While there have been times when singer-songwriter Sarah Jaffe has been able to let go and give her songs over to someone else, she just couldn’t for her last three projects, all released in 2019.
“Mentally, the times that I have written and pitched to other artists and have been able to detach, there’s just kind of like a mental boundary that is just implemented,” Jaffe says. “But with these three records, everything was just kind of like bleeding into the next thing. It was all very raw and real. There wasn’t that wall.”
Jaffe has an uncanny ability to break down the barriers of the studio, to interact with us as an audience, making us feel like we’re in the room at the moment she’s recording each track. It’s a natural part of her personality — the capacity to be vulnerable, humorous, melancholy, even angry, all at once, with anyone she comes across.
“In my day-to-day life, I don’t like pretenses, I pretty much show you who I am right away,” Jaffe says. “I’m also an extremely self-aware person, which has worked both in my favor and against me at times. In the case of creating music, I think it’s really allowed me to be sentimental but also see things how they really are.”
Jaffe says, “it’s been a decade of trial and error” since her debut album was released in 2010 — a decade of trying to figure out what mode of creative expression fits her best. After her second album, for example, she toured nonstop, but now she hasn’t been out on the road for two to three years. She’s spent time composing movie scores, producing and toplining — the process of writing lyrics and melody over already produced tracks (unlike traditional songwriting when the two are done in conjunction with each other.) Among all the projects and experiments, she’s released 10 albums and EPs of her own over the last decade.
For her most recent work, she was in the studio with a new producer, Aaron Kelley out of Dallas, finishing some vocals for a score, when creativity struck. Kelley asked her if she’d be interested in toplining for some other projects he was working on, but the pair began recording what would eventually become dual EPs This is Better Part 1 and 2. It was a mechanism of catharsis for Jaffe — one that she desperately needed at the time, an outlet for her to process the pain of a recent divorce.
“There’s something that happens after all the initial hurt,” Jaffe says. “You dive into your own roots and you’re feeling yourself. It made me fearless in how I wrote music and how I thought about music… and just not taking that whole process too seriously.”
There was a certain urgency to the work, as well, making it apparent these songs were hers to release, not for another artist to record.
“Maybe I was being bratty, but I wasn’t ready to give up those songs,” she says. “A topliner, that’s all they do, that is their job to give up the songs regardless of whether they are relating to them or not. It’s just something that at the time, I didn’t want to sacrifice one for the other and I felt so attached to them that they just felt natural to perform.”
But her journey didn’t end there, and by the time she was releasing the EPs she had already moved on.
Whereas This is Better Part 1 and Part 2 explored the pain of her divorce and rediscovery, Smut, with somber yet delicate vocals, lightens the mood, allowing Jaffe to reconnect with a sense of self-assurance and even levity. “To me, more confidence means a better sense of humor, honestly,” she says.
It’s part of the reason she chose the title, which comes from a voicemail left for a friend of a friend where an unidentified voice says, “Are you still reading smut? Give me a call, I’ve got my cell phone, I love you, bye.”
Jaffe sampled the voicemail in the lead track of the album.
“It’s a word that slaps that not a lot of people use,” Jaffe says. “It’s supposed to be nasty but it’s funny. It encompassed where I was at.”
And who knows where she’ll go next, as she continues to break free of genre constraints. Smut, with its electro-pop sensibilities, is vastly different from where she started with the indie-rock Suburban Nature in 2010.
Back then, “People were just so adamant about sticking to a genre or sticking to a style,” she says. “That’s the opposite of what art is about. It’s about not having boundaries.”
ON THE BILL: Sarah Jaffe — with The Generationals. 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, March 10, Fox Theatre 1135 13th St., Boulder. Tickets are $16.
