Sara Houser’s long-developed reputation in Austin’s music community hasn’t come by way of putting herself out there as a solo artist. Yet, in emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic with solo billing and a new musical direction, the Austin music scene veteran found her way home at the same time.
After making her local name as a session and touring musician, and playing in several bands over the years — most recently fronting indie rock foursome Löwin, which dissolved during the pandemic — Houser has gravitated back to the piano-based, mellower musical roots that earned her a college scholarship on that instrument and became the foundation of her academic studies. And in the more stately synth-pop she’s recording under S.L. Houser, her eclectic musical journey is evident. Now, her music sits in a dreamier, more in-the-clouds space.
“I think after doing the guitar thing for like seven years, I sort of found my way back to piano and realized that it’s like my home-based instrument,” Houser said in an interview during Weekend 1 at ACL (top photo), where she performed a Saturday afternoon set. “It’s definitely where I feel the most at-home musically.”
Reflecting the foothold Houser has forged in Austin’s music scene since she moved here 16 years ago, her appearance at ACL this year was technically her second as a performer. The first came when she played Zilker Park with Golden Dawn Arkestra, a current labelmate on Austin’s Spaceflight Records and one of many touring or session gigs Houser has notched for both local artists (Spoon) and national ones (touring stints with Zella Day and Matthew Logan Vasquez, frontman for Delta Spirit). Producing and arranging are also part of Houser’s vast musical portfolio.
With those and other credits, her profile has been highest within Austin’s music industry. Now, with opportunities like ACL emerging, she’s expanding it externally. Gentle pianos and chiming synths provide a natural foundation to showcase Houser’s peaceful, lilting singing voice, which can recall the soothing likes of Dido or Annie Lennox. Appropriately enough, her latest release is a cover of the Eurhythmics’ “Here Comes the Rain Again,” but it’s on her debut solo EP, 2023’s Hibiscus, where her nature-informed, metaphor-filled vision is in full bloom. Hibiscus is billed as a “spyglass look into the mind of a self-described recovering workaholic,” a theme laid bare on “When I Want To,” one of the EP’s standouts: “I work as hard as I can like it could mean something/Tell myself that that’s who I am/What do you do when you don’t want to anymore/I ask myself if this is living, then what am I living for.”
Nods to the natural world — flowers and a whole lot more — abound in Hibiscus, whether on its title track (“Oh to bloom and die in a day, ain’t that a feeling/Fresh faced but in vain, the sun sets and I’m spinning”) or on “Nothing Grows in August,” where Houser continues the title with “but I’m trying anyway.” Self-examination and assessment are prevalent throughout the EP, which Houser released a deluxe edition of in 2024 with two additional tracks. That introspection continues as she works on a followup to Hibiscus.
“I think my songwriting has always been a way of me understanding myself. I sort of liken a lot of my songs as letters that I’m writing to myself,” she said. “And I think right now, I’ve just been seeking kind of like a bigger understanding of life in general. And that’s the second album, I’ve been writing about that way … more expansive.”
Houser grew up in Florida and South Carolina and went to college in Boston before landing in Austin in 2009, eventually making contacts and inroads in the music scene. Her gravitation away from piano came after college, resulting from what she diagnoses as burnout on the instrument. As a result, she jumped into learning guitar and into an indie rock realm that was far away from the academic treatment of music she had come to know. But during the pandemic, she began writing more on her own and developing an affinity for home production. That led to the end of Löwin and her first releases as S.L. Houser — the singles “Mirror” and “Reflection Refraction” — in 2021.
“I think that my goals and my definition of success with music have changed many times,” the 38-year-old Houser told me. “I think when I was 18, it was like, ‘Oh, I want a record deal, and I want a world tour, and I want …’ all these things that seem so accessible when you’re 18. And then, you get in it and you realize, ‘Oh, there’s so much in the music industry that is completely not in my control.’ So for me, music now, my goals are I still want to be inspired to do it. And as long as the opportunities keep presenting themselves, I will take them.
“And I’m always going to write music no matter what. I think it’s like a phantom limb — it’s a part of me that will always be there. But I’m really happy with where I am.”