Interview: Saara on R&B Music and Turning Grief Into Good Art
Photo Credit: Roslyn Mosses
Interview by Tara Saraf
It’s a real treat for me to stumble upon a song that makes me want to know more about its singer; This happened to me with “Serato” by Saara. Its unfiltered lyricism and smooth R&B groove hooked me in. For Saara, a twenty-seven year old R&B artist hailing from Las Vegas and Los Angeles, music was never a decision. It’s something she’s fallen into and felt aligned with from a young age, having been gifted a keyboard at age six from her brother, joining choir, and doing open-mics in school just to hold a microphone in between her hands. Her love for English and going through a breakup in high-school led to songwriting when she was sixteen, and she was eighteen when she started looking into joining the industry as a recording artist. She’s now in nursing school, accrediting this decision to her immigrant mother’s sacrifice, but once doubted her ability to balance both studies and music. “I’m not mad at where I’m at with music, but I just don’t really agree anymore with this logic that I can’t be more than one thing at a time.” In my interview with her, we discussed her forthcoming EP, the freedom and fluidity within R&B music, and putting an empowering spin on a painful experience.
I saw clips of a recent live show that you did and I noticed that your persona on stage really shines through. Considering your songwriting, would you consider yourself to be the same offstage or do you find the courage to be confrontational through music itself?
Oh, that's a great question. Music definitely does empower me. I wouldn't necessarily say that I'm the same exact person that I am when I step onto a stage, and there is some type of adrenaline and confidence boost that comes with it. I think the more brave I get in my music, and the things that I'm writing and saying, and the ways that I'm showing up on stage, I'm almost like learning from myself in that way. I will pull from that confidence when I need to, and then as I get more confident and less filtered in what I'm writing. I think it kind of trickles over into my real life. It's almost just like, my own internal ecosystem and it's like the SpongeBob episode where there's like 50,000 of him in his brain. It's like that, but it's like a positive environment or whatever.
“You might realize that you know where home is
But I got the door locked on you,
Call your uber, kiss that b*tch goodnight” - Lyrics from “Out My Mind” by Saara
Would you consider yourself to be solely R&B/soul or more comfortable with no labels?
I would definitely say that I am an R&B artist, and I'd argue the label is very, very important because I am a non-Black artist in the R&B space. So I think it's very important for me to make it clear that, hey, what I'm making is R&B and R&B is a Black genre, and all credit needs to go exactly where it's due, and if anything, I'm just the most that I'll ever be as a guest in this space, but I'm very incredibly grateful for that. You know what I mean? Just to be able to even participate, because I've never connected to a genre more than I've connected emotionally with R&B, and I can't change that. I think the words and the language that we use is very, very important. So I would say definite R&B.
The foundation of R&B is structure, to call something a genre is to acknowledge, like, a certain type of structure that it has, you know? So I definitely say that, there is a formula, there is a structure, and you need to have a good understanding of that, to pay respect to it. And I'm happy that I'm in a space where I can learn from, like, a lot of my close friends who are Black artists, and they teach me. And I always want to come from this perspective...there's a lot of freedom to be found, you know, and there's a lot of ways that, you know, you can, you can veer alternative, and you can veer this way, new age, old school, whatever. So I think that there's freedom in it, and then there's like a certain fluidity that you can apply to it, or that'll just come naturally in that each different person is relaying their experiences through music.
It’s such a versatile genre. It can be like, sexy, it can be sad, it can be happy, it can be, like, so many different things.
Totally.
Who do you look up to in the industry and who inspires you?
Ooh, I could write a book. I'm going to have to say, the first answer off the top of my head is SZA down because of her conversational lyricism. She is so good at having that effect of just feeling like you're on the phone with her and she's venting to you or you're reading straight out of her journal. And it is like my goal as an artist to get there, and for that to come as easy to me as it comes to her and put it on a page.
So I know you're a Vegas local, right? So, has that scene, like, impacted your sound or your worldview at all?
If anything, Vegas is pretty diverse. Because obviously tourism, we have the strip or whatever. So I think I've been blessed in that way to just not even have to go out of my way to meet so many people from all different types and walks of life and learn from whatever conversations I've had with them, or relationships I've formed with them and pull from that and just pull and pull and pull and put it into art. So, in that way, I would say that it's shaped my artistry.
I know you're going to release an EP in a few months. That's so exciting. What can you tell us about its potential themes or subject matter?
Okay, the subject matter is born very much from the story we started with “Serato.” We're picking up right there, and we are diving into that story, because, I mean, essentially, you hear it in the song. I went through a crazy a*s breakup in 2025 and it was just totally disillusioned. I was forced to confront a completely different reality than the one I thought that I was sitting in. So my EP is called Sugar. I think we settled on 5 tracks, so nothing super crazy. I've just never put out a body of work before. It's solely executively produced by my best friend. She makes fantastic music as well, and then mixed and mastered by my other best friend. It was really just the three of us who made it together. I was crying every day, and I was really just trying to process everything that I was feeling, and I was like, I want to make something out of this. And then we just sat in the studio every night for, like, a month, two months, something, and then I would just write with them and I would cry and we would talk about it and we'd lay stuff down. And then we'd just have this EP that I'm so excited is finally [in it’s] finishing stages. It’s just me working through my grief and I'm angry about it and then I'm happy and there's humor in it and all kinds of fun stuff.
“I do hope that there's a feeling of empowerment that I'm able to instill in anybody who's listening to my music.” - Saara
After listening to Saara, what do you hope people take away?
I think just a feeling of just being very empowered to be honest about how you feel, no matter what that looks like. I've seen people who have this argument that, like, it matters, energetically, what you listen to, and if you listen to a bunch of SZA, then you're just going to be, like, insecure and sh*t. I think about that sometimes because a lot of the music that I make, I'm not writing it in my best moments or my most powerful moments. But I'm being honest about how I feel because music, if anything, is like a snapshot of the experience.
I don't like that argument either because, to be honest, I don't listen to a lot of sad music. I listen to like a lot of hyper pop, reggaeton, like music that really hypes you up, but like, I'm still sad as f*ck.
Yeah. So, like, the complete inverse. It doesn't really matter because it's just a moment in time and there's so much more than just that, you know? With that being said, I just hope that people feel empowered to be very honest about wherever they're at, whether it's great or if it's not the best.. just embrace whatever their own truth and their own reality is. Something very important to me that I hope translates in my music is that it doesn't really, I mean, it does matter what happens to you, but you can always take it and you can make something beautiful out of it. And I think that's what any musician is trying to do. And that sentiment is very, very important to me because I've been through a lot of bullshit, and music is how I personally kind of work my way through it. If I can find a way to make it pretty when I call you a cheating a*shole, I got something out of it. That's kind of the takeaway that I would hope for.
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