Back in 2014, Sarah Vitort released her debut record, an album of country pop that "was kind of a collection of songs that were about my life up until that point—my first love, my exit from the corporate world, my adventures traveling abroad," she explains. "It was a perfect culmination of all the events that led me to a career in music. But as my life has progressed over the last year, I've grown and transformed in ways I never imagined, and I knew I wouldn't feel authentic continuing in the same direction."
Welcome Sarah Wild to the party, the new darker, edgier, more raw rock and roll personality that Vitort will introduce to the world when she shares the Doug Fir stage on Thursday, September 1 with co-headliner Haley Johnsen. Fascinated by superheroes and how they "go through hell and rise from the ashes to become who they are, I feel like my journey to find myself and the music within has been similar," she describes. Sarah Wild evokes a "sense of the balance between dark and light, good and evil, the knowledge that we all have both inside of us, and that pretending life is sunshine and rainbows all of the time is unrealistic. We can't deny the darkness. We have to allow it to be a part of us in order to truly live in the light."
"But I never want to lose the element of playfulness and humor, since that's what life is really all about in my eye," she adds. And that's where her first single "Maybe It's Me"—a catchy, countrified pop-punk and doo-wop anthem—comes in!
Ready to move on after a messy breakup, Vitort looked back on the split with fresh eyes and realized "how silly it was to have focused so much attention on that relationship, and how I'd done the same thing so many times before," she says. The tongue-in-cheek recounting of failed past relationships sees her recognizing that "I can't blame my exes for everything. I have to take some responsibility for my actions as well."
