Sarah Hartstein Closes Off Her Year at The Bowery Electric
Purple lights illuminate the walls of the small cellar room of The Bowery Electric as a petite girl with a wavy mullet steps on stage in her star patterned cowboy boy boots and sparkling dress. “Hey, guys. We’re monarch!” she says and the band starts playing, loud. After ending her day job, upstate New Yorker, Sarah Hartstein is seen dancing around the stage singing her heart out with her bandmates from gig to gig.
The 23 year-old singer just played her final show of the year at the classic New York City venue, The Bowery Electric, located in lower Manhattan, with her band monarch this past Saturday, as they opened for The Wonderlands. It was an intimate gig with a room full of friends, family, and fans. Before and after the show, Hartstein was seen making her way through the crowd as she was met with various hugs and conversations. Her smile was wide, her energy contagious.
“A lot of bands that we’ve played with in the city are just really supportive and good freaking people and really freaking talented…We've been lucky,” she said.
Hartstein has always had a love for music, but she originally went to school for something completely different. She attended Purchase College studying biology to become a vet, even after originally planning to attend for music. However, when Covid hit, she decided to make a change toward visual arts. She transferred to SUNY New Paltz to study graphic design. Now Hartstein works full time as a graphic designer for Health Monitor Network, a health marketing network that provides high quality education for patients. “It’s patient education in a way,” said Hartstein.
Hartstein spends her days remotely. She works with a team of other creatives that she adores. As soon as the clock hits 5, she clocks out for the day, allowing her to focus on her band.
“I've always loved writing [songs] and everything, and I always wanted to play. I always wanted to do covers with my brothers and open mics together, but they never wanted to do anything. I could never really find people to play music with in high school. I don't play any instruments. I just sing,” said Hartstein. So she kept trying
Sarah Hartstein comes from a big family and has five brothers. They all grew up quite musical, as most of her brothers played instruments like guitar, bass, and piano. While she has never played any instruments, she loved to sing while her brothers played as her at home back up band. After some time, she was able to finally convince her older brother Jesse Hartstein to join her in creating a real band.
monarch started back in the summer of 2021 and they released their first EP in 2022, titled Sweet Little Things. The Ep consists of five songs. “The title track to our EP, Sweet Little Things, was my favorite thing we wrote for that EP,” said Sarah Hartetin. “That one is just so pretty…I really [wanted] it to be very jazzy.” That was the song that led her to find Nick Pappalardo, the current guitarist of monarch, leaving Hartstein to feel very emotionally connected to the song.
The lyrics of Sweet Little Things read, “And I think about it every single day / About all of the sweet little things you would say / And I fall apart / To every single part”. The song starts with a soft bluegrass guitar sound that is followed with Sarah’s sultry voice. The song is filled with soft drums and some jazzy trumpet backups that are overlaid with various harmonies, adding texture and depth to the sound.
Soon after the release of Sweet Little Things, the original drummer ended up leaving the band to join the Navy. That was when Alex Alfaro found his way to the group. Now they have been together for over a year and are enjoying their times together performing across the city when they can with the rest of the band, Jesse Hartstein, Nick Pappalardo, and Darius Beckford.
The Sweet Little Things EP starts upbeat and lighthearted with the first track, Morning Coffee, and then slows down once it hits the title track, adding in more serious tones. The third track, The Risk, keeps the softness in vocals, but adds in more drums, which leads well into the next song, Shake You Off. It is a bit more edgy, with some bold background vocals and electric guitar riffs. The Ep ends on Naive, a sad song about being taken advantage of. It includes heavy guitar beats and an anger in Hartstein’s voice. This EP feels like a journey into Hartein’s life, following her heartbreaks and personal reflections.
Sarah Hartstein is often the words behind the music, writing lyrics and melodies. Lyrics are extremely important to Hartstein when it comes to her music. She wants her songs to tell a story— to really mean something to not only her, but also to the audience. “I have to care about what I'm saying when I'm singing or else I'm like, what am I talking about? Why am I singing this?” she laughed. With the early EP, Hartstein explained, some of the songs were kind of rushed when made. Now, when she sings them, she doesn’t feel as passionate. With the band's newer music, Hartsetin has put as much time and effort into them as possible. The music she produces is a piece of her, and she wants it to come across exactly as she feels it.
“A lot of my lyrics are always driven from my experiences in my relationships,” Said Hartstein. “I feel like everyone has a thing they always go and write about to cope with things, and that's always what I go straight from are failed relationships.”
With lyrics like “I look for you in everyone I see // I gotta know what does that say about me,” from their song No Vacancy and “You took advantage of me / Never wanted to love somebody/ so badly / But you saw how vulnerable I could be,” in their song Naive, Sarah Hartstein shares her personal experiences with love and heartbreak.
As a small band, monarch isn’t quite yet headlining their own shows quite yet. In the meantime, they open for other bands, testing out different venues and audiences, which is great but definitely comes with its hurdles to cross. As an opener, you never know if the audience even knows who you are or if they will care about who you are. So, with that, you have to be ready for anything. “We are always just hopeful that people will show up early. We literally don't know what the outcome will ever be for that show,” said Hartstein.
Hartsetin could be playing for 500 people or 15 people, depending on who decides to come to the show early. “We had opened for Seeing Double in August, and it was a sold out show at Mercury Lounge, and it was such a fucking good turnout,” she said. “It was the early show at Mercury Lounge and the whole week I was like, I really hope people show up. I know it's sold out, but why would they come early? They have no fucking clue who we are the whole week. I was so nervous that people just wouldn't show up.”
The show ended up being amazing. The venue was packed and Hartstein could tell people were really enjoying her band's music. The more energy from the audience, the better the performance, she explained. It can really be a hit or miss.
Her band has actually begun to get quite the following with hundreds of spotify listeners and thousands of instagram followers. Being a smaller band makes it much easier for fans to get tickets to their gigs often, creating friendships along the way who cherish what the band has started from. “They are not trying to sell their music to fit the mold that the music industry is probably trying to sell just based on what normal pop artists like the most famous, most popular people in pop are doing right now. So I really like their indie vibe,” said Elisabeth Ford, a long time fan of the band. “And, the fact that they're a small band. I really love it because I like finding my own music and being able to go to cheap concerts is definitely something that I tried to do day to day, because I do not have the money to go see boy genius at MSG.”
Hartstein and her band hope to be headlining their own shows one day, but for now they do what they can do perform as much as possible. “Our short-term goals are definitely to open for bigger bands more often, and even on a tour with a bigger band hopefully,” she said. “And then just work our way up to where we're headlining and then we're touring and headlining a big tour. That would be the dream.”
