“All the tears I cried made a garden of me--in spite of it all, I have learned to let my life feel sweet”

Sara Jackson-Holman didn’t set out to become a singer-songwriter. A classically trained pianist, she began playing recitals and competing when she was 6 years old. In college, unsure of her place in the world or the direction of her education, she began writing songs at the suggestion of someone in her dorm. She instantly loved the immediacy of performing her own music. Distilling emotion, reaching from her soul to another. She paid a studio engineer $100 for an hour of studio time, recording her first 3 songs, and put them on myspace. Not long after, an indie record label out of Portland, Oregon reached out, and from there she was signed. 

Her career has been punctuated with song placements in shows like Grey’s Anatomy, Orange is the New Black, Bones, and numerous others. Three records, hundreds of shows, and a few tours later, Sara moved to Los Angeles (“for love,” she notes), where she spent the last few years writing, drawing inspiration from a new place, brighter weather, and new relationships. Her days were infused with the colorful, expressive, and warm palette of LA after so many years spent in the moody green of Portland, a change reflected in her music. 

“Braver than I once was, I’ve become an anthem to myself”

She has written over 100 songs in her new home, gaining fluency and comfort in her intuition and stylistic preferences. Her obsession with making meaning is gnawing and relentless, and she considers songwriting a tool to understand herself and externalize her inner world.  Yet another externalized expression of self is in the form of her music studio, a small bungalow steps from her home in Echo Park. With fuschia carpet and floor to ceiling pink fur, it’s maximalist, irreverent, soft, and chaotically dreamy, if not a bit impractical. “It emphasizes the fun nature of creativity and expression,” she says of the space. She is trying to be lighter, to think less, to be happy. 

“Prayers, lifted on smoke, that happiness would find me. Me and all the ghosts of the girl that I used to be”

After releasing three EPs across three different genres in 2020, SUPERCINEMATIC finds her relaxing into herself, accepting in equal parts the burden and the gift of feeling. Her third collaboration with Stefan Macerewich, SUPERCINEMATIC, creates a compelling, intoxicating world, at once nostalgic and contemporary. Lush arrangements support Jackson-Holman’s rich, emotive voice, which moves effortlessly from smoky depths to airy heights, in this sumptuous exploration of personal mythology. “Tell me everything, that’s my kinda dopamine,” the singer shares early in the album. Lyrically, SUPERCINEMATIC offers up a generous collection of vulnerable snapshots of psyche, by turns embodied, dissociated, anxious, wry, self-aware, consumed, revelatory and euphoric, SUPERCINEMATIC feels its way to meaning.