Sarah Beth Tomberlin

“Songwriting is emotional and heavy work. It’s not pleasant all the time. There’s a lot of emotional prodding and digging.”

The word “processing” came up a lot in my interview with Sarah Beth Tomberlin (aka Tomberlin) when she discussed how she writes songs. She uses songwriting as a way to process the events in her life, much more so than most songwriters have shared with me. But it’s difficult to write songs when things are “pleasant” in her life. “There’s no urgency to the process in that case,” she told me. It’s the difficult events that she writes about, and these events require distance before she’s able to process them.

Tomberlin's story has been told elsewhere. Briefly: she grew up in a very religious Baptist family (her father is a pastor) and moved often. She wasn't allowed to listen to secular music growing up. Tomberlin went to a private Christian college briefly before dropping out; she now splits time between Los Angeles and New York City, living with Busy Philipps and her husband Mark Silverstein. Her lyrics address the isolation she felt growing up and her struggle growing up in the church. "But funny thing is that I always hated church/ Spend so much time looking that I forgot to search," she sings.

[Side note: I loved this conversation and the thoughtfulness of Tomberlin’s responses.]

Tomberlin's latest EP Projections is out now on Saddle Creek Records. It contains the beautiful track "Wasted,” which I absolutely love and which was directed by Busy Philipps. Tomberlin’s debut At Weddings was released in 2018.

Watch our interview below!