Sara Petite is absolutely transcendent on her recent album The Empress. The guitar slinger nonchalantly ducks and weaves between outlaw country, rock’n’roll, and folk gracefully. She ties it all together with her rich storytelling, ricocheting from trailer parks to dive bars to prophetic imagery and back. Petite’s heroes struggle against addiction and poverty, and while these songs may be good stories, they also hit upon something else: an examination of women’s stories — and their triumphs.
Petite’s own life hints at the diversity of her storytelling: she grew up in a town of tulip farms in rural Washington, launched her music career in SoCal, and tours extensively here and in Europe. Petite has an eye to the underdogs, the women who party hard and work harder to keep their lives in one piece. “Le Petit Sabotour” drives this home with a honky-tonker that breaks down into an extended bridge in French — calling out a hapless man who thinks outrunning his past makes him noble.
Petite’s nasal twang gives her songs a sense of lived experience. Even with love songs like “Tread Softly” and “I Want You So Bad,” there’s a feeling that these things won’t stick. Even if the narrator wants to enjoy the good times, they also know that they are fleeting — minimizing their ability to take in the moment and predicting the relationship’s inevitable downfall.
“The Empress” is this album’s keystone, consolidating these everyday tragedies into a historical epic of everything women face down and overcome: philandering, double-standards, sexual assault, religious condemnation, and discrimination. Petite’s messianic vision unfurls with an epic sweep, a triumph of songwriting. Here, she centers a core truth, that women deserve their reward — and those rewards are coming.
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