Sarah Pierce

Sarah Pierce  

Barbed Wire (Little Bear)  

REVIEWED BY JIM CALIGIURI 

A tranquil listen comparable to early Nanci Griffith, the eighth album from Sarah Pierce strikes pay dirt. Songs about her family's heritage thread together subtlety in country trappings about a simpler life. Opener "Small Town" points the way, and she never looks back until proclaiming "I Don't Give My Heart" to just anyone. She and husband/producer/co-writer/drummer Merel Bregante are joined by Willy and Cody Braun on some tracks, but Pierce remains the sharp heart of Barbed Wire.  

Barbed Wire (Little Bear Records)  

Sarah Pierce   

Reviewed by Jeff Lincoln   

If you Google "Sarah Pierce," you'll learn about an early American educator who founded a landmark school. Try "Sarah Pierce Texas," and you'll find a lot more related to the singer-songwriter who records out of Austin. There's something to that, as Lone Star sensibilities permeate the songs and values of the cattleman's daughter. This is far from her first rodeo - "Barbed Wire" is her ninth release - but to hear her tell it, this record represents some of the most personal work she's done.   

Pierce didn't really come to bellyache - right from the opener "(Small Town") you learn that she loves where she lives, she's got a great man, and the neighbors always check on her. Even when life sends rough patches, Pierce stands defiant. She's honed a gunfighter's spirit. The topics are charming, but this is country/western music that's undergone a sort of twang-dectomy. Sometimes a mandolin or banjo sneaks in, but it's the persistence of the same mid-tempo that wears on the listener. Even the "party" song ("Light It Up") has a restraint, like the rhythm section's riding a brake. Things improve when they highlight Pierce's honeysweet voice - "Find My Way Back to You" is a standout, with a lot of air and sensual delivery. The speedier ode to friendship "Saddle Up" also hits its mark, via bluegrass.   

Pierce's lyrics have few curveballs or slick metaphors - you're much more likely to hear plainspoken truths or recollections. There's autobiography at a level not many artists would be game to do. (Pierce practically gives her address at one point.) "I'm the Daughter of a Cowboy's Wife" even takes on a father that left; but a scar or two's fine in this part of the country. One might wonder if she's really as tough and together as she claims. But better to leave the question on the table - who wants to mess with Texas

 Sarah Pierce: Love, Light, and Music 

Terry Roland 

When Sarah Pierce began her journey in the music business, she didn’t intend to be a songwriter. The Nashville music establishment was grooming her for success as a performer – she was expected to sing and make hit songs. Her first album, West Texas Wind, included only one of her originals, but the pull of the songwriting muse proved irresistible for the talented country vocalist. 

In the ’90s, she moved to Austin, Texas with her husband, veteran drummer Merel Bregante of The Dirt Band. “Moving to Austin inspired me to write songs,” Pierce explains. “There are great songwriters here. And if you’re a girl and you don’t play guitar and write songs, you just don’t get in.” 

The first song that came was called “Another Last Chance,” and it was about her experience of falling in love with her husband. “I had just left a bad relationship,” she recalls. “I had been in a lot of them. But, falling in love with Merel really changed my life for the better. I still feel it today.- 

“I’ve [also] had mentors like Matthew Cartsonis,” she says, of the talented multi-instrumentalist she met in Phoenix, AZ. “It is writers like [him] who really helped me get started as a writer. He was very frank and helpful.” 

Over the 20 years since that move,  her songwriting muse still sings to her at her home in the country outside of Austin. It is a place she and her husband call heaven.  Pierce has released a string of well-received albums. Her latest, 2011’s Bring It On, demonstrates insightful songwriting and her exceptional voice. The album carries insights about lost and found love, tales of personal redemption, and colorful cowgirls (her father was a cowboy). It’s an album of well-produced and finely crafted songs – the kind that lift the spirits, because she sings about life with a perspective that is full of hope. There is a brightness to her lyrics supported by the undertow of sweet country-rock complete with electric guitars, pedal steel, dobros and fiddle. Her portraits and insights about the ordinary magic of life in the country are full of light and positivity. 

This hopeful worldview is something she’s taken some flak for from critics in Europe. “An Italian critic remarked to me that he liked a song, ‘Love is the Only Way,’” she says, “but [he thought] it would be much better if I suffered more.” 

She laughs, then adds, “The music I’ve been writing lately is a bit darker.” 

Her new album, for which she’s raising funds on Pledge Music, is titled Barbed Wire. “It’s about getting older,” she explains. “I hadn’t done an album in a couple of years. I was in a writing rut. I hadn’t written anything for a long time. We had just moved from the city to the country, outside of Austin. We were on our land and I found an old piece of barbwire that was from 1876. I thought, ‘This looks like me.’ 

 “It was really beautiful, even though it was a bit twisted.” She continued. “I cut off an 18 inch collector’s cut and brought it home.  It occurred to me [that] this is what life makes of us. From that moment I started writing and the songs for the album were finished in two weeks. The album really spring from that moment.” 

Barbed Wire will include a song by Reckless Kelly’s Willie Braun as well as Pierce’s originals. Braun will also duet with her on a song she wrote about her grandparents, called “I’m Sorry.” And there’s also a song about her mother. The song, “Daughter of a Cowboy’s Wife,” is like a bookend to Ian Tyson’s classic romantic cowboy song, “Someday Soon.” The story describes the struggles of a wife of a hard-drinking cowboy and her personal redemption after he leaves her. It’s a stark portrait of the wreckage too often left behind by those we love, while, in this case, the mother and daughter vow never to show their tears. If this song represents quality of production and material on Barbed Wire, we’re in for a treat.

Texas-based singer-songwriter Sarah Pierce, the daughter of a cowboy, was raised in a family of cattlemen in rural West Texas. A genuine real-life cowgirl, she’s been making music most of her life—BARBED WIRE is her ninth album—and she’s toured non-stop across America, Europe and Scandinavia. Recently, Sarah and her musician husband Merel Bregante, moved out into the country some 30 miles from Austin and their new environment has inspired this latest collection of self-penned songs. Encompassing the influences of her heritage, Sarah delivers a transparent, introspective window into her soul with a mature sense of wisdom and confidence in her message and her craft—all mused by new chances on life. She has taken her storyteller-writing style and really captured moments within her life and turned them into meaningful music. The songs contemplate true friendship, the unity of the small town folks and the joys of day-to-day life, western and cowboy themes, our part in the natural world, as well as the treacheries of the heart.  

Sarah sounds like she has the quiet bucolic beauty of rural roads and the open plains coursing through her veins. Listening to Small Town makes you feel like you’re ambling down a dusty country road toward something that might not exist anymore. She champions strong women in Wild Ones, which she dedicates to Merle’s Mom (Haggard that is), with some neat Roy Nicholls chicken-pickin’ guitar notes in the background. Her no-holds-barred stance Barbed Wire cuts to the quick within the simplicity and poignant themes across the range of this album seeming juxtaposed to the richness of Sarah’s western heritage and her coffee-house folk traditions. This is one woman who knows who she is and won’t be messed around with by anyone.  

Her songs are music as landscape, timeless tales that instantly take root in your mind as though they’ve been there forever. The easy gait of Saddle Up, the picturesque visions that spring out of a Mackerel Sky and the working class passion evoked by Call Us Proud reverberate long after the disc has stopped spinning. With some of Austin’s finest musicians providing the accompaniment it’s as musically accomplished as you would imagine, but it’s Sarah’s relaxed, assured vocals, catchy melodies and wry lyrics that are its greatest strengths