Together Alone

Album review

Although Boston's Sarah Borges began as a punk rocker who leaned alt country, she has steadily deepened her mastery of a repertoire which includes eclectic covers (X, Smokey Robinson, The Lemonheads, and Tom Waits) and signature originals that mix folk, rockabilly, classic country, singer-songwriter pop songs and gritty electric guitar-led rockers—all of it animated by soulful singing and charismatic stage presence. After a burst of buzz surrounding her 2005 debut Silver City, Borges settled into touring and recording, steadily developing an under-the-radar but widely respected career that builds on the legacies of previous female roots rockers like Rosie Flores and Lucinda Williams. On Together Alone she again teams with Eric "Roscoe" Ambel who produced and played guitar on her last album, 2018's Love's Middle Name. Although he reprised those roles here, his most important function was as majordomo tasked with rounding out Borges' iPhone-recorded demos with players who could record themselves at home; the results were expertly mixed by Mario Viele. With Borges on rhythm guitar and vocals, the band is filled out by Keith Voegele (from the Bottle Rockets) and Keith Christopher from Ambel's band the Yahoos—both on bass—as well as six different drummers. The mix of rock-based tunes with a heart are held together by Borges' strong vocal performances. In the opener, "Wasting My TIme," she's frank about the pandemic's enforced isolation shaking her self-image: "Been a while now since I've seen my friends/ Don't know when I'm gonna see them again/ Without them around it's harder to pretend/ That I know where I'm going." But that doubt is dispelled by the following track, upbeat rocker "Lucky Day," where Ambel chips in an ace solo. Borges' experience as an airport courier infuses what is the album's most complete tune, "She's a Trucker," a fresh angle on the cherished and cheesy canon of truck driver songs. The usual conventions get turned on their head as Borges sings, "I got sick of trying to get laid/ And now I'm just getting weighed." A pre-pandemic spot on the Outlaw Country Cruise is the subject of "You Got Me on the Boat," where she namechecks NRBQ, The Yahoos and The Mavericks and discovers that there's "Heaven and I found it on the high seas." The struggle to return to a full life while also contemplating the hours spent alone has now inspired a cascade of pandemic albums, and few have done it better than the underrated Sarah Borges. © Robert Baird/Qobuz