Sara Hartman Debuts New Album in Whirlwind Visit to Her Hometown, Sag Harbor

Singer-songwriter Sara Hartman, who has spent most of the past decade since her 2013 graduation from Pierson High School living in Berlin, returned to her hometown for a short visit last week to perform as a headliner at the Sag Harbor American Music Festival.

Hartman, who premiered her EP, “start somewhere dark,” at Bay Street Theater on Saturday night, also found time, shortly after her plane from Germany touched down on September 27, to visit her former music teacher, Suzanne Nicoletti, and her chorus class for a short tutorial on songwriting.

Dressed in black, Hartman sat hunched over her acoustic guitar, pausipng often, in a losing battle, to push her long, black curly hair out of her face.

“It’s a bit of a weird job, but it is a job,” Hartman told the dozen or so students of her current occupation as a songwriter for various artists on the German pop music scene. “So, essentially, I’m a ghost writer, which means I have to go into a room and make up a song, honestly, every other day some weeks, and I guess what I have learned is there is an honest way of doing songwriting.”

Hartman has always been a creative soul. She began to make music when she received a set of drums for Christmas when she was 11. “I really fell head over heels in love with drums,” she said. “They are alive, they are immediate — and I really disturbed a lot of neighbors.”

That same Christmas, her brother, Paul, received a guitar, and she soon appropriated that as well. It wasn’t long afterward that Hartman began to turn her musings into songs.

After graduating from Pierson, Hartman spent a year at the Berklee School of Music before moving to Berlin to work with producer Toby Kuhn. “It was truly terrifying,” she said of the move to Europe, “but equally exciting.”

Although she signed a deal with a major label, eventually leading her own headlining tour of Europe in 2018, Hartman said she was burned out and asked to be released from her contract so she could focus on herself.

“I was done — the amount of stress I was under,” she said. “I was not prepared for it. Long story short, I think I wasn’t ready for that kind of thing. Who is?

“It was about everything except for the music,” she continued. “I just wanted to go home and play guitar.”

Without the money from touring coming in to pay the rent, Hartman had to look for a new way to stay afloat financially. She had enough contacts in the music business to get hired regularly as a freelance writer, selling songs for both emerging new artists and commercial clients.

She joked that one of her tunes was used for the German film version of “Lassie.”

Without the demands of a recording contract, she has been able to focus on what matters to her. She has written and recorded the batch of songs that will be released as “start somewhere dark” on the independent Fox Lane Records label.

On Saturday night, she coupled those songs with a series of short films and spoken word pieces, dedicating the work, which was mostly composed during the pandemic, to her mother, Kerrie Sundara, an artist herself, who is seriously ill.

Hartman was backed by a four-member band led by Joe Delia on keyboards and featuring guitarist Klyph Black, bassist Michael Vinas, and drummer James Benard during her Saturday performance.

Kelly Connaughton Dodds, the president and co-artistic director of the festival, said she had been a fan of Hartman’s since the festival’s first year in 2011 when she was one of several Pierson students to be given short time slots to perform their own music.

Back at Pierson, Hartman was telling the students why she did what she did. “There’s nothing better in the whole world, in my opinion, than feeling a certain kind of way, making something out of that feeling, and then having somebody else say, ‘I get it,’” she said. “That is a profoundly beautiful feeling, and that’s why I like to do songwriting.”

Asked if she always knew she would create and sing music, Hartman replied, “I was sure and stubborn. Yup, this is it. It’s the only thing I wanna do, and it’s one of the only contexts that I make sense. The money comes and goes. It’s not stable. It’s not the kind of work you do for money.”

Outside the school, Hartman mused about Pierson.

“It’s changed, but some things have stayed the same: The teachers who really cared still really care, and that made me feel good to see that today,” she said.

Although Hartman has been back home a number of times since striking out on her own, she said something felt different this time.

“The joy, the pure joy of making music, is what I’m circling back to,” she said. “There’s an odd feeling in the air this trip. It really feels like I’ve come full circle.”