These boots are made for gawking
‘It’s hard on your hands, but it’s just this beautiful way of living,’ Wakefield’s Sarah Madeleine T. Guerin says of crafting her custom western kicks
WAKEFIELD — Artist and bespoke western bootmaker Sarah Madeleine T. Guerin works in an 11by-14-foot shed her husband built behind their house. It replicates a “ten footer,” a small, vernacular shoemaking shop common in Lynn 200 years ago. The Mill River rises through reeds just outside.
Where to find her: www.saboteuse.com
Age :47
Lives in: Wakefield
Originally from: Lynn and Swampscott
Making a living: Guerin and her husband, John Cullen, a work supervisor for the Coast Guard, have three children. She brings in income from client orders (base price: $6,200), art grants, and teaching.
“But I don’t consider it ‘making a living’ because my household and child care work is my primary living, which enables John to work inflexible hours to bring in more income than an art practice does.”
Studio: “This is like my brain. It’s like you are standing in my brain right now.”
Guerin’s tightly packed studio is filled with leather (cow, ostrich, alligator), sewing machines, shoe lasts (footshaped forms a shoe is built around), tools, and a skeletal model of a foot. Decades-old handmade ladies’ pumps and children’s shoes sit in nooks.
Materials: Guerin said vegan leathers being developed are not hardy enough yet to use for footwear, and she won’t use petroleum products.
“Leather’s a byproduct of the meat industry, so even if you don’t eat meat, it’s still going to be there. In my practice, I see it as keeping this out of a landfill.”
How she started: Studying architecture at Rhode Island School of Design.
“Everything I did in the architecture program I do in my boot-making practice. You’re taking a functional object that needs to fulfill some basic human requirements, the way architecture provides shelter. The same goes for footwear.”
What she makes: If a client comes with a detailed design in mind, Guerin strives to meet that vision. But it’s her art that really fulfills her. She made “Chez Pras,” boots armored in X-acto Knife blades, remembering a terrible boss.
“My art is how I figure things out. It’s how I move through the world. It’s how I tell about my experiences. It’s how I unload painful things.”
How she works: “There’s a beauty and an integrity and a straightforwardness to material in bootmaking that is thrilling to be a part of. They feel really good to make. They’re labor intensive. It’s hard on your hands, but it’s just this beautiful way of living.”
Guerin works closely with clients, measuring feet, hashing out designs. Her process includes crafting custommade lasts, meeting clients for at least two fittings, soaking the harder leathers (used for soles, heels, and more), and plenty of stitching. It takes 12 to 15 months to complete a pair of boots.
Advice for artists: “Talk, communicate, and organize. Don’t accept and settle for the way society is telling artists to be happy for what you get. Charge for your labor. Always.”
For those partial to music rooted in vintage soul and its allied forms, next week will seem like Christmas. On Tuesday, Seth Applebaum and his Ghost Funk Orchestra hit town, nine members strong, on a twin bill with Marco Benevento at Brighton Music Hall. Two nights later, West Coast band Monophonics play just down the street at the Paradise. They’re also on a twin bill, with traditionalist Lee Fields — “arguably the best soul singer alive,” according to the mavens at his current label, Daptone Records. In between, on Wednesday, four-piece funk and soul-jazz powerhouse the New Mastersounds bring their ferocious live show to the Sinclair in Cambridge. Friday will be a day to rest and recover.
During a recent Zoom call, Applebaum characterizes the Ghost Funk Orchestra sound as jazz-funk, although he qualifies his answer: “It gets harder and harder with every release, because I keep trying to touch different genres and try new things. But at the core of it, it’s the jazz side of me. It all starts with jazz.”
He started GFO as a “basement recording project,” playing drums, guitar, bass, “everything that I know how to play.” It is essentially still that, he says; he still writes the songs, and then records them until he runs out of instruments that he knows how to play, at which point he turns to the assistance of other musicians, which expands the scope of the music in a big way. He took to posting the results on Bandcamp, and eventually, after being nudged by listeners, Ghost Funk Orchestra began performing live.
The band’s new record, “A Trip to the Moon,” certainly exudes a cinematic, big-band jazzfunk sound. Indeed, the record comes across as a soundtrack for a movie that doesn’t exist. It revolves around a loose concept ined volving a woman whose astronaut partner has just left her to travel to the moon; back on Earth, she’s wondering what will become of her and the man who has blasted off into space.
The concept was inspired by Applebaum’s discovery that recordings of astronaut communications on various Apollo space flights — most notably, the epochal Apollo 11 — were in the public domain. The self-described “space nerd” began listening, and the recordings became the catalyst for “A Trip to the Moon” and a vital element of it as well.
“I think I was about halfway through the songs that ended up being the album when I discovered the NASA recordings,” Applebaum says. He started playing around with sequencing the tracks he had already made and interspersing clips from the NASA recordings in between each of the songs. “It made a weird kind of sense, even though the songs that the clips were tying together had not been overtly space themed until that point. Now they just added this interesting context, and once I decidthat they were going to be the glue on the record, it helped inform me writing the remaining songs.”
The whole that resulted — music that is by turns slinky, ethereal, or explosive, with vocalists Romi Hanoch and Megan Mancini giving voice to the woman left behind, joined to interstitial recordings that convey everything from the astronauts’ deadpan humor to sheer wonder at what they’re witnessing — is singular and striking.
Tuesday’s show is the first on the band’s tour. Naturally, they’ll be playing songs from the new album, but Applebaum hasn’t yet decided whether the audience will also hear the Apollo transmissions. “It’s very possible,” he says. “I would just have to figure out the best way to do it.”
As it happens, the latest Monophonics album, “Sage Motel,” is also organized around a concept of sorts. Kelly Finnigan, the band’s frontman and songwriter, indicates during a Zoom conversation that its source was something connected to mundane rather than celestial travel: a motel that he regularly drove by in Oakland.
“I would see this motel off the freeway, and it just really stuck in my head,” he says. “When we start writing songs for a new record, we usually start just writing music, kicking around ideas. I like to try and challenge myself, and instead of something about just, you know, guy and girl, I wanted to have another character, and the character was the motel.”
That idea framed the record; each of the songs is a story that’s happening in one of the motel’s rooms. The album is bookended by two instrumentals, “Check In” and “Check Out”; in between, each song opens a door on depictions of love’s complications, of affairs coming and going (starting with the title track, which involves a relationship between a strait-laced man and a prostitute that likely won’t end well).
The band even extended the concept beyond the songs, setting up a web page (now expired) for the motel, as well as an Instagram page (still active), and a room reservation phone number, which plays a snippet from one of the songs when called. The band’s characteristic psychedelic-soul sound takes on a slower, moodier vibe throughout the record, which seems to fit the subject matter.
“Motels are crossroads for people,” observes Finnigan, “they’re intersections for people traveling, whether for work or for personal reasons. They might be picking up and moving, they might be a broken relationship, they might be searching for love. It’s just representative, if you think about all the people that are in motels and hotels, and what each of their stories are. Obviously, everybody can hear the record as they want and interpret it as they want, but that’s kind of the guide.”
Stuart Munro can be reached at sj.munro@verizon.net
GHOST FUNK ORCHESTRA April 9 at 8 p.m. At Brighton Music Hall, 158 Brighton Ave. $20. livenation.com
THE NEW MASTERSOUNDS April 10 at 8 p.m. $25. The Sinclair, 52 Church St., Cambridge. 888-929-7849, axs.com
LEE FIELDS AND MONOPHONICS April 11 at 8 p.m. At Paradise Rock Club, 967 Commonwealth Ave. $35. livenation.com