Finsbury Area Guide

Black Cat Music is proud to present.... Sara Petite (solo show) With support from Paper Fence An outlaw country headliner whose music reaches far beyond the genre's borders, Sara Petite has built an award-winning career with songs that owe as much to the rock & roll roadhouse as they do the honky-tonk. Hers is a raw, rough-edged version of American roots music, delivered by a five-time International Songwriting Competition finalist who's spent nearly two decades calling her own shots. Sara has no interest in chasing trends. She's too busy chasing the muse instead, earning a wide range of accolades including Top 40 success on the Americana charts, international airplay, and more than a half-dozen trophies from the San Diego Music Awards along the way. "When I first began playing shows, people used to tell me 'You've gotta pick a sound,'" she remembers. "I didn't like that advice. I like to do things my way, and that means going all over the map, from country to rock & roll to soul to punk. This music is my own, after all. It should sound like me." The Empress, her seventh record, marks a return to the intersection of country twang and roots-rock bang. It's a place Sara knows well, and she sketches its dimensions in sharp detail. These 11 songs take place in dive bars, trailer parks, the throes of passion, and the feedback loop of addiction, with Sara embodying her characters fully. From the heartbroken narrator of "The Mistress" an old-school country/soul ballad about a lover's affair with alcohol, punctuated by pedal steel and electric piano to the hell-raising hillbilly heroine of "Bringin' Down the Neighborhood," she maintains a strong female perspective, celebrating the full range of womanhood along the way. The Empress is an album for all genders, stocked with songs that tackle the universal struggles we all face. Even so, its central heroes are Joan of Arc, Mary Magdalene, and other woman who, like Sara, have pushed against imbalances in society for the sake of fairness. "'The Empress' comes from the idea that our world is out of balance," she says of the album's anthemic title track, which salutes the empowered rule-breakers of the past with fiddle and galloping drums. "Everything's gone off-kilter, and we all need that mix of feminine and masculine energies in our bodies. The more that women are respected and held to the same level of importance as men, the better off we're all going to be. On this album, I'm not writing about misogyny as much as I'm writing about my own life and the strong women I see in my world." Produced by Grammy nominee Eric Corne, The Empress crackles with the energy of a live band whose performances match the material's unique punch. "Sara is a great lyricist and singer," says Corne, who recorded the bulk of the album during a pair of inspired weekends. "She deals with real emotions, real stories, real feelings. It's easy to understand why great musicians play with her, like piano player Bobby Fuego, who played with Leonard Cohen, and bass player Jorge Calderón, who worked with Warren Zevon. They're the real deal, and so is she."