse...And then Dan realized that the bow that had come with the rented cello was broken, and it was 9 p.m. and nothing was open except McCabe's which is a guitar store, which happened to have a kid-sized student bow, and my manager went roaring off to get it before they closed...So the beautiful swooping bowing you hear on that track is Dan's tiny student cello bow work. Well done Dan!

...And so it went, right on through re-mixes and mastering, late late nights with us working Ryan to the bone and his poor sweet dog Mac being very patient about having to wait so long to go for his walk...I wish I could seal the album in the smell of the late-summer fog and cold lattes from Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf (closest place to the studio; we all know I prefer Peet's). And I wish I had put a bonus track at the end of the CD with Mark telling his best joke: "A buddhist walks up to a hot dog vendor and says, 'Make me one with everything' Ha Ha Ha." And maybe a little of Jen riffing about why Ryan and I get along so well (we're both Scorpios with Pisces rising or something like that, maybe Leo moons, I don't know). But there it is. Some thoughts on making my very first proper ALBUM. Back to top