Sarah Sekoa is a boho-chic, elegant hippie with a ready smile and patient grace. As we ease into the seats in the dark bar, avoiding both the crowds and the brilliant summer sun, we sip at cocktails and meander down the road towards artistic origins and creative ideations.
A daughter of Oregon, Sekoa is a poet and singer/songwriter that grew up in Gresham. She went to PSU where she played volleyball, eventually getting married and having a couple of kids. Everything was on the path that her solidly working-class lifestyle had prescribed.
That is until waking up one day to realize that she had a far greater ambition. And talent. While she had musical theatre and choir in high school, she had been raised in a megachurch form of restrictive Christianity that preferred adherence to creativity.
Thankfully, she got over that. Thankfully for her, but mostly thankfully for the rest of us who get to enjoy her creativity and voice.
So maybe I should not have been surprised that it was music, and her voice, that brought Sekoa to my attention earlier this year. What I did find interesting was her choice of music. She is a product of the 90.s, but her taste and styles reflect a more angst-filled and darker decade. A decade that I love.
Love is a Battlefield is the song that brought her to my attention. She sent me a link to view her cover, and I honestly thought, dismissively, ‘oh … that’s an interesting choice.’ The song was fine, an 80s anthem of sexual liberation and rebellion It was almost a primal scream, in an era when women’s voices were not as widely heard.
But, I had to admit: It had never been one of my favorites. Probably because I had known Pat Benatar’s niece in middle school, a cute and privileged little twit that had harassed me mercilessly through 7th grade English.
Sekoa’s version, however, knocked me on my heels. Instantly. She had replaced the roughhewn, bitter angst of the original with a softness and a clarity of longing that grabbed my attention.
The song was no longer just a peon to women’s empowerment against the brutality of men (not to minimize it, by any means) but a song of desperate hope for genuine love. The battle that Sekoa sings is not to find herself against the rigid form of toxic masculinity so pervasive in the rape culture of Reagan’s America, but the battle to keep an open heart, to fight for the promise of love, and the dream of what love is as a healing salve in an era where social isolation, objectification, and heartbreak still reign supreme at the end of Trump’s America.
Hmmm…. Maybe we aren’t so far past the ’80s as we thought?
Sitting with Sekoa, and her longtime collaborator, Billy Dimes, I quickly realized her choice of a cover spoke to a deeper artistic character. Not only does she have a soulful, deep timbre voice, but she also has a capacity for writing that makes her a true double-threat. She had started to write poetry in high school, the angry emotional poetry of teens that cries out against the injustices of the world. She saw it more as an expression of angst rather than art. It was only after years of dismantling her conservative influences, a divorce, and building her new life on her own terms that she accepted her voice as raw, brutal, kind, and true. It was at this moment that she gave herself the space and understanding to be free as a writer.
She describes her brain as a frenetic cacophony of sounds and images. “I have six channels running,” she says with a wry smile that lights up her eyes. “They are all running at once.” She hesitates to say this, thinking that this plus wonderful and vibrant swings from sheer joy to grief may cast her as mentally unstable.
She is not.
Even with the support of her creative partner, Billy Dims, she still asks herself the existential question: Does she fit in the clothes as an artist? When she surveys her life, she is a bartender and waitress and poor, she checks off the prerequisites, but wonders if she is an artist.
She is an artist. And a talented one, at that. Where does her voice come from? A place of hurt and love. Hurt is always a powerful creative inspiration. She writes to give herself therapy.
She credits Victoria Erickson, the Texas-based poet, as her inspiration. Erickson, a grounded idealist who’s been writing the world awake since she was a child, has inspired Sekoa to be concise and brutally honest in as few words as possible. Poetry, with its structure in her hand, limits her emotion to its most base, and raw meaning in a sublime and unstructured verse.
Poetry for her is less about ownership. It is like she is listening to something that she has been told. When she puts the pen to paper, it is about putting together words that she wants to read, and if no one else gets it, she just doesn’t give a fuck. Her writing feels like a manic blast of her being up until 3 am writing and tapping on her phone. Her mind has 6 channels running at all times, she tells me. It’s a constant barrage of ideas and words and images flooding her mind, and giving her the words for poems and songs that others would only dream about.
After spending an hour with her, it is obvious that her brain is laying down a layered, multi-track of Dark Side of the Moon while the rest of the world is living, sadly, in mono.
She used to wake up dreaming words, saying words, almost connecting to a higher plane. It was in college, perhaps first feeling that inevitable freedom from family and expectation, and the inherent loneliness of change, where she learned to channel her own words. Like almost every writer I have met, she sees these words before she writes them. For her, she has built a living room in her imagination, a place that she can see but can’t describe, and this is where the words come to life. “I wish I could draw,” she says, speaking wistfully of this place. But it is in this place where she finds her most creative moments, including the video that she shot for Love is a Battlefield.
And while she fits the order of the obsessed poet, Sekoa differs about her own self-direction, saying doesn’t get a lot done working on her own, and that her muse comes from collaboration with friends; she takes the role of the driver to move creative production forward. It is in those moments that she is most productive and in tune with her own genius.
Billy Dimes tells the story about how in the era of COVID-19, he has been discovering and sharing with Sekoa the songs of his youth; yacht rock, as he called it. The Eagles and Steely Dan, with a little Rafferty thrown in for good measure. Something easy and chill, and good feeling in these darker than usual days. He wanted to lay down a cover of ‘I Can’t Tell You Why’ and as he walked into the booth, he realized that the song is in such a high register, so he called Sekoa. She walked in humming the song. They did the video and the song in one take. That is the artistry of Sekoa.
“One shot, One kill,” Billy says with a smirk of a man who understands creative genius.
Her mind is a playground of new ideas, and her next project is the publishing of a collection of poetry. She maintains a running collection of thoughts and poems and projects on her phone. She sees herself as truly creative, but she admits that she lacks the credentials and experience to just stand up in front of publishers, or record producers, or even a film director, and just say “Here I am.” But she can intuitively see it, she can feel it. “I can do things in the world that really challenge people. I am a kid just beginning to see who she can when she grows up.”
When I press her about her poetry and its genesis, she smiles and tells a story about her birthday. She woke up, she says, to the need to listen to Joni Mitchell. She had never intended to listen to Mitchell, not that she avoided it, but only that it hadn’t spoken to her. Until that day. She listened to Blue. It was the raw emotion, the poetry, the vulnerability of her lyrics that spoke to her about her life: divorce, pain, and unrequited love.
Unrequited love is a theme in her life. She lives it 24/7. It taps her into unconditional love. A deep desire to have the love for someone else coming back It’s not just about self-love. The love she feels is so delicious and beautiful, and she doesn’t get to choose who inspires that in her. But she longs for the moment when the love that she is giving so freely, is given back and inspires in them the same longing and devotion. “Together,” she utters. “To be in that together.” Though it has yet to happen. She keeps falling beautifully in love with people who aren’t capable or willing to love back at the same level.
She loves to explore the feeling of love: the friendships and the love she has for her kids. It keeps getting sweeter and sweeter with time.
When she reads her poetry, she says she still sees the person for whom it was written, either the friend or the lover. Inspired by the love she felt for a person, she then reads it afterward and sees how it tied to the world around her: the trees, the people, everyone. It transcends. It creates a sense of devotion that is aligned with love.
She doesn’t write poetry so that the person knows, or even knows that she is the writer. She doesn’t care if the object of her affection (or romantic frustration) even knows she exists. It is just the need to send out love through words. It feels good to love. There is nothing but love. “If love flowing through me is all I ever get to have, then that is enough. And I feel complete.” Her poetry comes from this edge of love and emotion. Poetry that comes from a joyful place is just as difficult and hard to share as poetry from her grief and painful place.
As a poet and artist, does she feel fear about being happy? Is she afraid, like so many poets, that somehow happiness might rob her of the creativity to write? Her younger life, she admits, was filled with micro-traumas. And while she is not afraid to feel or even to love joyously, her mantra is “This Joy Too Shall Pass” And there is relief in this. She can lean into the joy knowing that it is as fleeting as the pain. And this is how she lives, and this is how she creates.
How can you package that hurt and emotion? It comes out in Love is a Battlefield. She is sitting in front of the camera, feeling the genuine emotions of the song. She is not acting. It is the authentic Sarah Sekoa as an emotional, raw, and vulnerable performer. She approaches it with confidence.
“Love is,” she says, “a fucking battlefield.” And she is there for it. She is not going to bow out. She is not going to give up. “I am going to win.”
Follow Sarah Sekoa on Instagram