Music Minute: Sara Lovell - Night Life

This spring, Sara Lovell will release her third children’s music album in less than four years. In keeping with her previous two award-winning albums (You’ve Got Me and Wild is Everywhere), Night Life is defined by its easy movement between diverse musical genres in a sparkling and adventurous musical exploration of what happens between the resistance and the surrender when day turns to night.

Listen to the first single, "I Don't Want To Go To Bed," 

Night Life kicks off with the gloriously rebellious and unequivocal “I Don’t Want to Go to Bed.” Jangly guitars mixed with a slightly trashy snare and tambourine suggest early 90’s REM, Switching sonic gears, the title track is a disco funk paean to a heroic dream life full of pharaohs, flaming arrows, icy waters and masked marauders.

The songs move between the prosaic and the sublime, the absurd and the beautiful. While many of the songs focus on bedtime and sleep, others touch on many of Lovell’s favorite themes of home life, nature, and the imagination. “Little Bug” sweetly imagines the commonalities between a tiny creature’s life and the child who speaks to her: “Little bug, what’s your name, you are small but we’re not all that different. I have hands, you have wings, we have houses that we like to live in.” A night of camping in the backyard is the inspiration behind “I Don’t Sleep in a Bed”: “I don’t sleep in a room, I sleep in a tent lit up by the moon. I see the raccoons when they visit, you'd think it's scary but it isn't.”

From the tender and humorous reality of the earthbound moments, Lovell switches to songs about living in a world without gravity, where one can soar through the sky and walk to villages on the moon. The message behind “Rocket” is a powerful call to take risks – even if it’s more than a little daunting: “There's a rocket in the sky and it won't be there for long. It's inviting me to try to be brave and to be strong.” Through her work, Lovell recognizes that parenthood allows grownups to engage with their kids’ very fluid flights of fancy, thereby rediscovering the power of their own imagination. “The line between reality and fantasy doesn’t have to be so rock solid,” she says. “New ideas come from allowing ourselves to dream freely.”
 
From frenetic delirium to the sweetest lullabies, the album covers territory familiar to every parent and child, delivering smart lyrics couched within the undeniably catchy and beautifully arranged songs that have become her trademark. Lovell (who studied at Indiana University’s famed Jacobs School of Music) brings her deep understanding of folk and pop music to vivid life in songs that range in influence from traditional work songs to disco to Beatles-era pop. The lyrics were co-written with award-winning singer/songwriter Monica Pasqual who also produced the albums.

In the last three years, Sara Lovell’s albums have won two Parents’ Choice® Gold Awards; two Independent Music Awards; a Family Choice Award and a NAPPA Award.
 
Lovell plans to release music videos and share these songs in live performances later this spring. For more information and updates, visit www.saralovell.com, or Facebook and Instagram.