Naming is complicated for Sarah Shook and the Disarmers. “I wanted to pick a name that didn’t really seem like it would be a country band,” says Shook of adopting the tag “Disarmers” in 2014. “I liked the irony of that.”
As for the name Sarah, Shook has actually been called River since late 2020 but hasn’t definitively decided to update the group’s handle. A nonbinary bisexual who uses they/them pronouns, the alt-country singer, songwriter and guitarist expects to be billed professionally as River “at some point,” they say by phone from North Carolina.
Almost two decades ago, a 19-year-old Shook moved from Upstate New York to North Carolina with their parents, who had limited their children to only Christian and classical music. “When I started writing songs, I didn’t even really have words for what genres I was working in,” the musician recalls. “In my early 20s, I heard country music for the first time. And I had this feeling of recognition. I was like, ‘What is this? Because this is something that I’m doing.’”
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The new “Revelations” is the most acclaimed of Shook and the Disarmers’ four albums. Joined by guitarist Blake J. Tallent and drummer Jack Foster — bassist Mason Thomas and pedal-steel player Evan Phillips enlisted after the album was recorded — Shook sweetens “Give You All My Love” with a pretty chorus but bashes out defiant broadsides such as “You Don’t Get to Tell Me.”
As Shook proclaims in the latter song, “I came all this way on my own.” The song “is pretty layered and came from a lot of different feelings about Christianity and religion and gender identity,” they say.
Shook quit a lot of things along the way: meat and dairy, their parents’ fundamentalist creed, and alcohol. “I’ll be sober five years in July,” they say. “It’s incredible.”
“I used alcohol for well over a decade to run from myself and aspects of myself I didn’t understand. And to run from the past and religious trauma and abusive relationships.”
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“For me, it was never enough to say that sobriety isn’t drinking,” they continue. “Sobriety is about facing all of my demons, getting my [stuff] together, figuring out who I am and then approaching life from this more poised and organized place.”
Share this articleShareBefore “Revelations,” Shook’s most recent project was a 2022 alt-rock album, credited to Mightmare, on which the musician played everything but a few bass parts. “That was my first foray into production. Obviously a very different animal. It was just me,” they note. “It showed me I was able to make good decisions in the studio.”
That project led Shook to tackle the production duties for the latest Disarmers release. Rejecting the high-tech strategies of a previous producer, Shook recorded the band live and didn’t Auto-Tune the vocals.
“I didn’t want to work with someone who didn’t know how to interpret or mix my voice,” they explain. “Making sure that I sounded like me was really important.”
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“One of things I really like about my voice is that it’s not perfect. It can be scratchy. There are times that I’m flat; there are times that I’m sharp.
“But I never set out to be a great singer, just like I never set out to be a great guitar player,” Shook says. “Songwriting is everything, and I just happen to have to do those other things to get my songs out into the world.”
June 15 at 8 p.m. at Songbyrd Music House, 540 Penn St. NE. songbyrddc.com. $15-$18.
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