Sabrina Stone

In her new full-length album, My College Degree and Me, Singer-Songwriter Sabrina Stone assembles an eclectic cabal of talent, including some of NYC’s finest young musicians, crafting a piece of pop-jazz perfection. Colored by her post-collegiate wandering, this album addresses the crisis many graduates face, struggling to define themselves beyond the campus. It is her own search for identity that informs these ten songs, from the languid bossa nova shuffle of “All Up To You” to the spring bounce of “So Many Options.” Tracing trepidation, frustration, romance, and late nights with too much to drink, this new CD is for anyone who has ever found themselves with a degree but no direction, balancing the necessity of making rent with the bigger challenge of choosing a path.

The album opens with the breezy samba swing of All Up To You, a tentative and bittersweet song about the moment after graduation when you jump into the deep-end of the adult world.

The title track, a jazz-inflected pop romp, My College Degree and Me shuffles its way acerbically into the set, with an infectious melody over a waltzing rhythm, featuring Chris St. Hilaire of The London Souls (EMI), who recorded their debut album at Abbey Road Studios, on drums.

In You Picked Me Sabrina performs a quirky back and forth of hesitant young love, with up and comer Cass Dillon, notable as the voice of Billy Joel’s single, “Christmas in Fallujah.”

Cats and Ice Cream rounds out the album as a fragile lament to uncertainty, framed under the auspices of a failing relationship. Melodiously melancholic, it pauses, drifts and sighs itself dreamily across the sonic landscape, a perfect rainy-day song.

I Sit Around, the truest jazz piece, features a beautiful, sweeping piano coda by Phil Selesnick. This song includes three-fourths of Sabrina’s original band, The Sabrina Stoners, who headlined a show with Denny Laine, played a few small festivals and released the EP Sabrina Stone in 2007.

Comfort is pure pop. A happy, hopeful, bouncy track, it shines between its more bittersweet bookends as a joyful declaration of requited love, simple and sweet.

Courting Myself is a clean, angry rock song, culminating in a wild guitar solo by Mark Williams, who also plays bass and mandolin throughout the album and has since performed with Diane Birch (S-Curve Records) and recorded on the upcoming album by Kimbra (Warner Bros, Australia.)

In Last Night, Sabrina is joined by British-born Canadian Singer-Songwriter Tobacco Brown and Louis Hobson, the originator of roles in Broadway’s “Bonnie & Clyde” and “Next to Normal,” conjuring dizzying layers of lilting, tipsy voices. A paean to living without regret, “Last Night” is about letting go and how, sometimes, we all deserve a drink…or ten.

Figure Me Out is a two-minute bossa nova jaunt about owning and enjoying your independence.

So Many Options is a joyous song about all of the things in one’s life to be grateful for and everything there is to look forward to.

Sabrina Stone is a staple in the New York City Singer/Songwriter scene. After years of playing at Rockwood Music Hall, The Baggot Inn, Makor, The Cutting Room, Comix and The Sidewalk Cafe, she can be seen, nearly every month, showcasing new and old original songs at the legendary Bitter End.
The quirky, energetic 26-year-old imbues her performance with a classic jazz sensibility and a knowing sarcasm. Eccentrically eclectic, Sabrina’s songs trace love, loss and boredom with equal parts humor and sincerity.
From rock to jazz to bossa nova to folk, Sabrina infuses her particular brand of pop with a wide range of sounds and experience. She is a Norah Jones with enthusiasm, a Lily Allen with heart, and a Jill Sobule for the masses.
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