Harp Magazine article on Sarah Borges....

Sarah Borges: Songwriter We’d Like to Get to Know Better
By Duc Pham (Harp Magazine)

If Boston-based roots-rocker Sarah Borges ever gets sick of touring, she has a bright future in marketing. Told how Harp heard her album while a hostage in a huge traffic jam, she says “it’s too bad we couldn’t force that situation upon everyone we want to hear the record, like make their car stop or stall so they have to listen. We could call it Engine Disabler!” That’s exactly the kind of captive-audience marketing idea the big media suits like to hear—but lucky for Borges, she and her band the Broken Singles don’t have to resort to such tactics. Rooted in roadhouse roots rock but mindful of everything from KISS to the Replacements to Reigning Sound, and wet with Borges’ gorgeous Kelly Willis/Mary Weiss vocals, Diamonds in the Dark (Sugar Hill) is required listening you’ll demand to hear.

Diggin’ Uncle Q - “The Day We Met” sounds like it has NRBQ’s Big Al Anderson written all over it. Borges says her bandmates hipped her to the goofy High Geniuses of American rock ’n’ roll. “Our guitar player Mike, he’s from New York and he’s seen NRBQ [innumerable] times…[and] he started bringing all the NRBQ records into the van. There ain’t nothin’ like driving down the American highway listenin’ to NRBQ’s Live at Yankee Stadium.”

She Works Hard For The…Tangible End. “Part of the reason that people make art is there’s something that they’re trying to work out or work through. I don’t know if you really know what that is until the end of it, and maybe there isn’t an end—but at least a song is a tangible, 3 1/2-minute end. You’re a little bit further along at workin’ out where you’re at in your life in the 3 1/2 minutes than you were before you wrote it.”

Uncommonly Good! Harp’s own David Sprague says there’s an “impossibly infectious hook secreted in every song.” Sounds like a Keebler cookie, eh? They are, of course, uncommonly good. “[laughing] Yeah, I know. Of course it makes you laugh hysterically when you read stuff that’s been written about you. Not that you feel like it’s untrue, but other people’s assessments of what you’re saying is always a little bit suspect. But that’s a flattering thing to have said, but it does conjure up Keebler elves or puppies.”