Sara Milonovich has been taking stock as she prepares her fourth album, Last Resort Motor Inn, and she has some stock to take note of. She was raised on a family farm in upstate New York; Milonovich grew up surrounded by bluegrass, folk, old-school country, and the earthy sounds of an agrarian area that still relied on agriculture. By nine years old, she was turning that rural landscape into music of her own, leading her first band as a top-shelf fiddle player. By her late teens, she was touring internationally as a member of the Celtic/bluegrass fusion band The McKrells. By the time she launched her solo career with 2009’s Daisycutter, she’d earned attention from folk legends like Pete Seeger, appearing on his Grammy-winning album, At 89. And now what?
Well, things have changed and continue to change all around her, and that’s nothing new; it’s the way of the world, but in her own corner of it Sara Milonovich finds gentrified mill towns losing their identities, farmers watching country culture become high-class fashion, resilient women surviving on the margins of society, and people searching for connection in fractured times. “There might not be a lot of hope or cheery bits in the songs,” she admits, “but there’s no quit in any of them.”
On the honky-tonking What We Did With The Place there’s a sense of that assessment of change, but it’s also about the emotional and the political as well as the physical aspects of creeping gentrification, on one hand questioning relentless greed “Ran the red light selling off your soul to the deepest purse” and then speculating on the meaning of ownership and history “Argue all day long about the right and the wrong but it’s all stolen land anyway” and then a questioning of authenticity and appropriation “Last time I saw a jacket like that I was back on the farm / 30 years ago it came free with a bag of seed corn / Now we’re all cast-irony proof.” Big topics in a single song, and there’s an album more where this came from.
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