Daily Discovery: Sara Curtin, “Summer”

ARTIST: Sara Curtin

SONG: “Summer”

HOMETOWN: Washington, D.C.

AMBITIONS: I’d like learn to play the drums, play my songs to a room of a thousand people and one day I would love to have an enormous garden that could feed me all summer long.

TURN-OFFS: Arrogance & cigarettes.

TURN-ONS: 90’s R&B & a sense of humor.

DREAM GIG: It would be a dream to have an orchestra & choral society as my “backing band”. Carnegie Hall sounds like a great place for that to happen.

FAVORITE LYRIC: “I remember that time you told me, you said, ‘Love is touching souls.’ Surely you touched mine ’cause part of you pours out of me in these lines from time to time.” – Joni Mitchell (“A Case Of You”).

SONG I WISH I WROTE: “In My Life” by The Beatles.

5 PEOPLE I’D MOST LIKE TO HAVE DINNER WITH: Joni Mitchell, Janet Jackson, Michelle Obama, Jimmy Fallon and Graham Kerr (The Galloping Gourmet). He can cook the dinner and tell us jokes.

MY FAVORITE CONCERT EXPERIENCE: My favorite concert experience still has to be my first. I was 10 yrs old and went to see REM with my entire family. We were lucky enough to go backstage and meet bassist Mike Mills. He told us a story of when one time he was playing Kurt Cobain’s old guitar he felt a hand on his shoulder only to turn around and find no one there. When I got home, I wrote a letter to Mr. Mills thanking him for taking the time to talk to me. A few months later, I got a postcard in the mail – handwritten, from Mike Mills wishing me the best. Sure, I remember the feeling of being in the loud stadium and shouting along to “It’s The End Of The World As We Know It”, but what stuck with me from the whole experience was how the musicians were real, normal, nice people. They lived lives and wrote postcards like everyone else. (Oh, and “Leo-nard Bern-stein!”)

I WROTE THIS SONG BECAUSE… A bouquet of flowers, just beginning to wilt but still fragrant, sat taunting me on my kitchen table. The summer romance was over, but the artifacts still remained. Polaroid pictures, wrinkled clothes, wilting daisies. I started to imagine a museum of these artifacts where people could come and donate their broken hearts each weekend to be hung on the walls out in the open for others to view. I originally wrote this song on the ukulele, but then found more depth of arrangement in the electric guitar drowned in reverb.