Sarah Stevens – Fingerstyle Guitarist & Storyteller

Sarah Stevens grew up in Vlaardingen, just outside Rotterdam, and picked up a guitar at sixteen the way a lot of Dutch teenagers did in the early 2000s: because of The Offspring and Red Hot Chili Peppers. For a few years, electric guitar and power chords were enough. Then, in 2009, she stumbled across a YouTube video of Tommy Emmanuel, and the whole idea of what a guitar could do changed overnight.

What Emmanuel was doing, one man producing melody, bass and rhythm simultaneously on a single acoustic instrument, felt like a revelation. Sarah switched to acoustic almost immediately, started learning everything she could about fingerstyle technique, and never really looked back at the electric. It is a trajectory that makes a certain kind of sense: the same hunger for expressiveness that drew her to the Chilis was now pulling her toward something far more demanding and far more personal.

She found mentors. Harry Sacksioni, the Dutch fingerstyle master, encouraged her to start composing rather than just covering other people's songs. That push mattered. Writing her own music gave her something to say, and a way to say it. Michael Fix, the Australian fingerstyle guitarist, took her under his wing and brought her along on tour through Germany. Playing night after night, watching how Fix held a room with just one guitar, taught her more than any lesson could.

Her debut album, Moree, came out in 2013. The title is a song she wrote for the guitar teacher who first showed her the chords, a small act of gratitude pressed into recorded form. Her second album, Still Waters Run Deep, followed in 2016, by which point she had already been opening for Tommy Emmanuel at De Doelen Grote Zaal in Rotterdam, one of the country's premier concert halls. She played on cruise ships, in museums, at festivals and concert halls. The work was going well.

In 2017, she stepped away from performing. She transitioned, and that took time and attention and priority over everything else, including the guitar. She was gone from stages for seven years.

She came back in 2024.

The return has not been tentative. Her live show is built around the music, but it is also built around her stories: funny, plainspoken accounts of the years she was away, the experience of transitioning, the strangeness and the humor of being human. Audiences who come expecting a quiet evening of guitar technique tend to leave having laughed more than they anticipated. The talking is not a gap between the songs. It is part of the show.

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A woman with short brown hair, dressed in a sheer black top and plaid pants, sits on a beige sofa with a guitar beside her in a room with colorful artwork on the walls and a patterned rug on the floor.
A woman sitting on a beige couch, holding an acoustic guitar, wearing a black sheer long-sleeve top, plaid pants, and brown high-top sneakers, with colorful graffiti art in the background.
A woman playing an acoustic guitar indoors, standing in front of a colorful abstract painting, with a pink wall behind her.
A woman with short, light brown hair wearing a blue striped shirt playing an acoustic guitar outdoors during daytime.