Sabrina Stone feels like she’s been running a marathon for a really long time.
The last two decades have been full of solo music, bands, EPs and full-length albums, changing styles, a ditched record contract, a move from New York to New Orleans, new jobs, lots of travel, heartbreaks and a broken leg.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
“You can tell from the fact that I barely remember a decade of it,” says the singer-songwriter and vocalist-bassist for alt-rock band War Bunnies. “I’ve been a personal bartender, and I ran a children’s company — I even had a band called Slow Growth that I created with a dubstep DJ in New York, and we have one single online. That’s out there. I forgot that.”
There have been a lot of chapters — and so many hair colors, Stone says with a laugh, pointing to the fading pink, blue and green dye that can still be seen in the sun outside of a Mid-City coffee shop.
With a major birthday coming up, Stone has been in a reflective mood. “I believe that on a birthday, you get to choose what you want to bring into the next year,” she says, so she wants to bring in her own new year with music.
Stone will host a singer-songwriter night at 7 p.m. Friday, Nov. 14 at Hotel Peter & Paul. There will be performances by Chelsea Hines and Dreux Gerard, and Stone will be joined by friends during her set, including her War Bunnies bandmate Aaron Younce and multi-instrumentalist Rex Gregory.
Until a few years ago, Stone had spent more than a decade mostly performing as a solo musician focused on her expressive vocals and acoustic guitar. Her last solo show was at the House of Blues in late 2020, but by the time Covid restrictions loosened, Stone and Younce were beginning to write music together as War Bunnies.
Recently, Stone realized four years had passed since she had performed solo in front of people.
“It was like, ‘OK, this is how I’m going to break the dry spell of not doing my solo music for so long, and this is the energy I want to bring into the whole next year,’” she says.
Stone grew up in New York City with a mother who was a theatrical agent and loved classical music and jazz and an architect father who listened to classic rock. She found her way to the piano in her mom’s house around 7 years old and stuck with it for a few years until she picked up a guitar as a 14-year-old.
Influenced by a range of rock and folk, from Alanis Morissette and Radiohead to Chris Thile, Stone started writing her own music, including her first recording, a song called “Nefarious.”
“It was the song that made me a bright red insect. It was like, ‘don’t mess with me. I’m small, but I am fierce,’” Stone says.
Her recordings caught the attention of a Canadian record label, which offered a then-18-year-old Stone a lucrative contract. Stone says she would have had to move to Quebec and trade her guitar for a piano.
It was tempting for someone who was then in her first year at Brandeis University — but Stone ultimately turned it down. It felt like a reckless move to lock in on a contract at that age and isolate herself in another country, she says.
Instead, Stone stayed at Brandeis and recorded her first, self-titled EP, released in 2007. Over the years, she’s recorded a full-length, “My College Degree and Me,” and several other EPs and singles. More recently, Stone released “International Date Line” in 2019, but the album is only available on CD, and she’s planning to release a remastered version in the coming months.
After a small tour in Australia in 2018, Stone decided to move to New Orleans. She had visited a number of times over the years and felt pulled to the city. She didn’t have a smooth transition, though.
“I broke my leg 10 days after moving here,” she says. “It forced me into this extremely introspective, slow space.”
But that bumpy introduction to the city forced her to start building connections. A visual artist and music journalist, Stone found work with Offbeat, and she now writes the monthly, gear-focused “Sound Check” column in Antigravity.
“Each connection has led to another one, and the music is increasingly louder and more confident and more powerful,” Stone says. “But that’s partially because the city is giving me that.”
Tickets to the Nov. 14 show are $15. Find Stone on Instagram: @sabrinastonemusic.
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‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.nola.com ’
