Sad songs

Folk artist Sara Beth Geoghegan searches for hope in grief and failure | Steve West

Jen Bates Photography

Sara Beth Geoghegan is painting walls, spreading wallpaper, and arranging furniture, moving from her tiny Nashville apartment into her first house. New and more spacious surroundings serve as an apt metaphor for where she finds herself at this time in life—moving from a claustrophobic depression set into motion by the heartache of a broken engagement to a new place of hope.

Plenty of gifted female singer-songwriters work out of grief or depression. Rosanne Cash's beautifully sad 2006 release, Black Cadillac, is about as good as it gets, a blood-on-the-tracks confessional recorded after her loss of her mother and father in one year. Yet while she provides a ripple of hope amid an ocean of doubt and struggle, Cash never comes close to an expression of faith in God. That's why Geoghegan's recent independent release, Tired of Singing Sad Songs, is a breath of unsentimental fresh air, realistically confronting the pain of loss and sadness while affirming a sure hope in Jesus.