By ERIC SCHELKOPF
Nashville musician Sarah Clanton is the type of musician who likes to connect with her audience as she performs.
Clanton will perform at The Venue in Aurora on March 6 along with Christina Eltrevoog. Doors open at 7 p.m. and the show starts at 8 p.m.
Tickets range from $12 to $15, available at themusicvenue.org. The Venue is located at 21 S. Broadway Ave. in downtown Aurora.
On March 7, Clanton will perform at the Friendly Tap, 6733 Roosevelt Road, Berwyn, with Robinlee Garber. The free show starts at 8 p.m.
I had the chance to talk to Clanton about her current projects.
Q – It’s interesting. I saw you perform at The Venue in March 2023 and you of course will be performing March 6 at The Venue. I guess it shows that when people come to see you perform at The Venue, they can count on spring being just around the corner.
It is kind of funny. I'm not really sure what keeps bringing me back the same week in March.
Q – When I last saw you at The Venue, you were talking to the audience about what inspired you to write a certain song and was just generally interacting with the crowd a lot. Is that important to you, to connect with the audience?
I'm classically trained and when you're in orchestra, you don't look at the audience. Connecting with the audience definitely took some work.
It is interesting how it's involved into this conversation with the audience. I do tend to really like a listening environment.
I have toured solo for a long time and I do a ton of house concerts. And it does feel really good to connect with the audience and kind of see what comes of it.
There's a lot of circumstantial hilarity that occurs, depending on how much people want to interact.
Now, I've got to get good at creating a sing-along or something.
Q – It does seem like there are more cello musicians out there these days. I understand that seeing Ben Sollee at Bonnaroo in 2008 provided a spark for you on what you could do with a cello.
It never occurred to me to sing with a cello. I just hadn't seen it.
Sometimes you have to see somebody do it to be like, "Oh, I guess this could be something to try out." So I started doing that and it felt like the puzzle pieces finally clicked.
Q – You started Tunedough®, an educational platform for independent songwriters seeking to own the rights to their work outright. You must have seen the need for such a platform.
So I had a record deal and the day the album came out, the FBI raided the offices of the parent company that owned the company that I was signed to because the owner was convicted of a $200 million Ponzi scheme.
I knew I needed to lawyer up to get my intellectual property back, which I did. And in the process, I found a website to log into where my royalties hadn't been collecting.
It just fired me up. I wanted to create a self guided course that music makers could take at their own pace so they could learn what there is actually to collect in a song.
Q – And have artists in turn thanked you for doing this?
Yeah. I have a friend who is a singer-songwriter. She went through my course and she just realized she hadn't signed up for one platform called SoundExchange and she found like $1,000 that was just sitting there.
Q – You released a new song, “Looks Like Love,” last June. Are you working on any new songs these days?
I am. And I am so glad you asked, because I definitely feel like in building my company, that's taken some attention away from my writing and this year, I'm trying to focus more on fewer things.
A couple of years ago, I had the idea to do this album "Shadow Work." And I thought maybe I would do this companion album called "Light Work."
I'm writing this record about the paradox. You can't have the bitter without the sweet and vice versa.
I think a lot about what I want to get up on stage and sing about every night.
Q – What would you like for people to get out of your music?
Songs, I feel like, take on their own life. I had one of my most magical musical memories happen at The Venue.
The first time I came and played there, this woman came up to me at the merchandise table after my show and said to me, "I looked up your music before we came to see if we wanted to come to the show tonight and I found this song of yours called 'Silver Lining' and we used to call my sister the queen of silver linings. And she passed away four years ago and the song has really helped me."
And I couldn't help but tear up. I had no idea my song was out there doing this.
I had no idea my song was helping this person in this way. It's kind of a leap of faith sometimes when you're writing music.
My heart just explodes at the thought that something I write is out there having it's own little life in someone else's life and helping them in some way.
Q – I was just thinking about your story about how you were inspired to play the cello on stage. Has anyone been inspired to start playing the cello because of you?
I hope so. I do hope so.
I have had a few women come up to me and tell me they play cello too but that they can't sing and play.
And I tell them to just give it a try and that singing and playing a cello is not that different from singing and playing a guitar. There are fewer strings on a cello.
