The Official Site of Sarah Cloud
Publicity

CLOUD SEEKS SUNSHINE IN L.A.
By Sona Pai

The lights of Los Angeles were blazing. The stars were out, in the sky and on Sunset Strip, and the sounds of Saturday night - car horns blaring, parties screaming and music playing - floated through the air. Amid the excitement and electricity, singer-songwriter Sarah Cloud, AB '95, stayed home. She sat in her new one-bedroom apartment, the apartment that was half as big and twice as expensive as the one in St. Louis. She sat on an air mattress, surrounded by an unopened guitar case and cardboard boxes with sleeves and pant legs drooping from the tops. She watched the only channel she could get on her television, and she ate Tootsie Rolls by the light of one lonely lamp on the floor.
"As a songwriter, you feel a tremendous guilt when you're not writing or singing, and being alone in this new place just made me feel worse," Cloud says.

In St. Louis, Cloud had been something of a local rock star. She played music regularly, at benefits, bars and outdoor festivals. She heard herself on the radio. She saw her name in Saturday-night lights. She opened for major acts such as Jewel and the Barenaked Ladies, and she had a solid fan base of her own, people who would scream and sing along as she played. Some of them had stuck with her from her early days performing as a college student, at Ninth Street Deli and Johnny's Beanery in Columbia. But Cloud wanted more.

So, in April 2001, she packed what she could fit in her car and drove rock 'n' roll's favorite thoroughfare, U.S. Highway 66, all the way to Los Angeles.

"I was so intimidated when I first got here," Cloud says of her new home. "In the Midwest, there are so many great musicians playing music for the sake of playing and so many people who want to hear it. Here, unless you're a 12-year-old girl who sings like she's 27 and looks like she's 22, it's hard to get anyone to take you seriously."

After a few weeks, the performer inside of Cloud got the best of her. She finally got the nerve to take her guitar to an amateur open-mic night at a club on Sunset Boulevard, and she's been playing regularly ever since. She's even got a couple of I-know-someone-who-knows-someone leads on record deals, though she's careful not to fall for any glitzy promises.

"I'm from Missouri, after all, so I'm naturally suspicious," Cloud says. "There are a lot of musicians trying to make it out here, but the good stuff has to rise to the top. If my time doesn't come, at least I tried. I never would have forgiven myself if I hadn't."