The Private Canon: "To Dream of Sarah"

This post is part of a series.
It was one of the more memorable live shows in my experience, to which I was happily invited by my friend, the sound designer John Zalewski: A butterscotch-voiced singer in a dark vintage dress and silent-film bob stood on her guitar case to be seen and heard above the crowd thronging the low-ceilinged Silverlake Lounge. Flanked by a kindly, dark-haired standup bassist lending support from her right and a bald percussionist on her left, she played earnestly and movingly through a repertoire of alternately assertive and delicate guitar tunes that danced along a secret continuum that links Tin Pan Alley to country to folk/rock to punk—a strain of Americana that I recognize as my native tongue, in a pantheon where Tom Waits sits with Don Gibson and Fiona Apple, where Arthur Lee breaks bread with Gram Parsons, and Exene Cervenka and Randy Newman once unwrapped their bedroll.

Eleni Mandell has continued to mine that vein since that show, in 2001 (her bandmates were the incomparable Sheldon Gomberg and Danny Frankel, whom she called "the professor"), and her work from any point in that long career is amply worth your time, up to and including her 2019 album inspired by her time teaching songwriting in a woman's prison, Wake Up Again (the title track is a lovely, off-kilter waltz about regret). But first impressions are usually strongest, so I'm especially attached to many of the songs delivered in the one-two punch of her stunning first two albums, 1998's Wishbone and 2000's Thrill: the threatening single-chord punk blues confrontation of "Pauline," which plays a bit like "Jolene" in reverse (it's the song of a homewrecker relishing the damage), the faux-gypsy touches decorating "Snake Song" and "Action Is Action" and "Tristeza," the creepy crawl of "I'm Your Girl," a series of churning bangers in various flavors of not-quite-pop ("Taking You Out," "Meant to Be in Love," "Nightmare Song").

What especially tug at my heart, though, are a series of despondent acoustic ballads, some but not all in triple meters or related shuffles: "Bedford (Avenue)," "Too Bad About You," "Normandie." Where one of her most arresting modes is the defiant kiss-off, in her ballad-of-the-sad-cafe mode she exudes a kind of empathetic chill, like she's over the worst of it but still nursing her bruises.

Sitting somewhere near the edge of this melancholy dispensation, while also gloriously transcending it, is the minor masterpiece "To Dream of Sarah," in which the singer's sympathies run to a boy haunted by a near-miss, or possibly something worse. The boy is almost certainly idealizing the mystery girl of the title, a bit like Paul Stookey's "Whatshername", precisely because she represents a road not taken. As if the gentle, old-timey shuffle of the verse weren't enough to draw me in, the minor-key bridge positively wrecks me, with a piled-on triple rhyme depicting youthful passions that run too hot for their own good:

When hearts are young and tender

When the night is cold and he can't defend her

He swears to God that he'll never surrender

Hope to see her again

That second line, about failing to "defend her," seems to hint at a tragic event that can't be undone, or a case where the boy's manhood was wounded because he didn't stand up when it counted (an assault? a cat-call? or just a very frigid night when he didn't have a jacket to lend?). It's a thin reed to hang a theory on, admittedly—for all we know, this could have literally been a lonely-hearts missed connection, albeit one in which the boy caught the girl's name—but either way the song seems all the stronger for suggesting that love-addled emotions may conflate major and minor events.

Most crucially, Mandell's lovelorn tone and sly ragtime chord progression manage to evoke both I've-been-there empathy and world-weary wisdom. This is true even as Jon Brion adds a fragrant celesta solo, with faint traces of Buddy Holly's "Everyday," which manages to sweeten the song's dreamy quality without cloying. Mandell would return to the theme of idle male fantasy from a different, more jealous angle in the catchy "Girls," on the album Miracle of Five. But "To Dream of Sarah" lives up to its infinitive title, enshrining a latter-day Beatrice or Esmeralda in a perfect little keepsake locket of a song.

A few more notes: If I thought Fiona Apple had a thing for triple meters, I'd forgotten about Mandell. I haven't done a count but it seems like every other song of hers is in 3, 6, or 12 (and while I'm recommending later work in 3/4, I'm quite taken with the gorgeous "Someone to Love Like You").

Also, I might as well share an interview I did with her later in 2001. The pretext of the piece for the actors' trade paper I ran, Back Stage West, was about how singer/songwriters making their own CDs was a bit like actors making demo reels or headshots, or something like that. I didn't get to talk to her much about what I really wanted to—her songcraft!—but she did have interesting stuff to say. One detail that's not in the story: To do the interview, I visited her at her home in Silverlake not long after the 9/11 attacks, and I remember she was playing the LP of Blood on the Tracks when I walked in. "What else?" she said by way of explanation. I know every scene by heart; they all went by so fast.