Sarah L King on The Light Ahead

Channeling the shimmer and glamour of the golden age of disco, Sarah L King is bringing energy to a sound that feels both nostalgic and refreshingly modern. With music that fuses infectious grooves with a sleek and contemporary edge, her latest album The Light Ahead is a melting pot of jazz, neo-soul and funk.

I was joined by Sarah recently to talk about the creation of the album - the inspirations that drive her sound, and what it means to make that late 80s and early 90s nostalgic funk sound accessible in today's musical landscape...

To start at the beginning, your debut album Fire Horse was released in 2024. When you came to write The Light Ahead, how had your mindset shifted?

With Fire Horse, it felt quite ‘Dear Diary’, with lots of confessional lyrics. It was the first album I'd done, so I poured myself very personally into it with what was closest in my heart. But since then, I’ve been gigging with the musicians from that album for about eighteen months, and we kind of know each other quite well by now. We bonded with that album and we've had a lot of fun touring it, so I think when it came to writing the second one, I felt more confident.

I was used to the sound of us all together (which probably did affect what I was thinking about when I was writing lyrics) but when I was composing and coming up with the music, I was thinking I wanted more of a groove-led thing. I wanted to go a bit further and be more confident with the type of music I'm making, because those guys are so great. I wanted to really get the most out of it, and it was exciting to take it in that slightly more groove-led way.

You’ve described this album as being about optimism and really enjoying the present moment. Was there a particular experience or turning point in your life that sparked that philosophy, or was it a gradual shift in mentality?

I probably didn't want to stay locked into that emotional mindset I was in. The first album started in lockdown, and I think there was quite a bit of pining and yearning for things that weren't there – people that weren't there. My dad passed away in the first album as well, and that definitely coloured it a little bit. So in this album I guess it was a culmination of several things that were a catalyst. I knew I had to write again, that was a given. But I don't think there was one particular thing.

Your music sits in this beautiful space between jazz, neo-soul, and singer-songwriter storytelling. How did that particular musical voice develop for you?

You know what, it's quite hard when you have a hybrid genre. I love it, but it's hard to pitch it to people. I think it came about very organically: I listen to all sorts of music, but I love the jazz vocalists and modern jazz – my father was a jazz trumpeter, so I listened to a lot of music.

When I started to write songs and compose myself, I discovered I couldn’t compose a really complicated jazz piece; there was no way I was going to do something in seven/eight rhythm with really long interludes and things. It just sort of naturally happened actually, the way I wrote reflected all the things that I'd absorbed over the decades. I love a lot of modern neo-soul singers like Kandace Springs, who is one of my favourite singers. She's beautiful on both piano and the vocals, and she's quite simple in how she goes about her own compositions – even though they're wonderfully complex. I think people like her have influenced me in a way, because I admire her vocally. I'm thinking about what will come out of me that I can compose, but also vocally enjoy singing, and it's just naturally come out as a hybrid.

Sounds as though it wasn’t a contrived pulling together of different things…

No. Actually, if you try to write a classic jazz standard, like the show tunes of the 20s and 30s, it's actually very hard to do these days. Also, you think ‘why?’, because there's so many great ones there, and you want to reflect where we are now. So it feels right to have this hybrid genre. 

It's exciting, and a lot more people are doing it, too. It's very hard to categorise and pitch yourself, because people say ‘jazz’ and people say ‘soul’, so it's really awkward when you're pitching to streaming platforms and you've only got a few boxes to tick, and you think ‘I don't even feel really exclusively jazz or soul’...But the more words you throw at it, the more people get it.

There are also parts about the album that hint at a kind of disco-era glamour, including the front cover. What is it about that aesthetic that appeals to you?

That just is something that excites me, to be honest. I loved disco so much when I was a lot younger. I thought it was a really seminal, progressive form of music, and some of the best artists were so great – Sylvester, Donna Summer, Earth, Wind and Fire.

But I think that aesthetic has been overdone in the past, and everyone's sick to death of disco compilation albums. But if you go right back and draw on the musicianship of that, it's just beautiful. There are singers I admire like Alison Goldfrapp and St. Vincent that have brought it into the now, and they're really glamorous. So I suppose I aspire to be vaguely in that world, and I just love the aesthetic of it.

Let’s talk about your original compositions on the album. They come across deeply honest and optimistic, and you touch on quite a few different messages. Was that a deliberate choice when you were writing, or did these moments naturally occur? 

That's a good question; I’d say it’s a little bit of both. I think that's one of the reasons why this album steered away from the first, because I do remember consciously thinking that I want to be more open and look at the world rather than internally. Certainly like with one song, ‘We Gotta Find A Way’, that's a song about collective responsibility for climate change.

At first I thought ‘Should I do that? I don't want to be preachy. Who am I to do that?’. But then I realised that it's a subject that I really feel strongly about, so I did it as a challenge to myself. I tried to keep it very metaphorical, but it felt like the right thing to do for that song. I came up with the melody first and then the neo-soul vibe came with it. 

You’ve chosen a really interesting set of covers on the album. What made those particular songs the strongest choice for this particular album?

I take ages to decide on covers. As most artists would be, I'm very fussy about what I do and why with covers. ‘Never Can Say Goodbye’ was the right choice for me because I've always loved that song as a disco song, and I love the challenge of trying to do some sort of disco or Philadelphia soul type of song with a jazz spin on it. It feels like part of my style, this bringing together the worlds that I'm interested in.

Nicola Conte was another cover and I just love his music. He's an Italian acid jazz composer and guitarist. He's so cool, and I like that he's really rhythm-based and groove-led – it all sounds very cinematic. I know some of his songs quite well, and I stumbled across this one, ‘Like Leaves in the Wind’ and I realised I hadn’t over-listened to that myself, even though it's got all the elements of his music that I like. It's kind of cinematic in my mind; it conjures up lots of images and I felt like the message in it was very right for my album. Especially to put it at the end, because life is out of our control and we're like leaves in the wind. 

It was Claire Martin that suggested to me I do ‘Overjoyed’, and as soon as she said it, I completely agreed. Because again, I haven't overheard that song myself and I absolutely love Stevie Wonder. I think Stevie Wonder has coloured my entire life of music and come out in my own writing in some ways. I stumbled across a few different versions of it when I was researching it and I realised that I didn’t have to do it the more traditional way. I could do it in a more samba-type of upbeat way. So that also gave me a real challenge. And I just love that song. So I'm really pleased that Stevie is somewhere on the album because it feels right for the genre. 

‘Just A Little Loving’, which isn't actually written by Dusty Springfield, it's written by Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, was one where I loved the idea of doing it in a three/four rhythm, slightly different from the one that Dusty Springfield did it in. It just felt right for the genre of the album, because there aren't many actual jazz tracks on there, and I feel in a way that's one of the closer tracks to a traditional jazz sort of trio sound. I loved singing it and the band played beautifully on it, so I'm glad that's there.

When you take on well-known songs like these, how do you find the balance between respecting the original and making it feel authentically yours?

I think it's a bit like being an actor made to play a very famous person. If you're going to play Winston Churchill, don't waste time trying to give yourself a double chin, a fat belly, and the right voice. Just think ‘how would he react in this situation? What's the spirit of this man?’ It's the same with music. You think, ‘what is the spirit of this song?’

I think you can go very badly wrong with covers, and it's very easy to make them suddenly sound a bit naff – which is why I'm very fussy about them, and there's a fine line. You've got to keep the spirit of it, but why do a cover at all? That's the other thing. Why do a cover unless you bring something fresh to it? You've got to have something to say as yourself, and ideally convey what it is about that song that excites you. There's nothing more exciting to me than hearing someone's cover of a song – it’s happened a lot with things like Radiohead ‘Creep’. People have done great covers of it, including jazz covers

The album was produced by the one and only Claire Martin, OBE. What did she bring to the project that helped shape the sound of the record?

I’m glad you asked, because she's brought such a lot to it. I'm very thankful and grateful to Claire, because she introduced me to the musicians when I first made Fire Horse, and they've stayed with me. I didn't know those musicians beforehand. She's just great to work with: really enthusiastic, funny, very quick, and she knows what she's doing. 

I think just through the musicians she chose, as well as the engineer that she brought to the project has affected the final sound. Chris Traves is a wizard. He's fantastic. Claire's worked with Chris a lot, and I think he has a certain way of working and a certain sound that they're used to. Chris is a similar era as me too, so we like a lot of the same type of music – another thing that Claire also really understands. That all feeds into creating this sound. 

I love working with her. We're quite different in some ways – no two vocalists are the same, and they shouldn't ever try to be – so it’s really nice that we both recognise each other's differences but at the same time we understand what we're trying to achieve. When she's in the studio with Chris and me, we have a lot of fun and there's a lot of references we can get to very quickly because of that shared language. We're probably subconsciously putting our own influences into that sound, but those influences are probably quite similar to the era of music we all resonate with: the whole Steely Dan, Donald Fagan vibe, and that late 80s, early 90s Crusaders jazz-soul-funk sound.

You’ve mentioned the importance of your ensemble a little already, but can you expand on that? Having performed together for the last couple of years, I imagine you’ve really honed in on the musical chemistry…

Definitely – I mean, they're all fantastic. I would say Laurie Cotter is a giant; he's such a great guy. Kind, funny, lovely to be on stage with, but of course a fantastic player, I have to pinch myself! But I love his bass playing because he's so versatile, he'll step up to anything. He's like a swan, because it all sounds so effortless and fantastic, but you know all the work is going on underneath. I still discover things that he's played in my own tracks as I'm listening to them where I realise the nice undercurrent that he's keeping so tight with his own little flares. 

Jim, the pianist, is absolutely wonderful, and again very versatile. I think Claire picked these musicians for my type of music, and she picked them wisely because we didn't want straightforward, straight ahead jazz people as such, given that my style does mix different genres. So Jim is great on the Hammond, on the organs, on the classic piano. And he's played in those types of genres with great people as well. We all take different references from each other, and actually we've got similar tastes in music. There's a strong passion for funk music; things like Tower of Power and a few other bands that they've introduced me to, actually. 

Jamie Murray is a very exciting player. I didn't know Jamie before my second album. Claire brought him in and I'm honestly so lucky. Jamie contributes a great deal because he just intuitively knows what to do, and when he does it, he does it with real flair. So he very quickly picks up on what's happening, enough to put in a little flurry here and there, but never overdoing anything. He just understands. He has this natural gift on the drums. 

Do these songs change or evolve when you bring them to the stage and perform them live?

Yes, absolutely. One thing that I’m really obsessed with is my love for backing vocals, and I compose and record most of mine myself. I'm really passionate about them – most of the songs I've loved over the decades have got backing vocals in them, but that is actually quite a challenging thing to do live. Simply in terms of logistical or economical restraints, it’s not always possible for really great backing vocalists to come in, so often I won’t necessarily sing with backing vocals, which means that it's instantly not going to sound like the recorded version. 

But you know, I think the live renditions of these songs are always going to be quite different to the album. I think that's inevitable. Unless you go really, really big and can have an eight-piece band on stage wherever you go, otherwise it's tricky. That's why the songs, the structure of them, they have to carry. You can't put bells and whistles on them in the studio if they're not solid in the first place, so if you can play them just piano and voice, then you know you're onto a good thing. I think in a lot of the live performances I do, I've got my core trio and I often don't have much more than that. 

It's trickier when it comes to a groove-led thing. Jamie will be stunning, and so will Laurie, so it'll work and sound great. But some venues we play in, it may just be a classic piano and not a keyboard, so that's going to give it a different sound. It ends up where every gig is slightly different.

And finally, after making an album that feels so optimistic and outward-looking, where are you headed next? 

Well, I've got the album launch at World Heartbeat in Vauxhall, which is a beautiful, beautiful venue. It's absolutely gorgeous and I'm so excited. That's on the 26th of March. And then I have a couple more dates at the moment, which are absolutely on the album launch tour, and that is Hampstead Jazz Club on May the 9th and Pizza Express Soho on June the 6th.

I want to get back to just having the time to write songs, because around me at the moment there's this cloud of busyness around the launch of this album. It’s lovely and exciting, but I’m looking forward to getting that time back to just go back to writing songs without having anything else going on.

I will definitely be doing more in the near future. Secretly, I'd really like to write a musical! I feel like the kind of songwriting I do would lend itself to that medium, and I've got a few ideas, but I'm just thinking about what would make a good, completely left-field musical. So who knows?!

Any final thoughts?

I know some people out there can be a bit snobby about jazz, and it's something that's previously been very male-orientated. But there's a lot of younger people coming along who are fantastic, which is lovely to see. And when it comes to the type of music that I really like, like the late 80s early 90s funk, The Crusaders, Joe Jackson, and all these brilliant people, I hope that perhaps I can try, in my small humble way, to bridge a gap between those late 80s, early 90s tracks and now, so that a younger generation will perhaps hear something I've done and go ‘what's that?’ It has that sound of nostalgia, but it's now. That's what I'm trying to do, not consciously, but I feel like if that happened that would be an amazing thing. 

I suppose on a more political front, I really want to raise awareness on the dangers of AI in the music world. Literally in the last few days, I've noticed that AI artists are jumping on real artists on streaming platforms and publishing music under that real artist’s name. These are high-profile artists and it's horrifying to see; I don't know how it's even happening. I just want to put the word out there, because people should definitely be looking into that.