The most-played female artist on Under The Radar is also one of my personal all-time favorites, Sara Groves.  Even with a sore throat, she was willing to sit down with me for an interview, which was one my 2010 highlights.   


DT:  Besides UTR naming Fireflies and Songs the #1 Gourmet Album of 2009, you’ve had a lot of praise from critics and fans alike.  How does all the positive attention feel?
Sara:  Anytime I finish a record, the most I can do is feel that I did the best that I could. That sounds very cliché, but that’s it. After that, whatever happens, I have to kind of let that go. I think this record has been really special because I did disclose so personally about marriage and friendship and everything that people reciprocate in that way – sharing back personal things. I think music just taps into something in all of us that goes beyond maybe what the spoken word can communicate. So, I think my favorite response has been along the lines of marriage. We’ve just had a lot of couples or individuals come up and say, “This really helped us recognize something in us,” or “We were in this place and felt like we’re not alone or we can get through it.” So I think those kinds of things are always incredible and a huge honor to get to put a voice to somebody's experience

DT:  How do you balance being a full-time musician and full-time mom?
Sara: Three things I’ll say. First of all, I have a lot of help. Second, I don’t have to do what everyone else is doing in addition. I think a lot of people think about how busy they are and they look at my life and they think, “I couldn’t do that too.” What we have to do fills our days in a way that’s right.  Third, I say “no” a lot. Over the years we’ve said no to things that killed us to say no to. But we look at our kids a lot. They’re our barometer if we’re keeping a healthy pace or not.  We don’t always do it well. I will say that.

DT:  Do you have any thoughts on what the word “worship” means to you nowadays?
Sara:  Man, worship. Well first of all, you know I don’t think its cliché or old to say I think you can worship in a myriad of ways. Everything to me… I even try to wash the dishes that way.   I even wrote a song about washing dishes on the last album called “Setting Up the Pins” and it was like, how do I take hold of even the simplest tasks, kind of in that Francis Schaeffer kind of thinking, that God is there in the midst of the most ordinary parts of our life.  …One song that’s had a huge influence on my thinking of worship has been Jon Foreman’s “Instead of a Show” from one of his solo EPs.  The lyrics say, “Away with your noisy worship, away with your noisy hymns/ I stop up my ears when you’re singing ‘em/ Instead let there be a flood of justice/ An endless procession of righteous living.”  Man, that’s a powerful song. It’s not about going through the church motions, but about being the hands and feet of Jesus.

DT:  What’s the story behind your new song “Like A Lake”?
Sara:  Yes that was about forgiveness. I started to write a song about Rwanda, the forgiveness that we’ve seen there is unbelievable. I remember the first trip that I took, heard about a woman who would go down to the prison and she would implore the men “Confess to these crimes that you’ve done.” And after going week after week, a young man stood up, 16 years old, and said “If I confess to killing your family, will you forgive me?” You know she did not see who had killed her five children and her husband, but she knew in that moment that this was the boy. She went home and she just prayed and cried and mourned and grieved. She came back a few weeks later and said “If you will confess that you have killed my family, I will forgive you.” And three years later under pressure from humanitarian rights groups they had to set some prisoners free and back into the population. He was set free and he came to this woman and said “Your forgiveness was the greatest gift that was ever given to me.” And she said “Where will you go from here?” He was 19 at this point and didn’t know where to go. She said “Stay here and work on my farm.” He worked on her farm and a couple years later she adopted him as the heir to her property. So you hear a story like that and you’d think that that was unique but it’s not. It’s not unique in Rwanda. And they are really pushing for truth and reconciliation – to really use forgiveness as a weapon to not have genocide again. So I started writing this song about that. At the same time I had a friend going through an extremely painful divorce. Just watching him I thought “You know, if I write a song about Rwanda, they’re going to think ‘That’s overseas; that’s not here’.” We have a little lake (a glorified pond) behind our house and I was looking out over it and I just thought, “Isn’t this just such an amazing picture of God that He takes and takes and takes, just swallows up all this hurt.” You can’t imagine what God sees and knows and yet he extends forgiveness to us - unbelievable. And I thought about all the things that fall into a lake over time and how it changes the surface of the bottom and yet the surface on top stays keeps this openness. Watching this friend extend forgiveness through his divorce, I just thought I want to write a song that captures more of the personal feelings, also drawing on my own experience with hurt. When I’ve been hurt, everything in me wants to curl up into a ball and just harbor this pain. My heart gets so tight. But Lord, help me just be open like a lake. So that’s the heart of that song.

 
DT:  Your songwriting is so connected to real life.  Are you always analyzing life?
Sara:  Inside, my mind is constantly just worrying, which is a blessing and a curse. It’s what makes me a writer - I think and have to get things out verbally - process my life with songwriting. But it can be crazy up in here sometimes. I feel like I spend a lot of time trying to just like quiet and I don’t know if that makes any sense but to really take in. I’m constantly making connections. I always want to connect everything, that’s almost a compulsion with me to connect everything. But I feel like that is part of the gift that God’s given me is to. I never see anything by itself. I always see it anchored in all of history, in all of the Bible, in all of the story, the narrative. So one little thing can take me back to the prophets and Moses or just my grandmother or soup. So that’s sort of if I were to define myself, like my existence as like, I’m constantly reading and talking. I don’t know - i’m constantly input, input, input, all these connections and it can be kind of exhausting. But I enjoy that. I like to live that way.

 
DT:  What makes you tick in everyday life away from music?
Sara:  Well, my family. My kids are everything to me. We have a lot of fun as a family – we play a lot. Me? I’ve got great girl friends. In my family - I’ve got two sisters and we’re very close. I love to talk. Troy says if talking were an Olympic sport I would be a gold medalist. I enjoy conversation. I hope it’s not always one sided. I also like listening. I love people - interacting with people.

Sara Groves was our special guest on Episode #82 of “Under The Radar”. And look on our site for your chance to win a Sara Groves 8-CD discography (available until 6/25/10)!