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Sarah Mary Chadwick Finds Clarity in Sobriety on Excellent New Single
A review of ‘Nothing Was The Same After The Bar Burnt Down”
Anyone familiar with Sarah Mary Chadwick’s music will be taken aback by how her latest single, “Nothing Was The Same After The Bar Burnt Down” begins. Most Chadwick songs, typically, begin with swirling piano lines pierced by the singer-songwriter’s signature, soul-piercing croon. “The Bar”, by contrast, begins with a much more understated piano progression and Chadwick’s delivery is sprechgesang.
Previous songs from the Melbourne-based musician evoked bar room jaunts, channelling a drunken haze, where all emotions good or bad were felt acutely and deeply and rendered in staggeringly forthright fashion. Or, to quote Chadwick herself: “It’s like the interior of a drunk’s mind, everything is bright and tragic and huge and dark and silent and everybody is new and bright.”
That “The Bar” instantly stands apart from the rest of Chadwick’s work is fitting; it was written as a reflection on her first year of sobriety. The six-and-a-half-minute song — which is Chadwick’s most thematically ambitious to date — uses the metaphor of a town’s only bar burning down to chart her journey quitting drinking, as well as that of countless others who have done (or tried to do) the same thing.