Dead Horses with special guest Adda Boyd

The union of Sarah Vos’ emotive songwriting and Dan Wolff’s bass playing transcends the singer-songwriter-with-backup-musicians paradigm. Dan’s adventurous musicality equally shines alongside Sarah’s songwriting sensibility. To date, Dead Horses has released three albums, two of which have been produced by Ken Coomer of Uncle Tupelo and Wilco, an Audiotree Live Session, three singles, and a five-song EP.

Since the band’s early days, Dead Horses has been something of a fluid project centered around Sarah and Dan but has also welcomed other like minded musicians for recording and touring. Two of the band’s original members ultimately left the group due to opioid addictions (“I still see the pawn shop sticker every time I look at my guitar tuner,” remembers Vos), but the Dead Horses moniker the pair created as a tribute to a friend who’d overdosed from heroin stuck even after their departure. To this end, Vos says, “Our music is about hope and joy, all while sharing an important message that you’re never alone in your battles.”

This compassion is hard won. At 15, Vos’ world turned upside down. Raised in a strict, fundamentalist home, she lost everything when she and her family were expelled from the rural Wisconsin church where her father had long served as pastor.

“My older brother was diagnosed with schizophrenia and my twin had mental illnesses and cognitive disabilities,” explains Vos. “When the church kicked us out, they basically told my dad, ‘If you can’t lead your family, how can you lead your church?’ At the time we were expelled, we lived in the church’s parish house,” explains Vos. “Suddenly, my father was unemployed and my family was homeless. My parents couldn’t afford insurance for the medical care my siblings needed. We were kicked out and completely abandoned. One of the hardest things in life is watching your family suffer, to be so close but unable to ease their pain. Visiting my siblings in psych wards hurt me in a way that I’m still not sure I’ve made sense of. While I can look back now and say that it maybe wasn’t conducive to me developing in a healthy way as a young person, I can see that it instilled such a sense of empathy in me.”

By the time Vos turned 18, her family had begun to get back on their feet and she headed to Milwaukee for college, and there, came to terms with revelations about her sexuality that her religious upbringing had forced her to repress. The mix of freedom and relief and shame and guilt was overwhelming, and a depressive breakdown ensued.

“I couldn’t take care of myself,” she remembers. “I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t do anything. I stopped going to classes, and then I dropped out altogether and moved back home to Oshkosh. That’s where I met Dan.”

When bassist Wolff and Vos first started playing music together, she felt as if the clouds had finally parted. Vos, introduced songs she’d been writing since high school open mics, Wolff learned a new instrument for the band (the double bass), and within months, they had earned a devoted local following. Initially, Sarah and Dan resided in different musical spheres. Sarah was at a singer-songwriter vantage point, whereas Dan had previously played in punk bands, but the two quickly bonded over their shared adoration of folk music and upbringings in the church. Regular gigs led to steady residencies led to regional touring and their first recordings.