ABOUT
Unwilling to be constrained to one art-form or medium, Toronto-based artist Sarah Lounsbury shifts between songwriting and performing, painting and textile work with the agility of a modern-day Renaissance woman. Fully grounded in reality while still nurturing a deep sense of idealism, it’s what may seem on the surface like a recipe for a conflicted person (and she can confirm that it often is), though it’s this unique quality that helps to make her an adept songwriter layered with complexity.
Canadian-born, raised in both Charleston, South Carolina and London, Ontario, as a young artist she relocated to Toronto to study keyboard in Humber College’s Bachelor of Music program. All the while, honing her photography, sewing, knitting and painting skills while studying piano, voice, and composition. After graduating, she started to fully embrace the freedom of exploring different mediums and states of making, slowly but surely finding a way back to her folk and DIY roots to create the pieces she wanted to experience.
“After leaving school, I was working 3 jobs and running from one place to the next, existing without the time I needed to really think or feel or reflect. Whenever I had a free moment, I’d let myself create what I felt compelled to create without questioning the medium, whether it was sewing my own garments or sitting at the piano piecing ideas together. I feel that the work I’ve been creating since has been the most honest and the most representative of who I am.”
With influences such as Elliott Smith, Feist, and Joni Mitchell, her carefully crafted and deeply personal songs combine thoughtfulness with honesty and emotional intensity. Her work explores themes community, otherness, relationships, and time through interlocking rhythmic patterns, textured piano harmonies, and her signature clear-voiced delivery of quite literal lyrics.
Currently, Sarah is working on an indie-folk project to be released in 2022, many sewing projects at various stages of development, and carving out time to take better care of herself and her non-deductible furry dependents.
Garden King
by Sarah Lounsbury
UPCOMING SHOWS