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life story
Born in Concord, California, Sara Winterford is better known as her stage persona, Sara Monaco. She was born to Christopher and Stella Winterford in 1986, and has two siblings: an older sister, Lindsay, born in 1982, and a younger brother, Matthew, born in 1990. Sara’s parents are, respectively, second generation English and Irish, and her mother impressed her cultural heritage on her children. It doesn’t come down to just the overly zealous celebration of Saint Patrick’s Day but is ingrained into the three kids, from what they eat to their religion and even the way some of Sara’s older family members talk. Sara was raised Roman Catholic, and her grandparents are quite devout. Her mom is too, but selectively so - the issue of religion is really only brought up when it furthers Stella Winterford’s cause. Having said that, her parents didn’t really go out of their way to push their belief onto their children when they were in school. Christopher and Stella believed that their children should be allowed to find their own faith, and if they chose to turn their backs on it altogether, that was their choice too - although their mom would joke about it when Sara was a kid - “It’s up to you if you want to burn in hell!”
Throughout her childhood and teenage years, Sara wasn’t really inclined to being musical. She played piano and guitar, but not to any amazing standard - she was more focused on her artistic sensibilities. She’s been a focused individual since she was a small child - her powers of concentration are legendary in the Winterford family, although when she was a kid she usually used it to win staring contests and nothing more prestigious. When she puts her mind to achieving something, though, there’s no doubting that Sara will get it, no matter how long it takes. However, it wasn’t until she graduated from college that she turned her infamous (within her circle of friends and family, at least) powers of focus to becoming a vocalist.
Sara attended college in New York City, studying Studio Art at NYU. It was when she got to the city that she realized for the first time that other people might view her as a sexual being. She hadn’t been a beautiful teenager - rather, she was gawky and awkward - so the attention she received from men (and occasionally women) took her aback. After all, there had been no enormous change in her physically, at least not that she’d noticed. She had never had braces, still occasionally wore her glasses, and weighed a little more than she had in high school. (She looked on this weight gain as a bad thing, but it was actually a matter of her filling out in the right places.) Maybe it was an issue of confidence - once she got to college, Sara felt she was able to be herself for the first time, unshackled by her family being around to embarrass her (and as much as she loves them, they can be deeply humiliating at times, generally on purpose) or her old schoolmates who knew her as the band geek and skinny, hard-working teenager she’d been. Whatever the reason, she began to dress differently, wore make-up, courted the looks of men who glanced her way or who asked her for her number. She was eighteen, and there aren’t many girls of that age who would refuse positive male attention.
After graduating in 2008, Sara returned to California, but only briefly. Her older sister was living in New York by then, working as a fashion assistant, and Sara made plans to go out there and live with her. She’d fallen for the city, and as much as she loves her parents, she didn’t want to be left behind with them and her younger brother while her sister was having some amazing time in New York. Sara moved back out there at the new year of 2009, and that was when her ambition to be a singer was kickstarted. Lindsay, ever the protective older sister, took Sara under her wing and showed her around the city’s nightlife. Sara had had some idea about it beforehand - she’d been at college there for four years after all - but Lindsay knew about places she didn’t and so the younger Winterford sister allowed herself to be led around by the hand for a while.
By mid-2009, Sara was being supported financially by her grandparents. She couldn’t seem to get a job no matter what. She continued working diligently at her art, starting a blog and offering her services as an artist on the internet, and even at one point began working on a children’s book. Nothing was really coming together for her, though, and although she’d long believed she would always be an artist, for the first time she began to lose faith in herself. It wasn’t until the fall of 2009 that things started to turn around and take a totally different direction.
Believe it or not, Sara’s career began on Myspace. After going to the same karaoke bar every week with her sister and her friends, she was advised by an audience member to put some recordings of her voice on Myspace. She’d been vaguely writing songs for a while but began the task in earnest, uploading them to her personal page and diligently producing them with help from a friend who knew more about these things than she did. Eventually, she was noticed by a band manager who wanted her to join one of his projects as the front-woman. Sara agreed tentatively, but it didn’t really work out and instead she started recording an EP on her own instead through the same manager. That EP, “Kill Kill”, was released to no acclaim or interest whatsoever in 2009.
Despite that, she recorded her first album in 2010 under her new pseudonym, Sara Monaco. She didn’t and never has thought much to the moniker, but her manager at the time thought it was a better sounding name than Winterford - more musical, more tuneful - and she went along with it reluctantly. After all, he probably knew what he was doing, right? By late 2010 the album was released - with her real name tagged onto the title at her request. Again, the album sunk without trace and she resigned herself to being a starving artist for the next year or so.
She didn’t give up entirely, though. Sara continued to write songs and upload them to Myspace, and after her managed dropped her, she went through a bleak period where no one seemed to be interested in her. She wasn’t prepared to let her musical ambitions go, though, and eventually she was caught in the net of a new manager. Unfortunately for Sara, he wanted her to keep her Monaco name, but she was prepared to do anything to get a break. After the manager reinvented her - dyed her hair, made her lose fifteen pounds, had her teeth fixed - she was unleashed back into the world with a new sound, new songs, a new album forthcoming. Thanks to the power of YouTube, which helped to promote the songs from the new record, she was able to get her face and more importantly, her sound out there.
Since 2011, Sara’s art has mostly fallen by the wayside. She still draws sometimes, but she doesn’t have major amounts of time to devote to drawing and at most ends up doodling while she’s on planes or in airports. Her album released in January and it was a success, selling 900,000 units worldwide so far. She’s on the promotional trail and she’s just so relieved that she can start paying her grandparents back and stop being a starving artist that she hasn’t had time to process her success just yet.
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