Behind Closed Doors with Sabrina Comellas
Sabrina Comellas is a singer/songwriter based in Burlington, Vermont who will be performing in our upcoming Keepsake show, Roots Less Traveled. Tickets are on sale now! In this interview, Sabrina chats with Jay and Hailey about the communities that have shaped her as a musician and person, her thoughts on success in the music business, and her new puppy, Penny.
In this semi-weekly blog series, we post in-depth interviews that take you behind closed doors (or #BCD) with independent artists, many of whom have performed or will perform in a Keepsake show.
Hailey:
Tell us a about your childhood and how you got into songwriting. Who were some of your influences growing up? Did you grow up singing and playing music?
Sabrina:
I started doing musical theater pretty early, and I’ve been taking voice lessons for as long as I can remember. I’ve grown up doing a lot of different styles of music. I was the only musical person in my family other than my grandmothers, who both stopped singing in their later years. I sang jazz and opera for a while, and performed a lot of musical theater. When I got to college, I started getting into more folk and pop music, which influenced my style. I loved listening to artists like Shakey Graves, and I really started digging into older stuff too, like Bob Dylan and Linda Ronstadt, who are both amazing musicians.
My childhood was great. I was a very sporty person and was always the oddball in the group, which I liked. I was the girl who was friendly with everyone, but didn’t necessarily have a circle of friends. I didn’t fall into one particular crowd, I just liked to know everyone.
Jay:
Have you always lived in Vermont, or if not, how did you find yourself there? Do you plan to stay for a while?
Sabrina:
I grew up on the North Fork of Long Island, from birth until I was 12. Then I moved further west on the island for middle school and high school. I went to college in Boston and studied abroad in the Netherlands and domestically in Los Angeles. After graduation, I moved to Brooklyn and Manhattan for a little while to work as a social media assistant for a fashion company. After a couple months of being there, I was starting to get more environmentally conscious. Aside from seeing how bad the fashion industry is for the environment, I started to gain insight on the poor representation of women as Instagram models and things like that. I got turned off by that way of life. So I decided to quit my job and move home. At the time, I didn’t know what I wanted to do, so I went on a road trip.
“The community and music scene here, the general appreciation for the environment and people’s wellbeing is very pertinent in Vermont. So, I decided I wanted to move up here. ”
I went to Boston for a while and visited some friends there, then I went to Maine and did the same. Finally, I ended up in Burlington, Vermont to visit my friend, Jacquelyn Potter. I ended up having an amazing week. The community and music scene here, the general appreciation for the environment and people’s wellbeing is very pertinent in Vermont. So, I decided I wanted to move up here. I visited at the end of March, and by the end of April, I found a house. By the beginning of May, I found a job. On May 25, I moved in.
Jay:
Oh, that’s awesome. I also grew up on Long Island by the way, kind of near you. Smithtown.
Sabrina:
Totally! Oh my God, you spent way too much time at the Smithhaven Mall, didn’t you?
Jay:
I did. That was my childhood. But I’m so glad I’m out of there.
Sabrina:
Same! I found it was culturally stunted. Quite red and I myself am a much more liberal person. There are parts of Long Island I really enjoy, mostly in the more diverse areas. I grew up in a small farming community further east, so I really liked the people there and the small businesses. But I realized in order to enjoy Long Island, you need to have money.
Jay:
Exactly. We heard that you work at a bakery in addition to playing music. Is that your primary day job?
Sabrina:
I like to consider myself a jack of all trades, which is a benefit and a drawback. I’m not an expert at anything. Prior to the pandemic, I had several jobs. I was working as a bartender at a local music venue, Radio Bean and The Light Club Lamp Shop. They are owned by the same gentleman and they’re interconnected. I worked there for two years, and it was awesome being able to meet musicians all the time. That place is a unique, quirky musical community that really filled the town with life. I was also working as a snowboarding instructor at Smugglers’ Notch for a year, which was cool. I got to work with people ages three to 60. I worked as a server at a historic bed and breakfast that’s family-owned called the Willard Street Inn. It’s a great place. If you ever come up and you want to stay at a bougie place that isn’t crazy expensive but still classy, that’s the place.
Jay:
How have you navigated writing and performing music with the money-making side of your career? Do you hope to be a full-time musician some day?
Sabrina:
I like the fact that I can do a lot of different things. Gardening is also something I’ve been interested in this season... So yes, I do like being a jack of all trades. Pre-pandemic, I was really getting into a great rhythm and having a healthy work, career, and personal life balance. I’d just gotten a residency at Hotel Vermont, which was awesome—super cool experience, great place to play. But back then, I was working mostly during the day. When I first got to Vermont, I was working six days a week, all at night, trying to build up a repertoire and getting myself together and trying to switch to more daytime hours. It was pretty easy. I would spend my days working behind the bar and evenings practicing or writing or performing. I had lots of support from friends and family and my roommates, and it was easy to balance everything.
“Nobody is just a musician. We’re people and we have hobbies and skills and other things we like to do.”
So if you’d asked me that question before the pandemic, I would have said, Yes, 100%. I could see myself doing music for the rest of my life. But having that taken away and the opportunity to look at other aspects of my life, I want to be more of a well-rounded person. Nobody is just a musician. We’re people and we have hobbies and skills and other things we like to do. It’s not like I’m only going to play guitar and sing for the rest of my life. I like the idea of being a performing musician, having a band that tours, and maybe having local notoriety in the northeast. I would love to couple that with homesteading. I like the idea of having nature be involved in my future. Music and nature is the way I want to go. Oh! And travel, please send me around the world.
Jay:
I love that answer.
Hailey:
Yeah, Jay and I are both generalists I would say, and we talk about that a lot. Especially with Keepsake House, many people we’ve been interviewing are generalists too, so it seems like we find each other.
Sabrina:
I also think that question can be discouraging sometimes for people who want to be a musician because the truth of it is, unless you're famous and filling up stadiums, there are other things you have to do to sustain that lifestyle. That’s something I was ashamed of because I couldn’t support myself just doing music, I had to have a side gig. But that’s not the case. Just because I have one job that isn’t music doesn’t mean I’m not committed to my musical career, you know? It’s a healthy balance of life.
Hailey:
Totally, and it’s even more difficult now with how little people are paid for recordings.
You released your debut album Sabrina in 2019, which Seven Days called “lush, slickly produced and ready for prime time,” which it really is. It doesn’t sound like your average first album from an independent musician. It’s very well done and could be played on radio or television today. Can you tell us the process of writing the album? Did you hold onto some of the songs for a while, or were they all written in a specific period? How did you bring these to life, and who did you collaborate with, if anyone?
Sabrina:
Yeah, it started with one song that I wrote when I was in college and I loved. I never really considered myself a songwriter because I never sat down and put the effort in to finish and complete a song. I would always have little snippets that I compiled in a journal or voice memos on my phone. Now that I do consider songwriting a craft of mine, I go back, listen to those things, and take ideas from them and develop them. That’s one of the ways I write music now.
But in the beginning, I didn’t consider myself a songwriter. So I left that job in Manhattan and I moved in with my dad because I was unemployed. I would do things around the house, cooking, chores and occupy my time. One day, I asked myself, what do I want to do today? So I started to do more artwork and play guitar more frequently. And the three months I lived at home at my dad’s house, I would just entertain myself by writing music. I wrote five songs in three months, which to some people isn’t a lot, and to others it is. For me, that was a lot because I hadn’t written a song in three years. And all of a sudden, these things just flew out of me and as a result, I had a little more of a handle on chord progressions and structures.
“Just like when you’re learning to ride a bike, you’re going to fall off and skin your knee. But you’re going to get up and eventually, you’ll learn how to ride the bike but your knees will still be bruised. ”
With this album, when I decided to move to Burlington and work on music as my career, the first thing I wanted to do was get an album out. I wanted to make music so everyone could hear me. I wanted it on every streaming platform. I wanted it out for free. I wanted it everywhere. I wanted something tactile too, some sort of a printing of my album. I wanted something to hold onto and be like, look at this thing that I made that I put all this time and effort into! And that’s what it turned out to be. I got some vinyls pressed, which was nice.
There are some things I regret about the album. But you know, just like when you’re learning to ride a bike, you’re going to fall off and skin your knee. But you’re going to get up and eventually, you’ll learn how to ride the bike but your knees will still be bruised.
I met a woman named Myra Flynn when I was working at Lamp Shop. I introduced myself to her and she told me that she taught a songwriting workshop, so I signed up and started talking to her. Immediately, she recommended I go to Colin McCaffery in Montpelier, Vermont at his studio called The Greenroom. I told her I wanted to work on recording my own music and she said Colin had really high production value, and he works with musicians to get them an affordable rate that they can work with that he also feels like he’s being fairly compensated. And he has the ability to flesh out the artist’s vision.
I absolutely loved working with Colin. He was easy to talk to. He understood how I would explain things without me having to write them out. My music knowledge isn’t that of someone who trained or took music theory. I have a powerful, trained vocal instrument, but I don’t read music. So having a producer that can work with my mode of communication was helpful.
We produced this album and the songs are beautiful and I’m grateful that my music has been commemorated in that way. But I kind of look back on it now as an art project that you did in high school when you’re now in college for fine arts. I did well at the time, but it’s not exactly what I wanted. I was working more towards the goal of getting the album out than focusing on what the album said overall. It’s a little more of a country vibe than I’d like it to be. I wish I had more input in the drums, but I left that to Colin. I didn’t know anything about drums at the time. I was grateful because he was able to play a lot of the guitar melodies for me that I couldn’t pick out myself.
Jay:
You have a duet on the album, “Relapse” with Eric George. Did you already know Eric prior to recording? What was that collaboration process like? Also, Eric is a country singer and makes this song sound like a country song. Was that your intention or something new that Eric brought to the track?
Sabrina:
Eric George is a fantastic musician local to Burlington. I met him when he performed at Honky Tonk Tuesdays at Radio Bean. He has a band called Pony Hustle. How fast does your Pony go!? They’re an amazing band. He inspired me as an artist, and I was constantly looking for different artists to be involved. I thought the song [“Relapse”] could really gain some weight if it was sung as a duet. I wanted it to be told from different perspectives. I liked the idea of two people having the same problems. I wasn’t singing to Eric, and Eric wasn’t singing to me, but we were both lamenting together about the difficulties of love.
I asked him if he wanted to collaborate with me and he was immediately all for it. I worked with Colin first to get our vocals and arrangements done, then I went over to Eric’s house and got his vocals down. He actually typed out the lyrics on his old-fashion typewriter—he’s such a cool stylish musician. He has a very rustic, vintage vibe to his life. I’m grateful I worked with him. It added a specific style to the song that I don’t get in every live performance.
Hailey:
I’m glad that was a good experience because when you said the album is country sounding, that’s actually the song that comes to mind.
Sabrina:
Yeah, and I want to emphasize that it’s not that I disliked that it is country. When I wrote those songs, that just wasn’t how I imagined them necessarily. With any song, you can have multiple producers. I have friends who’ve gotten their song produced four different times with different producers and they decided which [mix] they liked best. That wasn’t going to work for me because I didn’t have that kind of money. I really liked how my product came out with Colin because it was very clear he was the producer and he included his own speciality in the craft of my album. It made this work unique.
But yes, it’s a little bit on the country sounding side. [Going forward], I want my music to be more folk-Americana, like The Lumineers, The Head And The Heart, and Shakey Graves, all those peeps.
Hailey:
Well, I’m a big fan of the record and am especially impressed by your lyric writing. You’re so honest and witty, like most of the great country and folk legends, and you’re able to illustrate a story filled with vulnerable emotions all in one song. Can you tell us more about your lyric process? What inspires you, and have you been a writer all your life?
Sabrina:
Every song I write is true to me and my own experiences and emotions and thoughts. Journaling is a great way to get out of my own head. Not just for songwriting, but for my own mental health. I’ve definitely found some great gems from writing in my journal. I usually highlight them and go back to them later.
“Every song I write is true to me and my own experiences and emotions and thoughts. Journaling is a great way to get out of my own head. Not just for songwriting, but for my own mental health. ”
Predominantly, I’ll just write lyrical ideas on my phone. Usually, if I’m sitting down and an idea comes to my head and I have the time, and if it doesn’t feel stressful and it flows, I write out a verse and chorus. I have so many things that are short and sweet. Some of them are 30 seconds long, and I love them and don’t know what to do with them. I’m not trying to push them into a shape. It’s a weird mix of having to work on something and having something naturally happen. It’s kind of like gardening—you have to be mindful of how you’re growing as a person and how to harvest all these ideas.
Jay:
Is there a song on the record that had a clear vision for right from the get-go? Conversely, I feel like there’s always a troublesome track that was maybe difficult to bring to life (whether that’s arrangement or production or the actual writing of it)—was there one for you?
Sabrina:
“Runaway Bullet” is a song I did in one take, and I always knew exactly how I wanted it to sound. It’s very simple.
Most of the songs, I had a vision for. I had an idea where I wanted the swells and dynamics to be. I could verbalize that to Colin; it was the style I had difficulty explaining to him, because I didn't know how to communicate it. Other times I’ve been producing or writing, I usually have my band come over and say, hey Will, I kind of want the drums to be like this [mimics hi-hat sound] and then he’ll come in and fill it in. I’ll give my feedback and I really used other people who were proficient in their instruments to build my vision because I can’t play bass or drums that well. I’m a beginner at all of these things, but it’s so much easier to work with others to make your ideas come to fruition. Sometimes I don’t even know what I want until I hear it, and then it becomes obvious to me. And other times, with my bass player, he would play a bass progression that I really like and I would come up with a guitar part that goes along with it, and from there, I would develop a melody line with my guitar from the chords I originally used.
Hailey:
It’s so fascinating to hear how differently people work. Jay came to me the other day and was like, I’m gonna learn bass! And it was important to her to take those on for herself. But I also like that you’re very honest and admit what you can’t do and that you need to work with others who can in order to bring your vision to life.
Sabrina:
You’re never going to get anything done if you can’t go to people for help. I wouldn’t have an album right now if I did it myself... or I would, but it would be of far poorer quality.
Hailey:
That’s completely fair, especially when it’s not something you wanted to focus on. If you wanted to focus on a solo record, that’s a different project.
Our next question is the most asked question of the last year: how has the pandemic affected your creativity and career?
Sabrina:
I didn’t pick up my guitar for eight months. It just sat in its box. I was super depressed last summer, so it was really hard to activate that creative side of me. I kept saying to myself, You’re not doing enough. You’re never going to be a musician again. I had these very self-deprecating thoughts towards it, so I completely ignored my guitar and music for a while so I could take off the pressure of having to do it and develop it. I tried to focus on different parts of my life instead of shaming myself for not having a forward progression in my career. So often we get caught up in this idea of productivity and success. When the ability to be productive and “successful” in my own career path was taken away, it was hard for me to find things that brought me joy. My guitar and singing were not doing it for me because I couldn't engage in it right away.
“The whole world is going through this. It’s not personal! I’ve come to terms with delayed growth. It’s okay to be stunted right now.”
A few months ago, my mental health improved more. I was more open minded. I realized I didn't lose my musical ability. The whole world is going through this. It’s not personal! I've come to terms with delayed growth. It’s okay to be stunted right now.
A couple months ago, I started to get back into playing. I really only practiced by myself in my house. I play guitar on my back porch, which helps. I haven’t written anything since last April. At that time, I cranked out two amazing songs that I love and haven't been able to perform live. After that, I was like, what’s the point of writing these songs if I can’t play them for people? I haven’t written anything since then, but I stopped putting so much importance on productivity and success and I’ve gained the ability to appreciate music more. It doesn’t need to be something I need to be successful at and doesn't have to be measured or compared to anything else, just something that brings me joy.
Jay:
Yeah, I really resonate with that too. I feel like if you’re a musician, you’re going to make music either way. Whether or not you get paid for it, it’s always going to be something you do.
Building a community of artists and music lovers is so important to Keepsake House. You’ve mentioned community being super important to you as well - can you tell us about the communities you’re a part of and how they’ve shaped you and your path?
Sabrina:
The Radio Bean community was the first one I was a part of in Burlington and it absolutely changed my life. I was introduced to so many interesting people. I was encouraged to pursue a music career. I was supported by my friends and co-workers and the management team. That was a strong, healthy community of weirdos, including myself, who just supported our careers and being ourselves. So that was a big part of Burlington for me.
There’s a plot of land called Intervale. They do community farming and have a few nature trails. I wouldn’t say I’m a part of that community, but I appreciate and value it. I have gotten my CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) there a couple of years in a row.
The service industry in Burlington is really tight, and I love supporting those restaurants and friends. I do a bit of mutual aid work. My best friend works with an organization called Food Not Bombs, as well as Food Not Cops. They work in the Houseless community in Burlington and help clean up their areas and provide food and shelter.
The dog community is great. Everyone has a dog. The town in general cares about the health of the town, so I feel like I know all of my neighbors even though I don’t.
Hailey:
That definitely sounds like Vermont. Speaking of, we know you have a new puppy, Penny. Will there be Penny-inspired songs coming up? How has Penny changed your life?
Sabrina:
I'll probably write one at some point. I don’t know what it’ll be yet. She is my best fiend. She saved my life 100%, no doubt. There’s a rescue that brings dogs found in Puerto Rico, so that’s where I got her. She was eight weeks old. She’s forced me to be responsible. Taking care of her health allowed me to take more care of my own health. It’s gotten me out into nature more. She keeps me in a more positive mindset. She has this energy around her and is wonderful to have by my side.
Sabrina will perform in Keepsake’s first in-person show, “Roots Less Traveled,” at Battery Park in Burlington, VT on Saturday, May 29. Buy tickets now!
Poster by Jeff Deng.
Jay:
What are you up to currently? Can you tease any upcoming songs or projects? Where do you see yourself heading next?
Sabrina:
This is the first show I’ve done since the pandemic started. My plan is to see how this goes and to keep taking everything one day at a time. This past year has shown me that I tend to overthink things, so I’m trying to do that less. I’m trying to accept new opportunities as they come and have more confidence. I want to pursue music as my career, but not my only career. For the foreseeable future, I want to focus on writing music and honing my skills on the guitar and not putting pressure on myself to perform just yet. I want to get back into things slowly.
Jay:
At Keepsake House, we talk a lot about the magic in live shows and the communities they help create, almost like every live performance is itself a keepsake that you cherish from a whole house of life experiences. Tell us about your most memorable or fulfilling live performance, the one you would grab first in a fire.
Sabrina:
“I love to bring people together as a musicians. Collaboration and inclusion are some of the highlights of working in music and the arts. ”
My album release show at The Light Club Lamp Shop. I had a cellist, violinist, drummer, an upright bassist, a second guitarist, Eric George. I had two backup singers. I had all these amazing musicians with me. The room was at capacity before I even started. I was wearing these amazing red trousers that I’d just gotten and my shop T-shirt. It was just nice. No, it was fucking awesome, it was great. My dad and his girlfriend were there and my mom was there and my sister was there. They had seen me live before but not quite like this. It was my favorite performance. I sang through my whole album, I sang a Maggie Rogers song, an Emily King song, and I ended by singing “Night Shift” by Lucy Dacus. Everyone flipped out, so that was cool. There was a line to get in. I felt like people really cared and wanted to listen to my voice.
It was a magical experience. It was such a good energy in the room. Everyone was happy to be there. There were huge rounds of applause. The musicians were smiling and having a great time. The fact that I was able to provide that show experience for everyone, I’m so thankful for that. I love to bring people together as a musicians. Collaboration and inclusion are some of the highlights of working in music and the arts.
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