Sarah Goldstone - Waving (2023)

Even if you’ve never actually heard of Sarah Goldstone, there’s a very good chance you’ve heard her. The Brooklyn-based musician has already lived a number of musical lives, spreading her talents widely across projects, making ends meet as a musician for hire, as she finds any way possible to keep exploring her musical dreams. In recent years, those dreams have started to come through, as she has been travelling the globe as a touring musician for the likes of boygenius, Lucy Dacus and Hurray For The Riff Raff, all while working on the songs that would become her debut album, Waving, out next month via Ruination Record Co. Ahead of the album’s December 1st release date, today Sarah is premiering Waving’s beautiful title track.

Waving is almost like a play, two separate scenes that come together to form a picture of a relationship at a turning point, gazing back at what was and asking if the cycle can be broken to give hope for a future. The track begins with a trip to a partner’s parents, “searching for signs of what we’d be like if we went the same way as them”, at first it seems almost idyllic, yet as they drive away the first cracks begin to show, “we’re driving away, I’m waving back to them, fathers always stop waving before mothers do, and one day you’ll stop waving before I do”. The whole thing is set to a fairly classical piano ballad, channelling the likes of Regina Spektor or Rufus Wainwright’s more stripped-back moments.

Following the opening scene, an instrumental section introduces the waver of a John Grant like Theremin, as it seems to take us to the next scene, the musical equivalent of a wordless night drive back from a thoughtful weekend away. On arrival you can almost hear Sarah’s cogs whirring, “I try to forget, but I know what I’m doing”, before the spectre of old hurt rears its head, “trying to pretend my heart hasn’t taken a beating, when it’s taken to beating faster and faster, when you come near”. Ultimately her fear of repeating painful old patterns seems to lose out to her desire to be wanted and to want for a brighter future, as she repeats, “if you’re in the mood to yearn, yearn for me”, her voice giving way to the swaying, slow waltz of the outro.

Listening to this beautiful title track of Sarah’s upcoming album, it seems evident that for everything she’s already achieved working on other people’s music, she might just have saved the best for herself, a beautiful complex songwriter making it all sound wonderfully simple.