Sarah Sample’s ‘Old Barn Owl‘ is a gorgeous song. It is also very much a song of two parts, a gentle strummed folk song that takes to wings that soar over a desolate and lonesome landscape. It’s a song that Sample co-wrote with her sister Cate Graves under a West Texan sky full of stars.
Sample says that they “were attending a song-writing retreat where we learned a new method: cutting up old books into bits and pieces and then creating new lyrical phrases from them. My sister and I sat under a fall moon and wrote the chorus. As we started singing the lines, something cathartic was happening. It was quiet. It was healing. We reflected on what can happen in nature, with no one to judge you and the acceptance that you are worthy just as you are. You never know what kind of song you’re going to write, but sometimes when you’re in a mystic place you get these kinds of odes to nature.”