You won’t catch Sarah Bethe Nelson whining about being on the road.
Indeed, the San Francisco-based songwriter spent much of the interim between 2015’s Fast Moving Clouds and this year’s Oh, Evolution on tour, an experience that shaped her music and made her happy.
“Oh, Evolution has a lot more movement and freedom which I really like, and that has a lot to do with the fact that I was traveling a lot more and I was doing more things that I want to do,” says Nelson. “Just being on tour, moving quickly, having that structure but also fluidity in that you get to go somewhere new every day.”
“I like being gone. I like moving around every day. I like playing. I really like traveling with my band. We all get along really well,” Nelson added. “It’s a nice change, just the movement and the pace of it.”
Nelson recorded her latest at El Studio in San Francisco with Phil Manley, in a significant change-up from the last two albums which she made with Kelley Stoltz. “[Kelley and I] lived together for a long time and have been friends for a long time now. We recorded the first two albums in home studios — first in the apartment that we lived in, and the last one we did at his studio that he has at his house,” she explained.
Going to an outside studio, she said, raised the stakes. “I realized that I was a little more nervous about it this time, which I think can be a good thing, a productive thing,” she notes. “I noticed that I spent a lot more time getting the songs ready before bringing them in, instead of bringing them in rough and seeing what happens. I was a little more present in demo-ing things and having an idea. It’s also because time is of the essence, too. You have these blocks of time. It turned out to be a really wonderful experience, working with Phil, and I love the way the record turned out.”
The way it turned out, by the way, is bouncy and full of swagger. Where Fast-Moving Clouds sheathed its tunes in swathes of hazy, shoe-gazey indeterminacy, Oh, Evolution bops from one buoyant pop hook to another. “I Don’t Care”, fairly jiggles with clean, euphoric tuneful-ness, while “Hazy” shimmies and shimmers in unadulterated positivity.
If it sounds like Nelson shrugged a weight from her shoulders in the last two years, that’s because she did. “I had a lot more momentum. There was a lot more light. It was more hopeful than the other one. There’s a little more feeling of being stuck in the last record, and this one is a little more freedom and light.” she asserts.
Nelson also used more vocals, fewer instruments this time, particularly of the wordless variety. “I had it in my mind going into the studio that I wanted to maybe in certain times where I would put another instrument on something to instead use more vocals,” she explained, “And so, there are more ‘la las’ and ‘oohs’ and ‘ahs’ in this one. I think that leaves space and it also kind of fits my brain space at the time, just kind of traveling long distances and being in different spaces.”
Nelson grew up first in Pollock Pines California, a tiny town nestled in the mountains between Sacramento and Lake Tahoe, and later in the somewhat larger Placerville. “It was gorgeous, a lot of rivers and trees and very beautiful and wonderful when you’re a little kid, but as you’re coming into adolescence and being a teenager, you get bored and you get into trouble and you move away,” she says.
Nelson didn’t get into music right away, beyond a fifth grade stint playing oboe in the school band, but she was a writer, eventually finding like-minded, artistic types in nearby Sacramento. That’s where she met Rusty Miller, who plays guitar in her band, and who has also worked with Kelley Stoltz and many other Bay Area stalwarts.
In Sacramento, she explains, “Writing was first. Music came later. It’s quicker. You get this release faster. You get to go through the emotions and then present them to the world faster than you can with writing and then they kind of take on their own life and you don’t have to carry those thoughts around as much, although sometimes you do.”
Still primarily a writer, she earned an MFA in creative writing, honing skills that strengthen her songs today. “I write very differently when I write poetry than lyrics. But I think I use similar tools in terms of editing and stuff like that. I’m an aggressive editor,” she states. “I write down a lot of stuff and then weed it out.”
Her favorite writers manage to get a large impact out of just a few words. She’s a fan of Octavio Paz, Paul Celan, and Jack Gilbert. Her poetry tends towards the lyrical, rather than narrative forms. “All of my songs are based in some experience. Some of them are more literal than others, of course, but they all come from something that I’ve felt or experienced personally,” she said. “I don’t know if I’ve honed the craft of speaking from someone else’s point of view, especially in lyrics.”
Nelson started playing music in Sacramento, sitting in with dozens of bands and connecting with a supportive community. She found she liked the communal aspect of playing in bands, so very different from scratching down poems in a notebook. “Playing with other people, you could see how your ideas could grow and become so much more than you could make of them. You incorporate other people and you have a band, and that kind of like evolution of all of that is such a … it just catches you up,” she beams.
She met Rusty Miller in Sacramento and has been playing with him ever since, despite his commitments to Kelley Stoltz, Sonny and the Sunsets, Jackpot and other Bay Area bands. It was through Miller that she met Ela Jaszczak, who now plays bass in her band. Garrett Goddard (who has also played with King Tuff, Sonny and the Sunsets, Howlin’ Rain, Colossal Yes and the Cuts) sat in on drums for Fast Moving Clouds at least partly because he lived so close to the studio where Nelson recorded it. After a break when Mike Schon toured with Nelson, Goddard returned and is now her main drummer.
When not on tour, Nelson lives in San Francisco, a city whose living costs have driven out many underground artists. “It’s tough. It has its moments. It’s getting a little harder, but you know, you make it work,” she admitted. “It’s difficult but it’s possible and there’s a really great, supportive community here. In terms of the art world, which I appreciate, and sometimes people seem to think it has disappeared, and I don’t feel that at all. I think it’s shifted and changed but I still feel very much part of a community and very supported and there’s a lot of cool stuff happening and coming out of the Bay Area still.”
But even so, she still likes to leave.