Sarah Lentz
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Sarah Lentz

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"Indie-Music.com"

Quote: "This CD will stir your soul".

Angel sent to Fifth and West End.
Sittin’ across from me, sippin’ his coffee.
He said, “girl pick up your pen and write some poetry...
write something.
something I can really see.”
From Dakota he flew over to where I’d play.
And heard the saddest songs he ever heard sang....

Sarah Lentz has a gift, and it goes beyond her music and that powerful voice. She can see into the depths of everything. She knows the meaning behind a simple look, senses the longing in the young bones of an old woman, and feels every turn of the world.

She channels this vision into classically-born, piano-fueled pop songs written in the clouds. I feel like I’m listening to a wise, life-embracing spirit who’s been watching and listening forever, smiling as she watches everyone learn from the same mistakes and keep reaching out to connect.

Lentz fills up all the white space in her compositions, writing music that pours into the soul and fills it up with colors, insight, and belief. She begins with a song dedicated to “those lost on 9/11/01 and for those in our lives we’ve found again.” Through the mystical sounds and muse choir, she yearns to make amends for her isolation:

You walked past me the other day.
You caught my eye and smiled, but I looked the other way.
What was your name?
I wish that I had been listening....
And tell me of all the dreams you dream.
I want to help you reach those things.
Everything before now has changed...

She feels everything so strongly, and she pounds it onto the piano. The instrument becomes an angry voice during an interlude in “Boomerang” before falling back, tired and resigned, repeatedly asking for everything to be okay again. She composes with energy, with passion, and with vision that catches everything. In fact, I love a line from “All Right” because it seems to describe her perfectly:

Can you blame me for a flaw in my heart?
So it beats faster, is that such a disaster?
But it beats for me and for you.
In this life of yours and mine.

This CD will stir your soul. You can learn something from an artist who already sees inside it.
- Jennifer Layton


"Verbosity.org"

Imagine your archetypal "female songwriter", imbued with a voice of more range and expression than her peers and lyrical talent far beyond her years; combine the strong songwriting with sparkling production and intelligent, understated piano and you have what might be the finest indie release in the last year. Far, far better than it has any right to be without label support or big-name behind the boards, "No Going Home" is a dazzling collection of 10 powerful tunes, ranging from Amosesque piano ballads to full-out Portishead electroglam. Dynamic, textured, never dull, and rarely anything less than stunning, Lentz' yearning, sensual songs prove that she's more than a pretty face, and may well be one of the most under appreciated musicians in the New York scene.
- Daniel Cohen


"Digitalcity.com"

Gutsy piano crooner Sarah Lentz is truly a treat for York music enthusiasts. The combination of her hysterical stage antics, intricate songwriting and soulful pipes is impressive. Her performance is actually so emotional you've got to wonder what her inspiration is. Normally backed by a tightly tasteful rhythm section, Lentz pounds angrily at the piano and sings so boldly about tender situations in a manner that Alanis Morrisette and Fiona Apple would certainly envy. Expect your socks to be knocked off by compelling soul/folk/pop that is equally funky and rocking.

- Eric Elbogen


"'Begin Again' with Sarah Lentz"

By Meredith Deliso

Last spring, Sarah Lentz thought she would be celebrating the release of her long-awaited fourth album, six years in the making. After some setbacks, from financing the album to engineering it, she finally gets to do so this month, with a release party at Williamsburg’s Public Assembly on March 28.

“Begin Again” is a work the musician more than once refers to as a miracle album. For without the help of fans and friends, it may not have seen the light of day.

Putting three of her previous albums out on her own label, Lentz has been trying to get her latest out, full of material written since 2002. When a deal with a label fell through for her fourth album, Lentz thought that might be the end, until she reached out to her fans for some help. Asking them to purchase the as-yet unfinished album in advance, and then from generous donations in addition to that, she was able to secure enough funds to continue.

“Right when I was ready to give up, they came through,” says Lentz. “I had tears in my eyes for days. I felt so encouraged and inspired by these people that believed in me so much.”

Then, determined to continue to do everything herself, Lentz was stalled in the recording studio, where she didn’t have much training in.

“I had some friends from music school that I kept calling for help – how do I work this machine?
Where do I plug in this thing?” remembers Lentz. “They took me out for a drink one night and said, Sarah, it’s time that we helped you with this record.”

And so, with the help of her friends, Lentz was able to finish the album itself.

“It was an amazing gift,” says Lentz. “It’s my little miracle record.”

Coincidentally enough, while recording the album, Lentz realized there was another miracle of sorts at work – she was pregnant with her first child.

“It was kind of cool to record while I was pregnant – he was getting to hear my voice,” says Lentz, who gave birth last spring. “When I play it for him now, it seems like he really recognizes the songs.”

Lentz wanted to release the album before her son was born, but the timing didn’t quite work out, and now feels ready to release it.

For all those reasons, Lentz found it fitting to call the album “Begin Again,” taken from the name of a song on the album.

“I felt my music’s beginning again in a whole new way with all these people behind me who supported me for 10 years,” says Lentz, who pulled the name from a track on the album. “That song became clear it should be the title track. It symbolizes so much.”

Though that track, a bare, piano-based anthem, became the album title, the one that means the most to Lentz is “Jericho,” written after a trip to New Orleans a year after Hurricane Katrina ravaged the city.

“I wrote that song to honor them [the people of the city],” says Lentz. “That’s the one song I hope most that people will hear and remember that that’s still going on and they will need help.”

Lentz also thinks it came out the “coolest,” too, with its mimicking of a New Orleans-style funeral march, with instruments slowing joining in with a solo clarinet in the “procession,” until culminating with all the voices and instruments playing together.

“I want it to lift up and remind people of the joy that was in the city for so long,” says Lentz.

The rest of the album showcases the musician’s steady piano work, pounding out songs influenced by folk, pop and soul, under her mature voice, in the tradition of female songstresses like Tori Amos and Tracy Chapman, but without any excess.

Lentz’s CD release show on March 28, the day the album’s officially out, came to be at Public Assembly rather by accident. Arriving at 70 N. 6th St., the Greenpoint-based musician was looking for Galapagos Art Space. In its place, having claimed into the space after Galapagos moved to DUMBO was the new venue.

“I kept thinking, wouldn’t it be so nice to play somewhere in my neighborhood because this is where I love to be anyways,” says Lentz. “I wanted somewhere that had a good happy vibe.”
In addition to Lentz on piano, she will be joined by her band, comprised of drums, bass, electric guitar and accordian, as well as some brass for songs like “Jericho.”

Between piano lessons, working as a musical director at a church on Manhattan’s Lower east Side and her 8-month old-son, that hasn’t left Lentz much time to devote to writing new music, though she looks to be able to sit down at her piano more.

“I’m hoping that not another seven years goes by before the next record,” says Lentz. “I have at least one more in me that I’d like to get out.”

Sarah Lentz celebrates the release of her new album, “Begin Again,” on March 28 at Public Assembly (70 N. 6th St.) at 7 p.m. Tickets are $10. Kelley McRae Band is also on the bill. For more information, go to www.publicassemblynyc.com or call 718-384-4586. For more on the artist, go to www.sarahlentz.com. - Williamsburg Couier & 24/7 Blog


Discography

No Going Home (2000)
Eveything's All Right (indie, 2002) (Engemics, 2004)
My Christmas Carols (2004)
Begin Again (2009)

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Bio

Sarah Lentz is a songwriter's songwriter. She crafts songs whose constituent elements—lyrics and music—are strong and able on their own. But when brought together these elements are lifted into a realm where things are in flux, where tonality and heartbreak are searching for resolve and where what you see is what you get…until you hit that killer bridge where the narrative voices invert, rhythmic progressions are bent to the breaking point and sweetness couldn't be any sweeter until it rips your face off.

Sarah Lentz is a singer's singer. Her voice has a timber and range that equals a well-played viola, you know that strange little hybrid number that is neither a cello nor a violin but has the stormy, tragic power of the one and the soaring, triumphant majesty of the other. Sarah has the ability to whisper sweet optimism in her baby's ear but also power through a dirge that keeps the speakers buzzing for hours. Her voice is a voice that knows confidently what it is doing at all times, is generously offered without reserve, seeks to connect to the deep truths of existence and somehow comes up with that connection every time. Sarah Lentz is, yep—a singer/songwriter's singer/songwriter…and for as awkward and cumbersome as that term might read, it is a territory that few in Sarah Lentz's field can so comfortably and confidently occupy.

Sarah moved to New York City by way of Nashville by way of Pittsburgh seeking her fortune and more importantly musical comradeship to help her explore her ideas and ambitions. Her road professionally and personally has been a bumpy one. But through and in the midst of living life well and bravely, Sarah's vision and determination has remained true and unwavering, self-releasing two studio records and one Christmas record, fighting and defeating a debilitating autoimmune disease, risking financial suicide by marrying a visual artist and making a life and a family in NYC despite many other cheaper and easier towns in which to do so.

Sarah is extremely pleased to announce the release and celebration of her newest studio recording titled Begin Again that was funded by the faith and support of her fans. Begin Again, beautifully recorded by Emmy award winning Christopher Koch and mastered by Grammy award winning Mark Winter, is a robust collection of songs that keep moving, one after the other, into the territory of their own making. In these songs, there is a searching Sarah is engaged with that operates on every level. Lyrically, there is a searching for love, for peace, for permanence…for the real. But deeper and more complicated, this searching is mirrored musically through stylistic and formal shifts. We see Sarah's clear mind exploring and mining musical forms…making them her own, causing them to speak as she would have them speak, sound as she would have them sound, mean what she would have them mean. There is searching on this beautifully honed record but there is also a sense of finding—finding peace, finding resolve…or at least the hope for peace, the hope for resolve…and it is this hope that is the fulcrum upon which one can truly Begin Again.