Tori Sparks

A singer and songwriter who bridges blues, folk, rock, and ventures into flamenco music, Tori Sparks is graced with a fiery, gutsy delivery worthy of Ani DiFranco. After emerging in 2003 with the EP Tidewaters, she released her first album, Rivers + Roads, in 2005. Third album The Scorpion in the Story (2009) favored an acoustic palette, and with her fifth album, El Mar (2014), she gave fresh context to her bluesy vocal style with flamenco music. Taken from a concert in Barcelona, her first live album, Wait No More, was issued in 2019. A 2021 vinyl reissue of El Mar coincided with the American's tenth anniversary of relocating from Nashville to Barcelona. A native of Chicago, Sparks recorded her debut EP, 2003's Tidewaters, while she was a student at Florida State University. By then, she had begun playing shows regularly. After graduating, she relocated to Nashville and delivered her debut full-length, Rivers + Roads, in 2005. It was released on the now-defunct Nashville label Platinum Plus. Sparks spent the following year touring and promoting her album, and succeeded in generating some buzz in mainstream outlets like Paste and The Village Voice. She headed to the studio in 2006 with co-producer David Henry (Josh Rouse, Amanda Shires) and the resulting full-length, Under This Yellow Sun, arrived on her own Glass Mountain Records the following year. It featured several noteworthy guest musicians, including Steve Bowman (Counting Crows) and Aaron Sands (Jars of Clay), and the track "Cold War" appeared on TV's Criminal Minds and Lost Girl. The companion EP Little Stories consisted of previously unreleased songs and demos. In 2009, Sparks returned with the folkier The Scorpion in the Story, whose guests included the likes of Will Kimbrough and Viktor Krauss. Following on Glass Mountain in 2011, her fourth album, the double-EP Until Morning/Come Out of the Dark, added Shawn Mullins and Mike Farris, among others, to her backing lineup. That year, she also moved from Nashville to Barcelona, Spain. Shifting to the flamenco influences of her new home, Sparks' next two albums, 2014's El Mar and 2017's La Huerta, were collaborations with Spanish musicians including flamenco fusion trio Calamento and guitarist Francisco Guisado "El Rubio". Featuring a mix of original songs and covers, and English- and Spanish-language tracks, they were both well-received in Spain. She followed them with the live album Wait No More in 2019. Her third straight release with Calamento, it captured a performance at Barcelona's Luz de Gas in September 2018. May 2020 saw the release of a compilation spearheaded by Sparks that featured songs by artists affected by the cancellation of concerts due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Each representing a different musical style, it was called Amor en los Tiempos de Cuarentena. That same month brought the album Sonrían, Por Favor by Alma de Boquerón, for which Sparks contributed production. Sparks also served as Secretary of the Musicians Union of Catalunya from 2019 to 2020. Still under lockdown, she and her band recorded a cover of David Bowie's "The Man Who Sold the World" from their various apartments, and it appeared later in the year. It was also included on a limited-edition vinyl release of El Mar, issued in July 2021 to celebrate Sparks' tenth anniversary in Barcelona.
© Marcy Donelson /TiVo