Sara Petite - Road Less Traveled (2017)

After four CDs, and three San Diego Music Awards, Sara Petite has established herself as a shining light on the local roots scene. Her original songs have the kind of country songbird twang and spunk that made icons out of performers dating from Loretta Lynn and Dolly Parton through Lucinda Williams. While her maturing style incorporates the blues and rock idioms enough to give her faster songs plenty of muscle, her songs in the traditional distaff country singer role are where she demonstrates the ability to project as both the victim of heartbreak, and to flash the allure of a playful temptress. Her new CD is The Road Less Traveled.

Petite wrote the dozen tunes here (with help on one), and is backed by a studio aggregation that includes bandmates Mike Kastner, Steve Peavey, Erik Olsen, Wade Maurer, Chris Hoffee, and Phil Jordan. Instruments include trumpet, marimba, plenty of pedal steel, and fiddle, but the clear focus in Petite’s voice.

The title tune opens, a steady country rock groove with trumpet highlights; Petite doesn’t take long to give fair warning to a lover that she is here now—and definitely available—but gone soon, “Where I’m bound heaven only knows.” “Blackbird” has a foreboding lyrical message, a metaphor for past bad decisions, as she warns about the deceiver being an omen of bad things to come—delivered on a lively guitar lick-laden melody.

For “Getting Over You” and “You Don’t Care At All,” it is Petite’s ability to take on the decades-old cues laid down by Patsy Cline and Lynn as the wronged woman—the other side of the outlaw country singer couple with the wandering vagabond husband—in the crumbling relationship. The bags are ready to go, “You don’t mind if I pack up and leave.” The mood lightens for “Good 2 B Me,” which has a blues rock swagger, and lyrics about a dream Petite has about Tom Petty and a motorcycle. The song doubles down on its theme by sounding just like an outtake from a recent Petty album, with Petite in the vocal slot.

“Monkey on My Back” is the most urgent rocker on the album, about drinking, and layers of guitars pound it home. Petite tries for a purpose statement on “I Will Rise” and succeeds, building a statement about her “triumphs over heartbreak and fear” and resolving to rise from the ashes like a Phoenix. The mid-tempo disc highlight is a notch above the other material, a personal testimony put to music.

Petite’s alter ego is Sweet Pea, told about in “Sweet Pea Blues” and “Sweet Pea Patch.” The former is a soft country blues—about how there are going to be bad days, and the blues are going to happen. She hasn’t got the blues for “Patch,” though, as she wants to get down and dirty: “You’ll feel like heaven in my garden of Eden.” The band takes the chance to do some tasty guitar jamming, with nods to Creedence, on the rocker’s lengthy outro.