[Editor’s note: On Friday, June 28, Los Angeles-based musician Sarah Grace White will release her latest EP titled Sinkhole. The EP is the follow-up to her debut EP, 2023โs Are You Here This Time, and was co-produced by Jorge Balbi (best known as the drummer in singer-songwriter Sharon Van Etten’s band). Below in an exclusive essay, White describes how she used songwriting as a means to understanding herself and the world around her. Also, make sure to check out our review of the EP.]
I was in shock, sitting in my little chair, my roommates going about their morning business in the kitchen, gripping at my journal like it might save me. If only I could understand what happened, if I could remember every little detail and somehow capture it, I wouldnโt be crazy. It would be no big deal that a boy so obviously destined to be my soulmate had fled the scene without a scratch, my freshly broken heart in my hands. Maybe I could remember the bar where we met, the TV humming as we slept, the short drives home from his apartment, quiet and high. If I wrote down these details, no one could take them away from me. If I wrote them down, maybe I could leave them there, stand up, and make small talk in the kitchen.ย
This is how I wrote the title track for Sinkhole, quietly hammering away at a heartbreak that felt so big, I could no longer share it with anyone else. No more talks with my friends until 2 in the morning, no more meditation podcasts and offloading to strangers. Everyone, fairly, needed to move on – and I needed to help myself get up and over the hill. There is nothing quite like making something you feel proud of, for me. Exercise is great too, walking, therapy, etc. Iโm all for it – but I never feel more like myself when I can go to sleep having made something. Iโm a Leo so who knows, I like to feel proud of myself. And when Iโm in my most awfully self obsessed darkest little human corner, nothing makes me feel better like writing.ย
Each of the songs on Sinkhole came from different moments of trying to help myself, consciously or not, learn from a feeling and move on. Iโve learned the hard way time and again that I canโt shut down a big reaction. Sometimes I really want to, especially if they come from trivial moments I should societally be able to shake off. I wrote โAll I Can Doโ after a bad date with a stranger I never saw again, but all morning I felt sick, until I was able to give life to it in a new way, and listen. None of this is quite conscious – Iโd say Iโm proud of this EP because it represents my most esteemable reactions to pain, and I look at each song as a different point in my life where Iโd had enough wallowing and tried a tool that worked.ย
Any method of questioning into the psyche is a path to understanding – therapy, astrology, tarot, long walks, whatever works to help you explain the fact that we are little ants with big feelings and individual journeys on this spinning planet. I feel so grateful that I get to use songwriting as one of these tools, and it might be my favorite because it becomes a relationship thatโs bigger than the writer as soon as you start to share it. I was eating ice cream last night with my best friends and they were asking me what โYour Manโ was about, each of them having different interpretations, and knowing me more than most, guesses as to who it was about. I started telling them about the direct seeds of the song, the challenging situationship I was in when I was writing it (which they obviously remembered because Iโm chatty and insufferable), but I knew that wasnโt quite the whole story. The frequency of pain always brings something else – a proximity to the mysterious, the psychic plane. Some of it is factual, and some of it is a gift from who knows where. This combination of thought and letting go enough to receive is the sweet spot Iโll keep striving for as I try to get better at writing. I didnโt know what โIโm your man if you let meโ meant when I wrote it down frantically over a looping drum beat from YouTube, but it made me feel better, and now I do.ย
You can find more about Sarah and her music here.
Sarah Grace White
Contributor
Sarah Grace White is a Los Angeles based musician
