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Press and Promo Materials | What People Are Saying
Sara Thomsen is a singer-songwriter with a soulful voice, poetic lyrics, and haunting melodies. Her music comes from the heart, and that's where it takes you. With a voice richer than the best mid-west soil, her songs carry you inward and outward—in, to the particulars of your own life, and out into the shared humanity of us all. Compared by fans to Joan Baez and Joni Mitchell, important musical influences include these legends as well as troubadours of song Pete Seeger, Bernice Johnson Reagon and Mercedes Sosa. Sara has shared the stage with Dar Williams, Peter Mayer, Carrie Newcomer, Catie Curtis, Claudia Schmidt, and Ferron, artists who have also influenced her music. Her performance style is easygoing and full of humor and depth, capturing the audience’s full engagement. Sara’s music gently enfolds and unfolds the listener. Sara Thomsen’s new release, Everything Changes (2008), is an intimate portrayal of the heart breaking open and apart, tumbling through transformation with elegance and grace. The album modulates from joy to despair, crusty to tender, illustrated with a variety of musical styles. Peppering an acoustic folk base are hints of jazz, country, latin groove, celtic and bluegrass. Sara and her acoustic guitar are joined by talented musicians adding flavor and pizzazz to an exquisite musical mix: piano, bass, drums, dobro, banjo, trumpet, lead guitar, flute, violin, cello, and harmony vocals. Sara's sensuous voice and penetrating lyrics cut through to the heart and soul of human experience, transporting the listener to a place within that says: sit down, listen, relax, laugh, cry, dance and remember. Thomsen became familiar with “Todo Cambia,” the title track (Spanish for “everything changes”), during her travels in Mexico and South America. Written by Chilean Julio Numhauser, it was made popular by Argentine singer Mercedes Sosa. “A Woman’s Place,” commissioned for Women’s Month at the College of St. Benedict (St. Joseph, MN), tackles an expansive subject with shimmering lyrics and latin rhythms that beg for dancing feet. “I Remember These” is a poignant collection of childhood memories and a tribute to Sara’s lefse making and poetry writing grandmother, who nurtured Sara’s first creative love of drawing and painting pictures. Produced by Thomsen and co-produced and engineered by Eric Swanson at Sacred Heart Music Studio in Duluth, Minnesota, Everything Changes is Sara’s fourth solo album. Cuts found on earlier releases have won numerous accolades and songwriting awards. Sara won the Minnesota Folk Festival’s New Folk Songwriting Contest in 2002 for “Irene Marguerite” and “Keepin’ the Peace”, off By Breath (2003). “Is It For Freedom,” off Fertile Ground (1999), won a Top Finalist award in the national Music To Life Contest (2001), created by Noel Paul Stookey of "Peter, Paul and Mary" to recognize songs of sociopolitical concern. Published in Sing Out! Magazine (Summer '03) and aired frequently on Democracy Now! news program, the song’s impact on listeners has enlarged Sara’s audience nationally and internationally. In the tradition of Pete Seeger, Holly Near, and Woody Guthrie, Sara is a weaver of song and community singing. At concerts, conferences, classrooms, workshops, retreats, jails, places of prayer, and lines of protest, to be with Sara is to want to sing. Increasing wonder and awareness, deepening spiritual connection, and widening social engagement through song is at the heart of her work. Sara's ability to get people singing magically transforms gatherings into communities empowered with possibility.
In addition to her solo work, Sara is a producer of multimedia performances with dancers, poets, painters, storytellers, puppeteers and other musicians. Sara is the artistic director of the singing trio "Three Altos," comprised of a rabbi (Amy Bernstein), a folksinger (Thomsen) and a professor (Thomsen’s partner, Paula Pedersen). Performing locally to packed audiences two to three times a year, the Three Altos’ answered their audience demand and released their debut CD, Camaradas, in 2005. Sara is the founder and artistic director of the "Echoes of Peace Choir," a non-audition community choir in Duluth, Minnesota, with a repertoire of world music and a membership of 75-100 voices. Sara grew up surrounded by a family and community that loved to sing. From listening to her father sing her lullabies, to singing her first solo in junior high (Billy Joel’s “For The Longest Time”) to writing her first songs and recording Arise! (1995), Sara’s life has been infused with music. She is a staunch supporter of struggles for human dignity and ecological sustainability. Slowing down enough to see and hear the vibrant wonder of the ordinary is her work and play. All this can be felt in her music. Whether it is a song welcoming a newborn, protesting a policy, depicting night falling or describing a loved one, her music is alive and pulsing. Contact: Sara Thomsen 6476 South Range Line Road South Range, WI 54874 715-374-3239
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