Tori Sparks Returns to Her Roots

In the run-up to her upcoming benefit concert on International Women’s Day, Victor Horcasitas sat down with Tori Sparks in between her many television appearances and radio interviews to talk about her return to the stage after an illness, the special guests who will be joining her onstage on March 8th, the nonprofit organization Fundación Ana Bella and why she chose to support it, what inspires her, and much more. Below is a condensed version, but you can watch the entire interview on the Barcelona Metropolitan YouTube channel.

Tori Sparks, let’s jump right in! What's going on? What made you decide to perform this special concert on March 8th?

Well, do you want me to tell you the truth? Or you want me to tell you the story I've been telling all the other press people?

Whatever you want to do!

Okay, so here's the truth. The truth is that, about eight months ago, we were offered a show at the venue Luz de Gas, where we’ve presented album release concerts in the past, recorded a live album, and participated in various other shows, including benefit concerts. Our original idea was to use this date to present new material that I’d been planning to write over those following eight months.

Luz de Gas is one of my favorite venues to play because it’s beautiful, has great sound and it's one of the only venues in town that consistently offers its space to benefit concerts—even on weekend nights, which is incredibly rare. I’m aware that it also has something of a reputation for being kind of pijo, as in “only rich people go there and the beers are eight euros,” but I really respect the people at Luz de Gas. Roger and Fede and everybody have always treated me and the people I work with so well. That's why we’ve done more than one important concert at their venue, and that’s why we decided to do this particularly special concert there on March 8th, on International Women's Day.

But as I mentioned, the idea then was slightly different at first. But then I had some pretty serious health issues about seven, eight months ago, and once I recovered, my original idea obviously wasn’t going to work. I was sick in bed for so long, without a voice, so I didn’t have any new material to present. Or at least, not much.

So I thought, “OK, how can we save this,” right? What are we going to do? Are we going to cancel the date? No. Especially because we’d already planned to make it a benefit concert for a foundation that helps women—no way were we going to pull out. What we decided to do is what I believe in doing whenever life confronts you with a problem: try to work with it, to turn a mistake into a purposeful act.

I talked it over with the band, and with my publicist, and even though I still wasn’t fully recovered when we announced the idea, we decided to use the opportunity to celebrate of the fact that I was “coming back to life” again, so to speak, after being unable to sing, unable even to speak for weeks and weeks. It was very scary, it was painful, and the recovery dragged on for many months.

So to celebrate having come out the other side of that—and also to celebrate the talented women living and working in this amazing artistic community that we have here in Barcelona—we thought, “why not have a benefit concert where I'm going back to my roots?” You know, the Nashville-style music and the Chicago blues, these sounds from where I came from. Why not celebrate those roots and what they mean to me? Even though, of course, I still value all the incredible things I've learned since moving here, it’s important to remember where you come from. And at the same time, why not celebrate the roots of all the artists who will also be collaborating with us, all these incredible women whose heritage is connected to countries all over the world? Some of them are from here, some from Africa, some from England or other places. I want to celebrate all of our musical roots. As a result, the concert is called “Roots Music Revival,” because we're all returning to our roots, and celebrating booth the musical roots that we have in common as well as what we can learn from each other.

In the end, what started out as a bad thing—like, “damn, what do we do with this date?”—became actually a really beautiful opportunity to showcase some of my compañeras and still support a great cause. I'm actually very happy with the way it worked out.

Can you share the names of some of the people that will be playing at the Roots Music Revival concert?

Yeah, I was just on the metro running back from a doctor's appointment, texting all the artistas invitadas (guest artists) to make sure that they knew which days they’re supposed to show up for rehearsal. I was writing to Jodi Cash, who's an incredible singer-songwriter. She does rock sureño, Southern rock and roll, country-type music. She's like a little Catalan Dolly Parton—not in every way, of course, but in terms of her abilities. And we have Marga Mbande, who's an Afro-soul diva wonder, she's incredible. All these women write their own music, which is another thing I love about them.

Koko-Jean Davis is probably the best known name that we've got on our roster, she used to be the frontwoman for The Excitements, and now she's got Koko-Jean & The Tonics, she's toured all over the world. They just got back from touring in Morocco and France. We’ll also be joined by The Sparkles, who are a trio of incredible female voices. I met them through the Elvis & Friends show, another benefit concert, which I participate in at Luz de Gas every January.

And there are a couple more* that we're still trying to confirm, because obviously on International Women's Day, lots of these women already have concerts planned. But I want to try to showcase as many female artists from the local community as I can, and the names I just mentioned are some of the first people I asked, because we either know one another and have collaborated in the past, or because they’re people I really respect, and I think they deserve more visibility.

So how can people get tickets to the event?

You can purchase tickets directly on Entradium, which is the official ticketing link, but the information is also on the Luz de Gas website, and on my website, ToriSparks.com. I've been posting it on Facebook, on Instagram—pretty much if you search for “Tori Sparks Roots Music Revival” on the internet, you're going to find it.

We've tried to keep the ticket prices low—which a lot of people, including my publicist—tell me not to do. They say, “look, it’s at Luz de Gas, and there's a bunch of well-known, great female names on the bill, why not make it 25 bucks, make it 30 bucks.”

It would be worth that ticket price, but we put the price at 12 euros if you buy them in advance online, and 15 euros at the door. Of course, while we’d like to raise as much money as we can for this foundation, at the same time I don't want this to be an event that's only accessible to people with extra disposable income. That's not most people’s economic reality these days, and wanted to keep the prices low so that people would be able to afford to come.

However, there is a limited number of VIP tickets available if you want to do a “meet and greet” with all the artists before the show, which cost more. The idea was just to offer another way to raise money for the cause, for those who can afford it and who want to come say hello before the main event begins.

What can you tell us about the people who are going to benefit from the concert?

The profits from the concert will all go to the Fundación Ana Bella, which supports single mothers, as well as women in general who are survivors of situations involving domestic violence.

Every single “big” concert that I've ever done—from way back in the day when I lived in Nashville through today—has always included an aspect that somehow benefited the local community, whether that was raising money or simply raising awareness. In this case, the Fundación Anna Bella is not a local charity, which is how I usually like to do it, but it’s such an impressive organization and it does important work. It's an international foundation that was started in Spain that provides educational opportunities, work opportunities and support to women who truly need it.

As an adult woman now, I can't even imagine how my mother, who was a single mom running her own company while I was growing up, made it “work.” She made our lunches every day, drew cute little pictures on our napkins, made sure we got to music lessons in my case, and horseback riding lessons in my sister's case. And today, I’m a professional musician touring in various countries all over the world, and my sister is helping an Olympic athlete train her horses.

I mean, think about that: my single mother did all of that, somehow. When I asked her how, of course I found out things that I wasn’t aware of when I was a kid. For example, she only slept three or four hours a night, she sometimes didn't eat well so that we could eat better, stuff like that. So the older I get, the more I want to support organizations that specifically help women who are supporting their families and those around them, but have no one to support them.

None of this is to say that women have it tough and men have it easy. There are single dads out there doing their best. There are men who experience violence in relationships. But the reality is that, much more often than not, the burden of child rearing falls on women. Victims of domestic violence are most often women, and children. This organization helps these women who are doing the very best that they can, but they need a bit of extra help in order to give their kids the opportunity to have a good life. Or maybe they’ve managed to get out of an abusive relationship, and they just need someone to be there for them. To say, “Look, let me help you. Let me make sure you're not alone.”

Tell us more about your music. What do you have in store for us on March 8th?

As we talked about, my roots are rock and blues, some folk as well. But I tried really, really hard to avoid country music as much as I possibly could for the longest time! That might sound silly now, but when I was in Nashville, that’s all that other people wanted me to write, and specifically pop-country, so I kind of developed a metaphorical allergy to it. However, when I moved over here, I got enough distance from it all and I grew to appreciate country music so much more. And by that, I mean old-school country, real roots music, and I’m so glad that I did.

At the same time, I also had the opportunity to learn from all of these incredible flamenco and rumba musicians I’ve been surrounded by here, in Barcelona and in other parts of Spain I’ve visited. Let me tell you, it’s the weirdest feeling to be born in Chicago, but you end up onstage doing palmas with a rumba band! Weird, but fantastic at the same time. I've learned so much from the musicians I’ve met here.

As a result, my last several albums have been a mix of rock, blues and flamenco fusion, but I do think it's important not to forget some of the elements that really drew you to music in the first place. So now that I've been starting to write again—now that I've gotten my voice back and can write again—a lot of the new song ideas lean more towards the world of roots, blues, rock, which is where I started. We’re going to play some of those new songs at the concert, and even most of the songs that I recorded before I moved here will still sound new to many of the people in the Barcelona or Spanish audience who follow what we do, even if they’re not new to me. As I was thinking about how to plan the setlist for this show, I realized that no one here has ever heard some of them before! So I thought it was worth putting both new and “vintage,” so to speak, on display. And all of that is where the idea for the title of the concert came from.

Are we going to get a chance to “Wade”?

Well, we almost always use ”Wade in the Water” as an encore, because it gets the audience involved. And because it's so much fun! But because we were trying to present a repertoire that's different this time, we don't have that on the setlist. To be honest, we don't have an encore plan at all right now! But if you're going to be there, and you scream “wade!” I’m pretty sure that we’ll do it! 

How about “Verde,” “Penny on a Rail” and “Mama”? These are all fantastic, classic Tori songs.

 “Mama” we're doing for sure. That song was originally recorded on the album—or double EP—Until Morning/Come Out of the Dark, which I released right as I moved to Barcelona, but we redid the song in a kind of rumba style on our album El Mar in 2014. We’ve got to play that one—I mean, if you have a rock song dedicated to your mother, how can you not play it at an International Women's Day concert, right? It’s also one of our favorites to play. And the original version is technically from the Nashville era, so, it fits. 

There's a couple of other songs you mentioned—with “Verde,” we have a little surprise planned. As that one is from one of the newer, flamenco fusion records, it’s not a part of the official repertoire for this show, but I found a way to kind of stick it in there. Plus, we’re playing this concert as a quartet, not as a five-piece band with our flamenco guitarist, so the songs will sound a bit more rock and a bit less flamenco by default regardless of what songs we choose. 

How about “The Leaving Side of Love?” That one makes my hair stand up.

Oh, thank you! That one and “Penny on a Rail” we’ll definitely play. Those two are examples of songs from the pre-Barcelona albums that I do play with my percussionist, Javi, when we play in duo, or alone when I play solo gigs, but they're songs that I've never played with the band here—unless you count those first six months back in 2011, when I had just arrived and was still trying to figure out what I was doing. But “The Leaving Side of Love” still continues to be one of my favorites, and lucky for me, one of many people's favorites, so I continue to play it. I'm excited to play it with a full band for the first time in a long time.

We have an interview on the RTVE program Culturas 2 on March 6th, two days before the concert—that’s national Spanish television—and they've asked us play one song. At the moment, we’re deciding between “Leaving Side of Love” and a new song. I'm not sure yet, it depends on how my voice is doing that day.

What inspires to write your music? And how do you approach writing a song?

When it comes to songwriting, there are two parts to it, at least for me. The first part comes with the initial idea, or a seed of an idea, and that can come from pretty much anywhere. For example, the other day, I was trying to carry some coffee up to my office, and had some other stuff in my hands, plus the cat running around, and I couldn't do juggle it all, and I spilled a little coffee. It started dripping onto the wooden floor, and a line came to mind that I still haven't written anything about, yet. It was something along the lines of: “I will forget you drop by drop / With whiskey and blood / Self-medicating with those things / Instead of love.” Dark, right? How's that for inspiration? But it just as easily could have been a different like, like “I spilled your tears like cold coffee,” who knows. Images provoke ideas, books and movies provoke ideas, other people’s music does too.

But even though the example above was dark, it’s not because I was particularly sad or upset at the time; actually, when I’m going through something particularly painful, I don't typically sit down and write music. That’s a huge misconception that people have about making art: that you do your best work when you’re suffering. Maybe some musicians, writers or painters function that way, and I can’t speak for them—but at least in my case, that's when you don't write music or do anything creative. You’re trying to just survive.

For example, I was in a relationship this past year with somebody who ended up being, how shall I put it, not normal—he seemed like a good guy, but there were many, many issues with this individual. He thought there were cameras in the walls watching us. He was paranoid and manipulative. That situation was pretty exhausting. But now that it’s all over, and I’m feeling just fine, that's when the ideas come. You've got to gain some kind of perspective on whatever you went through in order to be able to say anything interesting about it. I think that goes for any strong emotion, positive or negative.

Then the second part of the songwriting process is having the time to actually sit down and work with the guitar, and develop those seeds of ideas that you scribbled down at random moments, and allow those ideas to grow into a song. That’s the part I'm really struggling with these days, because of time constraints getting ready for this big concert as well as other work-related commitments now that I’m more or less healthy and able to work again. I have several books filled with ideas, but no time right now. I'm hoping that after March 8th, things will relax a little, and I’ll be able to start work on a new album. 

I saw that Rolling Stone refers to you as “adventurous, pushing the envelope.” Do you know what they were talking about?

Yes, that article came out about two or three years after I moved to Barcelona, right before Rolling Stone Spain stopped printing. The article was called La Aventura Sin Red de Tori Sparks, which means “Tori Sparks’ Adventure Without a Safety Net.”

It told the story of my career up to that point, as well as my crazy idea to move over here. I’d briefly had a record deal in Nashville, it went badly because the company didn't promote the album we recorded—they didn't do anything at all, it was basically a financial racket. So, I fought the label for the rights to my master recordings, and then went on the road on my own in both North America and Europe, and continued to release albums on my own record label. That went on for several years.

And then came the crazy part, when I decided to move here, where I knew no one and didn’t even speak the language. And to top it all off, I started to do this flamenco fusion thing. Not that other artists hadn’t mixed flamenco with other styles of music—of course they had, like Camarón or Enrique Morente—but it was pretty much unheard of for an American to come at it from a blues or rock or jazz perspective, instead of the other way around.

Essentially, I was risking everything with absolutely no backup plan. I had a career in Nashville, I had a life there, but as an artist and as a human being, my way of doing things has always been follow where my instincts tell me to go, and it’s worked for me so far. And also to commit to whichever path I choose one hundred percent—and, you know, just hope I don't die or anything along the way. That’s what the journalist was interested in writing about.

For me, the Rolling Stone piece was a huge compliment. Somebody who's a close friend, and who has heard stories about what it’s like to be an independent artist, might understand all the sacrifices, the proverbial and sometimes literal pain and suffering that goes into the kind of life I chose, but there's absolutely no reason for Rolling Stone to care about my story—especially then, when I didn't have nearly the career that I've got now. So I really appreciated and continue to appreciate that article. Not only for the sake of my ego—I won’t deny that it feels cool to see your picture in Rolling Stone, it does—but more importantly, it made me feel like the mainstream press still looks at independent artists and sees them as an important part of the future of music. That meant a lot.

Every month, you also do interviews that highlight other creatives in Barcelona. Can you talk about what you're doing with that project?

Yes, that was an idea that came up during the pandemic. In spite of the fact that the pandemic was a terrible thing, it did bring to bear some really cool projects, such as the Metropolitan Culture Corner, which as you know is a collaboration with Barcelona Metropolitan.

I had already been doing stuff with the magazine from time to time, writing an article here and there. We were talking about doing something more concrete together just before the pandemic, and this project was an idea that had been kind of circulating in my brain for a while. A lot of artistic people are pretty bad at promoting themselves—sometimes because they don't have the time, sometimes because they’re shy, other times because self-promotion isn’t really a part of their skill set. And I thought that it would be very cool to create a collaboration with the magazine where I interview a figure from the local world of arts and culture once a month, to help showcase this person’s work, as well as what he or she brings to the community.

Naturally, in the interview I try to mention the bullet points of their career; for example, I interviewed a musician not long ago who'd been nominated for the Latin Grammys, and a director who'd been nominated for the Goyas. But that’s not the main purpose of these interviews; the more interesting thing is to find out what inspires them, what moves them, and why they do what they do. You hear some behind-the-scenes stories that you wouldn't get in a typical press release, and probably not in most “normal” interviews, either. I really enjoy doing that, as it gives me the opportunity to highlight other creative people, and to showcase Barcelona as the vibrant, interesting city that it is, which makes me happy. I love my adopted hometown.

Anything else you would like to add, Tori?

Yes! Two things, actually.

I mentioned that this is my return to the stage after some health issues. The short version of that story is that I had a hemorrhage in my vocal cords, which was compounded by a pretty bad case of COVID. So I was extremely ill for about three months, and then still pretty sick for another four or so, and I’m still not a hundred percent recovered. During that time, I went to five doctors before I found someone who didn’t tell me it was “all in my head.”

I mention this because a lot of people have been going through health problems since the COVID-19 pandemic started. And a lot of people I’ve spoken to—especially women, and more specifically, singers—have run into doctors who tell them that the symptoms that they’re experiencing are all in their head. So, as I’ve recently become an accidental spokesperson for mental and physical health these days, I would just like to say to anyone out there who’s experienced something similar: please take care of yourself, and trust your instincts. Please make sure that if you find a doctor who says, “honey, you’re just a crazy blonde woman, you just need to relax,” get a second opinion, get a third opinion. Take care of your health.

The second thing I’d like to say is, come to the show at Luz de Gas on March 8th! The profits will be donated to Fundación Ana Bella, an organization that helps single mothers and survivors of domestic violence. Its official mission statement says that it “involves female survivors, the media, public administrations, social entities and companies to all act as agents of social change against gender-based violence.” It’s going to be a special show with a laundry list of incredible guest artists, all in support of a good cause.

*Since this interview, acclaimed blueswoman Nuri Thunder from the band Big Black Rhino has confirmed her participation, as has the young, up-and-coming soul singer Núria García. Guitarists Albert Casanovas and Toni Espelta will also join Marga Mbande and Jodie Cash onstage. Koko-Jean Davis has unexpectedly cancelled her participation in the event to perform a show in Lleida. More guest artists are still to be announced.