Some real-life stories need a little embellishment before they’re fit for public consumption. Sara Milonovich didn’t have that problem with “Last Resort Motor Inn.” It happened several years ago while she was touring the Northeast somewhere along the I-95 corridor, where she and her husband booked room in a sketchy motor lodge off the highway. It was early spring, and sleet was falling.
“I remember noticing the crocuses poking up between piles of soggy cigarette butts and grimy snowbanks in the parking dividers,” says Milonovich. “That image made it into the first verse, as did a lot of other imagery and dialogue from that night.”
There’s also the encounter on the motor-lodge stairs involving a woman with upside-down New England Patriots stickers under her eyes. “Honey, you’re not staying here alone, are you?” she asked Milonovich, who explained that her husband was unloading the car.“Without blinking, she just turned back to me with this cynical look and said, ‘OK, honey, if that’s what you call him,’” says Milonovich. “It took me a solid 10 minutes of unpacking to realize she thought I was a fellow prostitute. In her view, nobody would stay at that hotel for any other reason.”
Raised on a family farm near Albany, N.Y., Milonovich has spent much of her life traversing the musical terrain between bluegrass, folk, country and rock. A fiddle player since childhood, she toured internationally with Celtic-flavored bluegrassers the McKrells in her late teens, later appearing on Pete Seeger’s Grammy-winning 2009 LP, At 89. That same year, she released Daisycutter, her solo debut. Last Resort Motor Inn was recorded with her trusty band of the same name and longtime producer Greg Anderson.
Milonovich wrote the chords and lyrics to the title track on guitar, hearing a violin running through the bridge and toward the end. In the studio, she expanded that thought into a sparse string arrangement with fiddle and viola, then added pedal steel from Texas legend Lloyd Maines.
“The choruses are about keeping your own sense of self intact and not sacrificing yourself to someone else’s ideas or plans,” says Milonovich. “‘And in the spirit of survival in the Northeast, there’s also some winter-driving advice.”
We’re proud to premiere Sara Milonovich & Daisycutter’s “Last Resort Motor Inn.” Look for the new album in October.
—Hobart Rowland
See Sara Milonovich live.
