COURTESY Deborah Lopez Lynch/Facebook
By Shylo Adams
New York-based singer-songwriter Sarah Factor will be heading home to showcase her newly released EP, Everywhere We’ve Been.
Born and raised in the great white north, Factor made the decision to ship herself south of the border to the Big Apple.
“I wanted to do musical theater,” the Toronto native says over a video chat. “The only place I could do [musical theater] was New York City, so I was like, that’s where I’m going.”
She moved and began studying musical theater after high school, but found herself back home after graduating from the American Musical and Dramatic Academy. Her next step in life wasn’t clear and she was left to question what needed to be done following graduation.
“I just felt really overwhelmed… I was at my confusion point,” Factor says. “I thought to myself, ‘I’m going to come back [to New York City] and I’m going to do this right. I’m going to move to Brooklyn.'”
After living in what she describes as ‘the city,’ which is Manhattan, Factor explained why she made the decision to change her residency to Brooklyn.
“It’s more of a community,” she says. “Reminds me of Toronto. We live in a quiet and low key neighbourhood where people talk to each other and you just take the train into the city.”
COURTESY Deborah Lopez Lynch/Facebook
Eager to get involved into the New York City music scene, Factor began writing songs but didn’t perform until a while after.
“I ended up starting with a friend of mine. They had this monthly show called ‘Seven Minutes to Shine,'” says Factor on her beginnings. “It was basically any performing art you did for seven minutes. It was a variety of dancing, music, and all sorts of other stuff. I did that one day and I was like, ‘why am I not doing this all the time.'”
Factor began finding venues and open mics to perform. She quickly realized that New York City offered “endless opportunities.”
“If you go to an open mic to see any sort of performance, you get a really wide variety of people coming from all different types of experiences,” she says. “I’ve been recently going to a lot of comedy, stand-up and story-telling shows. The variety of people you get up on stage is incredible.”
The exposure to different artists and styles of music began to influence her own work.
“There’s such a good spark when you go out and see music here,” says Factor about her music environment. “I started off still in this kind of music theater mode. One of the first songs I wrote, the bridge has a key change. I don’t do that anymore, but I was in such a mode of writing musical theater-type music. Being here and immersed in other singer-songwriters and other folk music has allowed me to definitely take a turn for the better.”
Her environment also gave her the opportunity to work with different musicians, which opened her eyes to different aspects of music.
“My drummer has been with me for a while and my back up singer,” she says. “I just recently added a guitarist and a bassist…The process of rehearsing with them is so lucrative to a growing artist. Without hiring my drummer and having him, I would not have built an inner rhythm. When I wrote songs before I never thought about tempo. It never even occurred to me…Keeping a tempo is something that is really important to me now. It is something I spend a lot of time on.”
Now, having built a back-up band around her and coming into her own artistry, Factor has found a producer that would fit her simple folk sound.
“My main concern was overproduction,” she says. “I had listened to some of [the producer’s] stuff and I really did not hear any sign of overproduction. My producer would say anything we add and anything we do is to compliment your voice, not to overpower it.”
Everywhere We’ve Been is a project Factor says she has built-up to and one she’s most proud of, as it is a direct reflection of where she is musically.
COURTESY Sarah A. Factor/Facebook
“I wanted to have something to give people at shows,” says Factor on why she made the EP. “[I wanted] to show people who haven’t seen me live and don’t know anything about my music. This EP is a great representation of where I’m at right now musically. It gives sort of a good range of what I do.”
Listening to any song from Factor gives you a direct insight to a time in her life because she writes about what’s “near and dear” to her heart.
“I write a lot about break-ups and people in my life,” Factor says. “Any type of story that I have to tell ends up in a song. In my opinion, my favorite songs and my best songs are the ones that have just fallen out of me. It’s usually a few months after something has happened, the dust settles, and I can push out a song. I think the struggle happens when I want to write about something that’s not a story.”
Keep an ear out for this singer-songwriter as there will be more music to come. You can see Sarah Factor live at The Central in downtown Toronto this Thursday.
Aryah Magazine 