Sarah, you began your career at just nineteen, signed to a major label, and have since evolved into an accomplished composer for orchestra, stage, and screen. Looking back, how did your early experiences as a singer-songwriter shape the composer you are today?

Well, first, thank you for the kind words, Alex! Decades of touring and recording have been as valuable and educational to me as any of my degrees or residencies. The stage and the recording studio are excellent teachers, in very different ways. The stage gave me a place to work out what I wanted to say in music, who I am musically, as a performer and writer. It is the purest interface between artist and audience – contact is direct.  You learn immediately what connects and what doesn’t. You learn what kind of spiritual service this musical exchange can be for both parties.  The studio gave me technical skills and a playground to experiment in sonically. Over time, in both of these arenas, my true creative identity emerged. 

I think, too, there is something really potent about the first youthful expression of any artist – it’s very unfiltered, raw and full of a free, naïve confidence. Ignorance can be bliss!  But the most important 

part of growing as an artist and technician is developing the knowledge of where your weaknesses lie, where you need to push yourself, without letting that knowledge degrade the confidence and pure passion that drew you to music in the first place. In many ways, to really take possession of your artistic power, it is necessary to lose your innocence to it.  You have to understand it, get under the hood and examine your skills fearlessly to refine them. It’s a delicate balance between working to develop mastery of your tools, but also wielding them gently enough to still let the magic in – that ineffable mysterious creative presence that we, as artists, merely channel.

Your work spans pop, orchestral, and contemporary classical spaces — often blurring the lines between them. How do you navigate these worlds creatively, and what draws you to fuse genres rather than remain within one musical tradition?

I have always been drawn to music, but equally drawn to poetry and the music of language, which is why I love songwriting – you take these two powerful electric currents of energy and try to merge them so that their combination yields something unavailable to either one on its own. To me, that’s what the best songs do, no matter how they are produced or accompanied.  

I suppose I learned to navigate different spaces and genres by 1) embracing my “outsider” status and 2) being an eternally curious and interested person.  I think #1 is a really important skill to learn – becoming comfortable with discomfort.  I have never fit neatly into pop or classical or any genre, really.  I came of age in the commercial pop music industry but didn’t align fully with its rules or aspire to its heights.  I was always classically literate and interested in composition, orchestras, theatre and film – not dreaming of becoming a pop star or driven by a desire to be famous. But pop allowed me decades of rare opportunity – to write, record, perform, arrange, develop an audience, to experiment and absorb on so many levels and develop my creative voice. As I’ve said, it was and is a very valuable musical education. On the flip side, I am not a classical artist but when I collaborate in the classical world (be it performing or composing) I bring my classical training, but also the creative freedom of pop (a different kind of literacy) unrestrained by classical conventions. I truly experience this liminal identity as my superpower.

You’ve written orchestral arrangements both for your own music and for artists like Dan Mangan and Hawksley Workman. How does your approach differ when you’re composing for another artist versus translating your own musical vision into orchestral form?

In both of these contexts, the orchestration is there to serve the song – and I bring to it my great love and admiration for songwriting craft. I think orchestrating songs of other writers, especially superb writers like Hawksley and Dan, involves a similar process to film scoring in that you try to capture the heart of the message or moment – what is the essence of this communication? What mood, what thesis, what vibe? How can I musically translate this?

Collaboration has clearly been a cornerstone of your career — from performing with orchestras to working alongside leading Canadian composers. What have you learned about the collaborative process through these experiences, and how do they inform your solo work?

I lean into collaboration more than ever now.  It’s a supremely effective way to transcend your own habits and creative ruts.  Other people are glittering universes of unpredictable unknowns – there’s no way to foresee what chemical reactions will occur between two interested, experienced creatives. Once you reach a certain stage of maturity with your own work, I think collaboration becomes essential to your growth.  Collaborations with my musical mentors Christos Hatzis and Jonathan Goldsmith have expanded my musical vocabulary immensely.  Collaboration with orchestras and classical music ensembles have stretched me as a performer and composer, in most cases far more than my own work has. In every collision, I learn something of value.  All vital growth occurs outside of the comfort zone!

You have been scoring the stage musical adaptation of Maudie. What are some of the biggest creative or technical lessons you’ve taken from moving deeper into a large-scale composition project like this?

Ahh so many!  The marriage of music and drama is complex, vast and a thrilling intellectual playground for a composer. You could spend a lifetime exploring how they intertwine and enhance each other, why certain things work and others don’t. It’s fascinating. Many film-scoring principles apply, but a musical includes that huge, imposing force that affects everything in its orbit – THE STAGE.  Everything about scoring a musical feels (to me) bigger, more direct and yet also more profoundly intimate – you are musicalizing not just a mood or a moment’s tone, you are literally giving voice to individual characters – and for this, you must know them, and precisely words they would use, precisely how much they know about themselves, their emotions and their situations. Furthermore, they don’t just speak these words, they sing them, usually at the height of emotional moments. So many aspects of story and character constrain the writing process and refine it. It’s not pop songwriting at all.  Nerd-tastic.

You’ve often described your music as balancing the emotional immediacy of songwriting with the architecture of classical composition. How do you begin constructing a new piece, or a new work — what does your creative process look like?

It’s never really the same twice. The real challenge is finding that one little nugget, the thread, the way in, that is going to trigger your imagination and allow the whole thing to slide out.  That beginning can be quick and lucky, or it can be long and arduous – as I say to my students, sometimes you are hit by a miracle-dart from the Inspiration Gods, and sometimes you need to get out the hammer and chisel.  But when it finally comes, more ideas generally tumble out for me, and then I work until the structure feels clear, elegant and inevitable. This can be merely a swift polish of what flowed out, or an agonizing wrestling match until it finally yields and clicks – it all depends on the clarity with which I heard and captured the initial spark. Knowing when to stop is also huge – I haven’t mastered that one yet, which is why often artists need deadlines! What was it Bernstein said? “All it takes to make a great work of art is a good idea and not enough time”? Something like that 🙂

How do you adapt your compositional voice to help tell a specific project’s story, and to ultimately serve a narrative — whether cinematic, theatrical, or purely musical?

The more work I do in film and theatre, the more my role feels like that of a “medium” – I need to be a permeable membrane.  I think most artists are already missing a few skins – we have to be in order to receive what we receive.  Another word for this radical openness is love. It is an ego-less position.  So I lean into this, and try to absorb a story, a person, a character. I try to swim as much as possible in their psychological waters and let them pour into me.   I’ve lived with Maudie for over 6 years now, and every time I watch a certain moment in the piece, it doesn’t matter how many hundreds of times I have seen it or which actor is playing her, I crumble. I feel what I imagine she felt, viscerally, every time. After making such a prolonged effort to know and understand her, in a way, I love this person I have never met.  Music forms this kind of soul-level connection. 

Over the course of your career, you’ve continually expanded your artistic scope. What continues to motivate your evolution as a composer, and where do you see your creative path leading next? Can you share anything about what you are working on right now?

As mentioned, I’m a curious person. I’m interested in life, in people, in art.  I love the dazzling complexity of life and I’m in awe of it.  The stimulation of intellectual and artistic challenges is how I engage with the miraculous wonder of existence. Pursuit, expansion, creation, evolution! We are all walking wellsprings of creative potential and I am eager to fully express it.   I will be involved in more large-scale productions and unusual collaborations across film, opera and theatre next year.  I am currently working on a Stratford Festival score, a documentary feature, a commission with Against the Grain Theatre and a choral commission.  I will be releasing another record of songs next year set for both string quartet and full orchestra, and that will trigger a new wave of performances. 

Finally, where can we learn more about you and your music?

All the usual social media spots and sarahslean.com! Thanks very much for the interview, Alex. Much continued success to you. 

Interview by Alex Petkovski

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