In the past year, Sarah Negahdari, the singer, guitarist, and chief songwriter of Los Angeles art-rock trio The Happy Hollows, has caused quite a commotion in the music world. Wired Magazine called her “one of the coolest women in rock,” Pitchfork wrote that her voice “commands attention on both the stompers and serenades,” and The Huffington Post branded her a “rock goddess.” Now The Happy Hollows are set to release their debut album Spells via Autumn Tone Records. The L.A. indie label will release the album in the U.S. on January 26, 2010. Sarah Negahdari’s journey to this point has been unconventional to say the least. It all began in a trailer park…well actually it began during the Iranian Revolution….
Sarah Negahdari’s unconventional background may explain her eccentricity. Her father fled Iran shortly after the Islamic Revolution and moved to the U.S. to escape persecution by the fundamentalist government. Shortly after he met Sarah’s mother, an ex-hippie from Northern California, Sarah was born. The family spent their first several years in a government subsidized trailer park outside of San Jose. They didn’t have much, but Sarah’s mother kept an old drum kit from her hippie days in the mobile home. In the summer, she would set the kit up outside and teach Sarah to play. These early lessons convinced Sarah that she wanted to be a musician, but instead of being a drummer, Sarah wanted to play the guitar like her childhood idols Jimmy Hendrix, Pete Townshend, and especially Bonnie Raitt.
Sarah moved to New York City in 2003 and ended up working at a bar, which also employed the future members of Akron Family. While not working, she played open-mic nights around the city, honing her guitar chops and unique finger picking technique. In 2006, Sarah moved to Los Angeles and, after meeting Ph.D. student and bass player Charlie Mahoney and drummer Chris Hernandez, both Washington, DC transplants, she formed The Happy Hollows.
Since 2006, The Happy Hollows have been a vital and critically acclaimed band in the Los Angeles music scene. If you were to place them on a contemporary musical spectrum, they might lie somewhere between Captain Beefheart and Cindy Lauper. They have moved seamlessly between the Silver Lake, downtown, and Long Beach music communities, their music defying easy categorization. The band’s music combines innovative structures, surreal lyrics, and fiercely adept instrumentation to recreate reality into a jagged panorama of vibrant, kaleidoscopic collage. Their songs straddle the sub-genres of post-punk, 90s college rock, and 80s pop yet they create a sound all their own by deconstructing these genres. Taking pop melody as a starting point, they do away with the traditional verse/chorus approach, and write music that is both catchy and challenging.
