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Sara Groves

Don’t mind Sara Groves if she gets a little emotional lately. That’s simply because she’s returned to her roots on her latest – Fireflies and Songs – going back to the original heart of her songwriting career and the personal subjects she once mined for. Instead of focusing on the world around her, Groves took this recording chance to look inside and to show her audience the personal conversations in the world around her – a rare treasure giving us yet another fantastic Groves record.

In our interview with Sara, she reflected back on the recording process, key conversations with producer and friend Charlie Peacock and label head Jeff Moseley and what it means to still be a teacher of sorts.

Soul-Audio: I’ve read where you said you didn’t want to teach on this album and wanted to keep it conversational and more personal. But I wanted to go back because I know you actually taught high school for a few years before you ever started this, so can you talk about that? Does that background affect your artistry?

Sara Groves: Yeah, I think so. I just kind of have that inside me. I’m predisposed to turn everything into a reference, even for my kids. One of them said the other day, ‘Mom, sometimes I wish you would just tell me ‘Don’t do that’ without going into all the reasons why I shouldn’t.’ I said, ‘Will you listen if I just say that?’ and he said, ‘Yes, I promise if you just don’t go at length into whatever.’ But yes, I do that even talking to my girlfriends. If something is hitting me for the first time as I’m learning it, I tend to immediately start shaping it into thoughts that will teach. I question how this could be digested by more people or even myself.

So it’s very much a part of my make-up. I don’t want any of my albums to come across wrong. My last album was all about social justice and my thought was, ‘If anything even remotely smacks of a finger wagging, if it feels I’m saying you need to do more social justice, then I just shot myself in the foot. That’s not the tone I want to take at all.’ So I’ve always tried to use myself as the learner. I’ve always tried to make myself that person I speak of. And I am. I was only waking up to all of that anyway with social justice. So, yes I do let that teaching thing seep in.

On this album, I just wanted it to sound like I was talking with my mom, talking with my girlfriends, talking with [husband] Troy in the kitchen – those conversations that have a lot of value to me, to come at it that way.

Soul-Audio: How do you go about undoing that process – to stop the normal way of doing things?

Sara: Well, one thing is to not personalize it into this other person. Maybe you can’t tell a difference because I write in first-person a lot anyway, but it was different for me. The “I” in these songs are, for the most part, myself. On other songs that hasn’t been the case. On “When It Was Over” on Add to the Beauty, that was about a friend of mine whose husband had an affair. They were waiting out this very painful time so they could speak again, so I’m saying “I”… wait, I guess I said “she.” [Laughs]

Well, anyway, with this record, I tried to not shift the attention to something else, I guess. That was hard at times because I was writing pretty personally where my marriage has been difficult and yet also celebrating the things that have really gone right. So it’s more internal as a writer for me than maybe you can see or hear. Maybe I don’t know. I don’t know the full mechanics of that, other than to say that if I was getting teacher-y, I just tried to stop. It was more inside myself. If it was turning into a lesson, I tried to stop and instead just talk about how I felt.

Soul-Audio: I love the story I read of Charlie Peacock telling you to just enjoy the process of songwriting and having that conversation unlock something profound for you. That seems such a great moment when someone outside of you gives you permission to be what you need.

Sara: Yeah, I love that and I need that a lot. That’s my personality to lock into a goal. I feel on one hand I’m very principled in terms of what I will or will not do – in terms of “write this” or “do this.” I have strong reactions to that. If the feedback I feel isn’t genuine or it won’t come out of me in a true way, then I won’t do it. But I also have a really strong other side of me that wants everyone to be happy and to please people is big for me. My mom said that was her job for me growing up is letting me off the hook – giving me permission to write, giving me permission to do what I needed to do. She told me this story of when I was little where she couldn’t let me watch the news because I would take every bit of it in. I think that’s part of being a writer and observer of the world, but the downside of that is that my mom told me, ‘You can’t feel everything. You have to let some of it roll off.’

With Charlie, I remember driving with my daughter Ruby and it’d been too long since I’d connected to my parents and grandparents in Missouri. It was the same trip where I ended up taking a detour by my old house on the way home which inspired the song “This Old House.” But I was driving and right when you pass the Missouri border by Iowa is gorgeous. The flatness starts to roll into the Ozarks, so I was already enjoying it and having one of those moments. Then my phone rang and I picked it up and it was Charlie. I said, ‘Hey, any thoughts for me for the record?’ That’s so good for me to think while I’m in the car.

He’s always told me I’m a lifetimer. I want to gracefully exit the stage before the big hook comes in to drag me off. Troy will get so mad at me, but I basically try to end my career after every album. Literally with every album, I’ve thought, ‘Well, that’s probably it. That’s the last record I’ll ever make.’ Then I think about what I want to do next and Troy will say, ‘Well, how about we keep doing this as long as people are booking us and having us.’

So Charlie is always saying that I need to know I’m a lifetimer. Sometimes I feel that way – that I know I’ll write music for the rest of my life. But I don’t know that I have the audacity to claim an audience for a lifetime. So either way, Charlie is always sowing good things into me. But this is all a tangent. Sorry.

Soul-Audio: That’s totally okay.

Sara: So Charlie says that and I totally burst into tears. He said, ‘I want you to enjoy songwriting and enjoy the presence of God.’ I said, ‘Man, I will do that. I would love to do that.’ So that’s what he did – he gave me permission to write this album basically. He gave me permission to write about whatever I want. There’s always that concern in the back of your mind for the CCM world that I live in. But not that I don’t feel at home there, but the scenery has changed a great deal there. There’s not a lot of room for the songwriter writing from the Christian worldview but not writing corporate worship.

But there I got permission to do just that, to write whatever God put within my heart to do. I cried with every single song that came out. I know that makes me sound like an emotional wreck or something, but it was so sweet. Every single song as it resolved or came to me, I just got emotional because I love doing this. I did feel very free to make a record that was deeply mirrored of myself.

Soul-Audio: I assume that level of emotion is not typical of songwriting sessions for you…

Sara: I am a pretty emotional person, but not all the time like that. [Laughs] There is something though that happens in me every time… I guess I don’t assume it will happen again. It’s such a thing for me, maybe like a mountain climber or someone who has a great ski run or something like that. That mystery part, when I get an idea and it comes together, whether or not someone else thinks the song is great, but for me when I put my finger on an emotion and I’m naming something, there’s not a greater joy for me in the world. That’s why I get out of bed in the morning. It’s about communicating and naming those things. That’s beautiful. So that’s what I mean, Matt.

I have to figure those things out. I’m a mess and I have to work these things out. I can’t move until I’ve vented that way – those things that need to be said or named. But no I don’t cry all the time. And I try not to cry in co-writes. [Laughs]

Soul-Audio: [Laughs] Well, I asked because I wonder if the emotional level was higher on this one, why is that?

Sara: Well, it was. I feel God is taking me back to the beginning. I still can’t believe that I get a question like this and I don’t mean to be cynical or downputting, but I had someone come up to me and say, ‘Is this a Christian album? Because I saw a music video and it seems like just a love song.’ When something like that gets said, I’m like, ‘No, really?’ I thought those conversations were in the past. So yeah, I don’t know why I went into that.

But for me it’s deeply spiritual to write about my marriage, even the fight and the conflicts. It’s so much the integration of my faith and life. I feel like a lot of that happened with this record. The arc of my career has seen quite a bit of range. I’ve been at this for 12 years, so I’m figuring how who I am at 37. I was going to do all these personality sketches and Jeff came to me and just said, ‘We haven’t heard from you in a long time. You need to check in.’ I was actually tired thinking it was completely true and right and what I had to do.

But to dig in the dirt again and go back to the beginning in terms of how I wrote when I first started, it was very… I don’t know. I listen to those first songs and realize that girl back then was as sincere as it gets. Not that I’m not sincere now, but those early days were so sincere and open. To go back to those early days is really sweet. You’re just grateful then for every person who shows up and for every coffee shop and every song God gives you.

I just really found myself coming back to that place to realize that it’s a gift. That people listen at all and that you get to write and process your life like that. So I do feel like in a lot of ways, I’ve been brought back to the beginning and that is emotional in a good, sweet reminiscent way.