Sarah Borges

Firebrand singer and songwriter Sarah Borges emerged as a standout figure in Americana through her ardent, subtly rough-hewn blend of country, blues, and roots rock. Her vocal delivery carries a robust timbre that conveys seasoned perspective alongside hints of fatigued fragility, while her compositions explore the rough contours of blue-collar existence alongside the pleasures and sorrows of romantic bonds. That intricate layering of elements already surfaced in her 2005 debut Silver City, and the interplay between her and backing group the Broken Singles came into clear focus on 2009’s The Stars Are Out. Themes of endurance running through her work proved especially fitting for 2022’s Together Alone, a solo project shaped amid significant personal upheaval.

Sarah Borges entered the world in 1978 and spent her childhood in Taunton, Massachusetts, roughly 40 miles south of Boston. An early enthusiasm for music and performance led her to major in musical theater at Boston’s Emerson College. Outside class hours she joined multiple indie rock outfits and developed a particular affinity for the Los Angeles band X, whose style fused punk abrasion with the melodic snap of country and rockabilly. That discovery guided her toward country and roots traditions, where she absorbed the work of Wanda Jackson, Bob Wills, Mahalia Jackson, Merle Haggard, and Bob Dylan. She turned to songwriting, crafting material centered on resilient women navigating hardship. By 2004 she was performing regularly, and her appearance at that year’s South by Southwest Music Conference in Austin, Texas, left a strong impression on attendees. A representative from the small imprint Blue Corn Music caught the set and promptly offered a recording contract. Blue Corn released her first album, Silver City, in 2005. The record drew favorable notice from the alt-country community, prompting extensive touring that prompted her to assemble a road unit called the Broken Singles, anchored by longtime friend and bassist Binky.

While Silver City continued to attract listeners and reviewers, the established roots label Sugar Hill contacted Borges and arranged to issue her follow-up. Credited to Sarah Borges and the Broken Singles, 2007’s Diamonds in the Dark contained nine original compositions along with interpretations of songs by Tom Waits, Greg Cartwright, and X. The Stars Are Out, arriving in 2009, took a harder, more rock-driven direction, splitting evenly between Borges originals and material drawn from NRBQ, Any Trouble, and the Magnetic Fields. That release earned her a nomination for Best Emerging Artist from the Americana Music Association. Borges and the group next sought to capture their onstage energy on the 2010 digital concert recording Live Singles.

Following a three-year recording hiatus after parting ways with Sugar Hill, she turned to crowdfunding to underwrite a new project. The effort succeeded, yielding 2013’s Radio Sweetheart, issued as a solo album on Lonesome Day Records and produced by Los Lobos saxophonist Steve Berlin with engineering by Dave Minehan, guitarist for the Neighborhoods and the Replacements. For her subsequent outing she enlisted guitarist Eric “Roscoe” Ambel, who contributed guitar and keyboards while producing the 2016 EP Good and Dirty.

A refreshed lineup of the Broken Singles accompanied Borges into the studio for 2018’s Love’s Middle Name, which returned to Blue Corn Music for distribution. The album marked her first set of songs written and tracked after achieving sobriety, though further trials lay ahead. When the COVID-19 pandemic halted live performances across the United States in March 2020, Borges, a divorced mother raising a son, lost her primary source of income and took a part-time position as a courier driver. At home she concentrated on new compositions. Once enough material accumulated, she collaborated with Ambel on a series of informal sessions in which she tracked guitar and vocals in her bedroom before forwarding the files for him to arrange with contributions from musicians across the country. The approach proved effective, and Blue Corn released Together Alone in February 2022.