Sad You Missed Sarah Ault’s No Man’s Land EP Release Show? Here’s an Intimate Look into an Unforgettable Night of Music
Words & Photos by Stella Smut
The abandon and desolation evoked by the title of Sarah Ault’s latest EP bears no resemblance to the packed, sold-out house for this talented songstress’s spell-binding release show.
The venue is at full capacity as blue beams of stage light pour over a crowd of anxiously waiting fans yearning to hear Sarah Ault’s new EP, No Man’s Land, live for the first time in what soon became a memorable night at downtown L.A.’s Moroccan lounge.
Behind the curtain, Ault darts around, circumventing various bandmates in preparation for the performance; her auburn mermaid tresses blurring into a golden sunbeam dress; her eyelids painted a seafoam, disco-queen green. She stops for a moment to sip some whiskey before handing it to her drummer for the night and on the record: legendary 90s drum icon and Foo Fighters frontman, Dave Grohl.
He gulps the whiskey, wincing, and blurts out a childlike “GROSS,” then “What the fuck was that shit? God, I got the chills,” concluding with a sarcastic, “There goes that show.” He’s funny, warm and sociable. His playful energy emanates the safety and warmth of a familiar hug.
A laughing, joyful Ault rallies the band to make a game plan for taking the stage. She instructs how this will go: she will go last, Grohl second to last.
“I’ll just do whatever you tell me to do,” he retorts, his eyes widening in jest at a documenting camera as the words leave his lips.
“Right answer!” she delights, pointing in his direction.
Ault met Grohl on the set of a movie they were both working on and struck up a friendship. Mention of Ault’s music had come up and he offered to drum on an idea she had. Soon he was drumming on her record and a plan to play the release show followed suit.
“She’s got a beautiful voice and her songwriting is different than most things I usually play,” Grohl notes with breezy admiration. “I don’t get to do music that’s this dynamic often.”
In a world where clout and ego seem to prevail over connection and experience, Ault made no special effort to publicize Grohl’s presence.
“I didn’t want my show to be full of Foo Fighters fans who didn’t care about what I was doing. I know how cool it is that Dave’s playing with me but I think it made it way better to feel like I could do this on my own.”
This was not the first time Grohl has drummed on another musician’s record or played live with musicians outside of his own projects. He’s a man who loves to play music for the sake of the craft and the connection it creates. How he embraced, with unnerving humility, the opportunity at hand as proof that there is always more to learn, no matter who you are, registered in the room like a beautiful witness to the untold depths of his character.
“I love playing with whoever asks. I think that you learn more playing with other people because no two people play the same. So whether you’re playing with a rock band that you’ve always looked up to or someone that you get along with, it’s just fun to have that conversation with people through instruments. You just learn a lot more playing with brilliant musicians.”
And the backstage room is filled with just that.
Everyone and everything felt good. Really good. As the band members individually drifted onto the stage and the crowd began to cheer, time seemed to stop.
For those in attendance, all of Los Angeles existed right there in that exact time and place.
LED candles placed on stage by bandmates and friends flickered amid the hushed whispers of a settling crowd–a canny set up by Ault to introduce the night’s first song and single: Slow Burn.
“This song is about global warming.”
The collective smiles dim as a sudden seriousness permeated the air. Ault’s piano and haunting vocals fill the silence with fears of a dying world too damaged and depreciated for salvation. Her lyrics allude to a beautiful moment of solace on the Titanic before its tragic descent into its seabed grave, citing a parallel that feels inescapable: perhaps this moment in time is our reenactment of the doomed ship’s irreversible fate.
The band keeps on playing like the ship isn’t sinking
No rescue coming, Lord what were we thinking
The crowd sways in a ghostly trance, mirroring the movements of her backing vocalists Gracie Leboy, Angela Schmitt, and Devon Lee, whose strong, radiant harmonies push into the bodies around them, lifting and levitating the energy of the audience.
Various songs are played in addition to the EP tracks, with a few clear stand outs.
The Road, also featured on the record, is an immediate crowd favorite. This live performance with Grohl’s seismic drum hits activate a volcanic wave that the other bandmates seem to ride, particularly visiting guitarist, Grethel Bonilla and bassist Jason Hiller. Hiller’s vibrational weaving of Bonilla’s guitar riffs, Grohl’s drumming, and Ault’s words of mournful yearning, acceptance, and then apparent indifference to defeat create a 90s rock nostalgia as though it was an involuntary atmospheric compulsion.
The crescendo recalled the apathy and distraction of lighting a cigarette with a cylindrical car lighter, searing your thumb and index finger to no avail because this song is so grossly captivating it’s heinous. To think of anything else, to let one’s mind reckon with any pain besides the tragically romantic atmosphere, would have been blasphemous.
The song somehow bodies forth loss, with undertones of hope in a world where cell phones don’t exist and you are forced to pay attention. Where girls wear black silk slips as dresses with fishnet tights and combat boots, and people carve bad poetry on bathroom stalls in underground music venues on nights where everything smells like the warm jasmine of a forgotten L.A. summer.
Ault’s sultry vocals are dreamy with a touch of grit as she sings: an aural love-child of Mazzy Star, Fiona Apple, and Stevie Nicks.
I want to believe in your rock and roll but it’s hands off the wheel, eyes on the road…
When Bonilla unapologetically rips into the guitar for a forceful solo, Grohl obliterates the drums as all the singers, including front-woman and star of the night Sarah Ault, take to dancing. The crowd cheers, and background vocalist Devon Lee can be seen thrusting her head to the rhythm of the guitar, hollering along with the audience in encouragement as the solo spirals to its peak. Ault shakes her wavy locks back and forth with rockstar vigor before belting her final chorus that leaves us all feeling like we just had the best sex of our lives.
As we catch our breaths and gain composure, she performs “Flesh, Blood and Bone,” an earlier release, to quiet our bodies and minds before sneakily lifting us back up with her penultimate song of the night, “For Your Love,” the final track of the recorded album. This track begins with beautiful acapella harmonies, slow, powerful vocals, and strong imagery of longing and surrender. There is a sense Ault is grounding herself and keeping us there with her, pinned by her words as she repeats her refrain: I’ve waited for your love, too long to let you go.
But just as life waxes and wanes with its calm and its chaos, we are jolted back into the high energy of Grohl’s drumming and surprised by a saxophone solo played by visiting musician Derrick Dymalski. Dymalski tears through the space with command, falling to his knees in the final position of the iconic rock powerslide, disappearing into the crowd for a saxy-stroll before collapsing onto the stage after his final note as though he was an Olympic sprinter who just crossed a finish line. The audience swoons.
Ault’s final performance of the title track, “No Man’s Land,” brings us back to her beginning. A meeting of purgatory and exaltation in a vast, empty wasteland where we can contemplate all the opposing forces that push and pull us into questioning the bounds of our reality. A place where we can wander forever or accept our powerlessness and bask in the freedom of a release that reminds us there are worlds beyond the bounds that most hinder us.
Bathed in red light, the final number comes to an end as Ault sings through a cacophony of wooing: And here I am, in No Man’s land…
The kick drum, bass line and guitar progression that introduced the song, also guide the show to an end, evoking at once the melancholy of death and some promissory transition into rebirth after the night’s glowing, booming, populous enlightenment.
“It’s about one’s own relationship with themselves,” Ault explains in the parking lot a couple of hours before the show. “At the end of the day, realizing that no one can ever really save you and that you need to be your own champion.”
No Man’s Land is now available on all major music platforms.
