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UMaine Artist Profile: Sara Richardson

By Zach Dionne

Posted on Monday, April 13th, 2009, 12:00 am

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Sara Richardson left Maine “right at the cusp of fame,” according to her friends.

A University of Maine music graduate since May 2008, Sara jammed in southern Maine for eight months with a full band. She recorded her first full-length album, “A Curious Paradox,” last October; she identified the February CD release party as “heartwarming,” possibly her favorite show yet.

Then she moved to New York City.

“I’m kind of starting from scratch,” Sara said. She moved to the Bronx in March to network, promote her music and glean inspiration for new material.

Sara, a 23-year-old native of Washington, Maine, recently earned a spot in the top ten musicians to watch in Maine by the Maine Sunday Telegram and enjoyed successful sales at Bull Moose Music. Despite the in-state success, the opportunity to take a shot in New York “wasn’t going to be there forever,” Sara said.

“When I moved here, I knew it was right,” she said. “Portland will always be there, and I can always come back.” She’s also continuing to promote herself in Maine; she performed at a Ray LaMontagne after-party in Portland on April 10.

She quickly found a receptionist-slash-associate’s assistant job at a medical college in New York. She’s been selling records and singing with New York musician Lauren Zettler. A “kind of pop, folk” radio station wants to work Sara’s songs into its rotation.

Most importantly, she landed a gig within three weeks.

“I felt very welcome,” she said of her first solo performance in the city at Rockwood Music Hall. “One guy told me it took him ten months to start playing in N.Y.”

Joining a giant pool of hopeful artists in a city many high caliber talents call home, Sara wasn’t intimidated.

“You can either choose to be envious and kind of jealous by all of them, or you can choose to be inspired. I’ve chosen to be completely inspired and embrace what they do,” she said.

Sara’s sound is a versatile singer-songwriter hybrid of folk and electronic. Each track on her album tries a new idea – she breezes through more than a dozen vocal tracks on “Penny Castles,” coos over a relaxed acoustic riff on “Lonely Hearts” and simply layers her voice over a recording of her father’s 1970s band on “Sometimes,” to a dazzling effect.

“You can still hear the scratches on the record,” she said of “Sometimes.” She grew up singing the song and surprised her father, Bob Richardson, with her duet interpretation on his birthday. “He was bawling his eyes out,” Sara recalled.

The electronic thread in Sara’s work started at UMaine, with an independent study under music professor Beth Wiemann. Sara began experimenting with electronic sounds on a computer program called Reason, re-orchestrating her folk songs with digital sounds.

She recorded her debut in nine days with Mike Flannery. It was mastered by David Kutch, who mastered Grammy-winner “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill.”

Sara thinks of her disc as somber and subdued – “very much a winter album.” She would like to write a record for each season, experimenting with sounds and vocal techniques.

She calls Joni Mitchell her No. 1 influence. She also loves Bjork, Sufjan Stevens and Feist. She spent time in University Singers and the all-female a capella group Renaissance as a student. The latter ensemble surprised Sara with a rendition of her “Submarines” at a concert last fall.

Sara hopes to visit Maine this summer to perform at the Live at Five concert series in Portland’s Monument Square. Pursuing the dream of music is a real endeavor to Sara, and her journey in New York has just begun.

“Whatever you want to do, you can absolutely do it. If you want to move anywhere in this, you can go move there. The world is here to help you with that.”