Sara Beck’s music has carried her far from her hometown of Ellicott City, Maryland – to arenas, theaters, and clubs all over the world. Her musical output spans two decades, with highlights including singing the theme song for Kevin Costner’s Emmy-winning mini-series, Hatfields & McCoys, and multiple appearances with legendary artist Stevie Wonder. In 2023, she released her first poetry volume, entitled i brought home a typewriter and my head exploded, as well as a classic country trio album in collaboration with Nashville-based artists Lauren Lucas and Kimberly Quinn (Lo-Fi Dolly, 2023). After spending twenty years based in Nashville herself, Beck relocated to Lynchburg, Virginia in 2018, where in addition to writing, recording, and performing, she is also an Associate Professor of Psychology at Randolph College. Her varied creative life is perhaps nowhere captured better than in her upcoming album, Letters from Granada, which Beck wrote and recorded from an apartment in the city of Granada in Southern Spain during a solo trip in the month of August, 2024.
“I had planned to write while I was there, but at the last minute, I decided to bring a mobile recording setup so that I could record as well,” says Beck, relating how the project came about. “I planned to work on academic writing during the days and soak up the musical culture of southern Spain by night, which I knew from previous visits to be centered on flamenco, which is this incredibly rhythmic and sensual art form.” Beck did just that, but she found that the street performances, often featuring a single unamplified guitar and a vocalist, made her want to jump into live recording with exactly what she had brought with her – her guitar and her voice. “Once I got started, I did source a couple of things from a local music store,” she laughs. Brushes, mallets, a small drum, and a miniature cajon found their way onto the recordings, alongside plaintive acoustic guitar and lush, layered vocal arrangements.
As a songwriter, Beck draws from the same roots-folk tradition as Patty Griffin, Emmylou Harris, and Brandi Carlile, with a straightforward approach to storytelling and a melodic lilt that evokes early Joni Mitchell. She wrote most of the songs on Letters from Granada while she was there, with the exception of two covers: Carey, by Joni Mitchell, and Bésame Mucho, a Spanish language standard written by Consuelo Velazquez. “Carey seemed like the perfect cover to round out the set of songs I wrote because Joni wrote it while traveling in Europe, and it has that same feeling of connectedness and elation I was feeling mixed in with something like homesickness, which I also felt,” Beck explains. There is one other song in Spanish on Letters from Granada, and it features text by the renowned Spanish poet Federico García Lorca in a musical arrangement by Beck (Cancioncilla del Primer Beso).
“Traveling alone, especially as a parent of young children, opened up creative space that I just don’t have on a daily basis,” Beck says. “I was listening to Spanish folk music and flamenco with the windows open to the conversations happening on the streets below, and it all just switched on a feeling of possibility. Anything Could Happen, which is the first single from the record, comes directly from that place and that feeling.”
Another standout track is Juliet Balcony, which is the only track on the record not featuring Beck on acoustic guitar. Instead, a hypnotic hand drum and a piano set the stage. “All of the apartments have these beautiful shallow balconies, just big enough to stand on, and a friend told me what they were called, after that scene in Romeo and Juliet. I had one in my apartment, and standing out there at dusk was magical. It just added to this sense of romanticism that I felt in Granada.”
Beck goes on, “I think it’s easy to feel dreamy and inspired in another country, and especially in a city as stunning as Granada, but I also had a few late-night musical moments in courtyards and bars that really influenced the record I made while I was there. With fewer instrumental options at my fingertips, I found myself focused on percussion and expressive singing, and that absolutely came from the music I was hearing in the streets in the evenings.”
Letters from Granada is at once intimate and lush, dreamy and grounded. Beck’s voice has a clarity reminiscent of Alison Krauss, and her songwriting is thought-provoking without straying too far from the words one finds in roots music and folk music all over the world. Her hope is that music lovers and fans will take the time to listen to the album from start to finish and be transported. “As an independent artist, my musical goals really center on connection with other like-minded humans,” she says. “I want you to put on headphones, pour something you like to drink in a fancy glass, and go with me on this little trip. Then let me know how it made you feel. That’s what making art is about.”
