Sadie Bass was a teenager when she first attended Michigan’s Faster Horses country music festival, around the time she was getting serious about her own career.
“I remember going there and watching people on stage and being like, holy crap, I really want to do this one day,” she tells Metro Times. “And I can’t believe that I actually am.”
Now 27, Bass is set to perform at this weekend’s three-day fest, sharing a bill with big acts like Jelly Roll, Lainey Wilson, and Hardy. Bass is scheduled for 1:50 p.m. on Saturday at the “Next From Nashville” stage.
While Bass moved to Music City in 2020 to pursue her country dreams, she originally hails from a town called Bath, located just outside of Lansing, where she says she enjoyed living a rural lifestyle.
“My dad had a couple acres,” she says. “I miss being in Michigan. We had a little bit of everything out there. We got to fish. We got to hunt in the fall.”
Bass says she listened to classic rock and pop growing up, with some of her favorite artists including the Beatles, Britney Spears, and Eminem. But she says she really started getting into country music in the 2010s, a transformative period that saw the genre expand into other styles and grow in popularity.
“It was Miranda Lambert for me,” she says. “I was like, wow, I really relate to her writing, I can sing her songs, the style. … I love so many different artists, but she stuck out to me the most.”
Bass says her mother encouraged her to sing but she was too shy to perform on her own, though she found it less intimidating to sing along with others whenever someone pulled out an acoustic guitar at a bonfire. “I started to learn some of the songs that my family would do, so we could play and sing together,” she says.
At 19, she dropped out of Lansing Community College, which she attended on a scholarship for softball, to make music instead.
“I cannot believe I quit at that time, because I wasn’t even vocally or even songwriting ready, but I did,” Bass recalls. “And I’m glad I did, ’cause I ain’t getting any younger.”
She says she believes it was God’s plan for her to become a country music singer.
“What I’ve learned with my relationship with God and the Holy Spirit is you might dream something, but unless it’s his plan for you, those doors probably aren’t going to open,” she says. “When I went to Faster Horses festival, I just had this feeling like I could be up there one day, and I kept looking at the artists and thinking they had to start somewhere, to put in the work if God keeps opening the door.”
She adds, “There’s so many times that have been setbacks that I could have just totally let it make me stop doing it. But I think God uses a lot of those things to help me become who I am, and I would have nothing to write about if I didn’t go through all of this. It’s all part of his plan.”
Bass says she visited Nashville for several years before deciding to take the plunge. During that time, she was inspired by Lainey Wilson, who she had met at a songwriters’ round, where artists collaborate and test out new material before a live audience.
“She’s absolutely killing it,” Bass says. “I remember watching her at these rounds, and I thought, oh my god, she’s so good … if she can’t do it, I’m screwed!”
After toiling in Nashville for more than a decade, Wilson reached superstar status in recent years thanks to her breakout single “Things a Man Oughta Know,” her flair for fashion, and appearing on the neo-Western TV drama Yellowstone.
Bass adds, “She just stuck with it, and I truly think all those years she put in — the struggles, everything — I think that’s why she’s so good now.”
While Bass says being in Nashville has improved her own songwriting, one of her biggest tracks so far was written here in Michigan. Released last year and co-written with her friends Drake VonKohn and Paul Wrock, Bass’s “Wake N’ Bake” describes getting stoned at a lake on a perfect summer day.
The track tells a tale familiar to many Michiganders, where lake culture is cherished and cannabis is legal, but Bass claims some of her shows in other states have been canceled over the still-subversive subject matter. (“It’s about tanning in the sun, you sicko!” she says with a laugh.)
This year, Bass has played to some of the biggest crowds of her career supporting Lambert, Kid Rock, Jason Aldean, and Gretchen Wilson on the Rock the Country Festival. Looking forward, Bass says she plans to keep the momentum going by releasing a string of singles in the coming months.
“I have been stockpiling songs for so long,” she says, adding that she believes releasing singles is the best route for rising artists, though it can be hard to save money from her waitressing job to self-release music. “If you’re independent it’s really hard to do it alone, especially if you’re funding it,” she says.
Bass says she primarily performs as a three-piece band with drummer Aaron Larsen and guitarist Zach Hayes, who is also from Michigan and has been with Bass since the beginning.
“God bless them because I’m changing my set every show,” she says.
But no matter where her country music career takes her, Bass says she will never forget her Michigan roots.
“It is hard to stay true to yourself, and you get around all kinds of people,” she says of the Nashville music industry. “So that has been something that I’ve tried to pray about every day, to keep me the same person that I was when I started.”
She adds, “I just had to trust [God] to keep getting me opportunities, but I’m so glad that I’ve gone through it all because if it happened overnight, I don’t know if I’d be the same person that I am.”
Faster Horses festival is Friday, July 19-Sunday, July 21 near Michigan International Speedway; 12626 U.S. Highway 12, Brooklyn. See fasterhorsesfestival.com for the full schedule.
