S.L. Houser

One Liner: Solid local indie rock (and you can hire her for lessons!)
Wikipedia Genre: No Wikipedia, but indie rock?
Home: Austin!

Poster Position: Bottom Quarter - Line 22
Day: Saturday
Weekend One Only.

BMI Stage at 12:15.

Thoughts: Not sure where this comes from, but my brain sees someone who goes by initials and immediately expects a male.  My repeated mental comparison for this one is a lesser Florence (like, & the Machine Florence).  It's pretty solid for someone with very few streams.

Her very limited bio on her website provides this background: "Sara L. Houser is a songwriter based in Austin, TX. She is a touring musician for Zella Day and Matthew Logan Vasquez as well as a session musician appearing on albums from many of Austin’s finest acts. In addition to her writing and performance work, Houser is also an avid music educator, producer, arranger, and composer. Her new deluxe album Hibiscus (Perennial) is available for purchase on vinyl and digitial download on Bandcamp."  A more in depth bio also provides that some of those session musician sessions were with Spoon, Golden Dawn Arkestra, and Walker Lukens.  That would be very rad if she was an elementary school music teacher who was also just about to go perform at ACL.  Her website says you can hire her for lessons on songwriting, piano, guitar, voice, and music theory.  I could use all of those!

She had been in an indie rock band called Löwin, which I am not familiar with.  She was also apparently KUTX's artist of the month for January 2024.  That is a cool thing they do.  Anyway, a couple singles and one 2023 EP called Hibiscus.  Top track is "When I Want To" with 15k streams.

Starts up like she should be singing about "running up that hill."  But I think she has a great voice that goes along with a catchy tune.  Probably better than anything Sabrina Carpenter has ever done.  The second-most streamed tune is the title track from the album, with 11k streams.

I like the atmospheric synths that are cruising along in the background under her vocals.  Her bio from KUTX says that she is a Berklee College of Music graduate and classically trained pianist, so maybe all of that piano we hear in here is from her fingers.  All sounds pretty solid to me.  I'd go check it out if I was out at the Fest that early on Saturday...