Sarah Katherine Lawless Talks Look Alive, “Mr. Fix-It” and Trusting Her Instincts

Ahead of her October 22 EP, Sarah Katherine Lawless talks “Mr. Fix-It,” building a fuller indie-rock sound and learning to trust her instincts along the way.

Sarah Katherine Lawless has a way of turning small, ordinary details into something much bigger.

Sometimes that means an unusual guitar tuning found in an old bookstore. Sometimes it’s a bass line that changes a song completely. And sometimes it means fixing everything in your apartment because fixing something tangible feels easier than sitting with everything else.

That last feeling became “Mr. Fix-It,” one of the songs on Sarah Katherine’s upcoming EP, Look Alive.

“I deal with a lot of depression and the only way I could dig myself out of it at the time was making my apartment look the best it possibly could,” she tells Everyday Jams. “Fixing all the little things that surround me to feel like I wasn’t living in the chaos.”

She started calling herself Mr. Fix-It. She was the friend with the drill, the one who liked working with her hands, and the distraction eventually found its way into a song.

The result is a track that sounds lighter than some of the feelings underneath it.

“The song itself is kinda funny cause it is honestly pretty sad,” Sarah Katherine says. “I think that’s why I had to have it lean indie rock, so it could juxtapose those feelings.”

That tension runs throughout Look Alive, which arrives October 22.

From Look What I’m Learning! to Look Alive

The title Look Alive is a quiet continuation of Sarah Katherine’s debut EP, Look What I’m Learning!.

She had always liked when artists found ways to reference their own earlier work, and as the new project came together, reshaping the title began to feel right.

Her first EP reflected a period of learning how to be an adult, how to be in love and how to take care of herself. Look Alivecomes from what happens after some of those things start to make more sense.

“Life has more direction but oh god what if I don’t get to where I want to be?” she says.

When she wrote what eventually became the title track, the connection clicked. Sarah describes “Look Alive” as the undercurrent beneath the rest of the EP, a project built around wanting something, questioning whether you’ll reach it and figuring out how to keep moving anyway.

That uncertainty shows up across songs like “Something’s In The Air,” “All In Moderation,” “Personal Space & Prodigal Time” and “Same Old Same Old.”

Most of the tracks were written around the same period, which allowed the project to come together naturally rather than being forced into one idea after the fact.

Looking back, Sarah Katherine noticed another thread running through the songs: questions.

“I have always been a big question gal,” she says. “Constantly curious and searching for answers of any sort.”

For her, part of the project became learning to sit with those questions without needing every answer immediately.

Finding a Fuller Sound

There’s intimacy in Sarah Katherine’s writing, but Look Alive doesn’t stay quiet.

She wanted the production to reflect the same emotional swings happening in the lyrics: moments of confidence followed closely by doubt, and softer ideas pushed up against something louder.

“It’s really the duality of man,” she jokes. “I oscillate between feeling on top of the world to the complete opposite with the natural craziness of life.”

For Sarah Katherine, leaning further into guitar helped open up that side of her writing.

She started out making more singer-songwriter leaning music before teaching herself guitar and moving further into indie and alternative rock. A number of the songs on Look Alive were written on a friend’s nylon-string guitar.

“There is a certain exploration I find in guitar that allows me to listen more,” she says. “Different voicings on that instrument can unlock feelings I wasn’t even entirely aware of.”

That curiosity has continued into alternate tunings.

Rather than learning all of them online, Sarah Katherine started going into old bookstores and looking for books on the subject, flipping through the pages and trying whatever caught her attention.

One of those experiments eventually became “All In Moderation.”

The track nearly didn’t make the EP at all. Recording had already wrapped when an unexpected trip to Nashville gave her the chance to finish it.

Now, it’s one of her favorites.

Learning to Trust the Process

Sarah Katherine didn’t walk into every recording session knowing exactly what the finished song should sound like.

That was intentional.

For Look Alive, she worked with producers Jake Aron, Isaiah Beard and Jack Harrington, bringing in general ideas and rough demos while leaving room for each producer to find something new inside the songs.

“They were able to pretty much read my mind about where we wanted things to feel dramatic, almost unkept to more subdued and tender moments,” she says.

That process also helped Sarah Katherine become more confident in her own taste.

“Through the process of making this EP I have really learned to trust myself,” she says. “The more I worked with different producers and found my sound, the more I could trust what my ear, and what I, liked and didn’t like.”

That doesn’t mean the second-guessing has disappeared.

She admits she has become harder on herself when deciding what makes a “good song,” while simultaneously trying to give ideas more time before calling them finished.

But there’s more confidence underneath the questions now.

A Project Shaped by Collaboration

The people around Sarah Katherine also left their fingerprints on Look Alive.

Her live band played a direct role in shaping several of the songs. Bassist Steve Williams created the bass line on “Something’s In The Air,” guitarist Alexander Walk arranged the title track, and drummer Stephen Ellison plays on both songs.

For Sarah Katherine, performing and recording don’t exist as completely separate parts of the project. The musicians she shares a stage with have helped shape what listeners eventually hear on the record.

That collaborative spirit extends beyond the music itself.

Sarah Katherine is equally interested in the visual world surrounding Look Alive.

She worked with photographer and videographer Anna Rhody and graphic designer Josh Cope to bring ideas from an extensive mood board into the project.

Some of those ideas were more ambitious than others.

One involved lighting a dryer on fire.

Sarah Katherine initially assumed it would be impossible until she learned Rhody’s father is a firefighter, which gave them a way to pull it off safely.

That playful, hands-on approach will continue into the physical release. Sarah created a journal to accompany CDs of the EP, giving listeners something interactive that extends beyond the songs themselves.

What Comes Next

For all of the questions running through Look Alive, Sarah Katherine sounds certain about one thing: she’s proud of what she made.

“I truly feel like this is some of the best music I have made thus far,” she says.

A lot of that comes from allowing herself to be honest about a period of life that can be difficult to define — being in your mid-twenties, feeling like you should know where you’re headed and wondering whether you’re making the right choices.

She hopes the songs can meet other people somewhere inside that feeling too.

“I just hope people are able to have these songs become their comfort and make them not feel so alone in all those thoughts.”

Sarah Katherine is already writing again, with her attention beginning to move toward what she says could become an album.

For now, Look Alive captures the version of her still asking questions, experimenting with the answers and getting a little more comfortable trusting what she hears along the way.

Look Alive arrives October 22.

Stream “Mr. Fix-It” now, and look for Sarah Katherine Lawless’ Look Alive EP arriving October 22.

Photography: Anna Rhody