Suppressing expression outside of your assigned birth gender is a common experience in the LGBTQ community, and on his third album Milkteeth, British singer-songwriter Douglas Dare crafts a gently heartbreaking ode to the feminine side he repressed as a child with “The Joy In Sarah’s Eyes.”
A pianist and autoharpist with a penchant for sparse, reflective compositions in the vein of Leonard Cohen (with a similar attention to lyrical detail) and Donovan, Dare recorded “The Joy In Sarah’s Eyes” live with his autoharp, outside a sound booth, and his vocal delivery has a similar confessional rawness.
“Sarah, I see you every day / and though I age, you stayed the same / how I remember the joy in your eyes / that joy’s still in me, it keeps me alive,” Dare sings over a quietly pulsating electronic bed and his delicate autoharp strumming.
“‘The Joy In Sarah’s Eyes’ began as a retelling of a very early childhood memory of mine that evolved into something much more revealing,” Dare explains of the highly personal song. “As I wrote the song, and I always start with lyrics, I realized that Sarah could be me. When I was young I was freely in touch with my feminine side and as time went on that was suppressed — the memory of this little girl was enough to reignite not only the feminine side of me but the free side, something I realized most of us lose as we go through life.”
Check out the just released Milkteeth below.