Singer-songwriter Sarra recently released a new single called "Kerosene" and to celebrate we asked her to tell us the story behind the track. Here is the story:
I started writing for this project in the summer of 2015. A lot of that time was spent writing a lot of sh*tty songs, some good, but mostly just an experiment in finding my sound sonically and lyrically. About a year and a half into the process my co-writer Jay Stolar and I had probably written close to 30 songs. A few of them really stuck and were actually pretty damn good but even after going through half of 2015 and all of 2016 pouring my guts out on paper, I think I was still really holding back.
Both of my grandfather's died within a month of each other in early 2017. I was driving back to Texas from the second funeral in Oklahoma and started going down this rabbit hole of relationships. I wasn't very close to either one of my grandpas and I was just replaying the tape of my life and my childhood to really understand why. Somewhere between the rainy dark drive home and me dissecting my family relationships I started down the rabbit hole of my broken marriage. My ex-husband and I divorced in 2014 and half of the record is about that experience.
There was a lot of bitterness and anger at the end and it got me thinking about the extremes of love. You start out in this blissful stage, the happily-ever-after stage. You're going to build this life and be together forever. But then somewhere down the road life happens and sh*t goes wrong. You end up breaking up and f***ing hating that person. I was driving down I-35 thinking how the hell did we end up there. Going from "I'm going to love you forever" to "I want to see you burn".
I loved the concept and I just started dictating lyrics into my phone. I took them back to Jay and we crafted "Kerosene".
The production process was a beast in itself. My producer Josh Goode came up with a really cool idea for the demo and I, unfortunately, got a little too attached. We were working on the rest of the record and didn't work on Kerosene for probably 6 months. Once we revisited the song Josh hated the production but I loved it. He was insistent on redoing it and when he did, I hated it. It put us in this really awful space because neither one of us wanted to budge. We ended up setting it down again and not coming back to it until the rest of the album was done. I told him that I wanted to go ahead and record the vocals and asked if he could at least lay down a skeleton of the tune and he could finish the production at a later time.
We scrapped both versions and hashed out some new ideas for the direction of the song. I had a gig that night and when I came home (Josh is my Fianc�) he had figured it out and it KILLED! We literally went from fighting about whether it should even go on the album to it being the lead single.
Kerosene was important to me because I felt like it expressed a vulnerability and realness in what I had experienced. I loved the concept and knew it could be something special. I'm glad I fought for it because it's one of my favorite tracks on the album!
Hearing is believing. Now that you know the story behind the song, listen for yourself and learn more about the album right here!
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