Sara Milonovich & Daisycutter – Last Resort Motor Inn
Alt-country/indie-folk singer-songwriter and fiddler Sara Milonovich is set to release her new album, Last Resort Motor Inn, independently via her own label, Loonymusik.
Last Resort Motor Inn is the sound of an award-winning songwriter taking stock — not just of a changing America, but of a lifetime spent navigating its back roads, small-town communities, music scenes, and contradictions.
Recorded alongside her band, Daisycutter, and longtime producer Greg Anderson, Last Resort Motor Inn unpacks stories rooted in rural America. With a combination of honesty and humor, Milonovich writes about gentrified mill towns losing their identities, farmers watching country culture become high-class fashion, resilient women surviving on the margins of society, and people searching for connection in fractured times. “There might not be a lot of hope or cheery bits in the songs,” she admits, “but there’s no quit in any of them.” That resilience is the beating heart of Last Resort Motor Inn — a reminder that when you’re a lifer, there’s no such thing as throwing in the towel. It’s a record about identity, persistence, and the common ground that brings us together, even when modern life threatens to pull us apart.
Milonovich also endeavored to have this album reflect her varied and diverse performance background, and to investigate new sonic areas with the fiddle that were less limited by traditional conventions and perceptions — including incorporating various amplifiers and effects, much as an electric guitarist would. “Whether it was using my bluegrass chops in a more traditional manner, drawing on my classical violin training in writing a string arrangement for a song, or plugging into an amplifier to explore new electric sounds, I wanted to write, arrange, and play with the greatest amount of creative freedom possible,” she explains. “Guitarists have always played whatever feels inspiring to them and explored new tones and techniques without any of those boundaries. I felt a little jealous of that, so I decided to start from that perspective and see what was possible, rather than having a preconceived notion or feeling confined to one genre.”
Milonovich planned three singles in advance of the album. The first, a honky-tonk rocker entitled “What We Did with the Place,” was released on July 31, 2026, with a premiere earlier that week at Americana UK, who praised its assessment of “the emotional and the political as well as the physical aspects of creeping gentrification, on one hand questioning relentless greed… then speculating on the meaning of ownership and history… and then a questioning of authenticity and appropriation.” Americana Highways called it “a truly inspirational song.”
A second single, the mandolin-driven love song “Planting and Harvest,” was released on August 28, 2026, premiering the week prior at The Bluegrass Situation.
Single three, a waltzing ballad (and the title track), “Last Resort Motor Inn,” was released on September 25, 2026.
Fans were able to hear the song a few days early via a premiere at Magnet Magazine, who praised the song, writing, “Some real-life stories need a little embellishment before they’re fit for public consumption. Sara Milonovich didn’t have that problem with ‘Last Resort Motor Inn.'”
Boldly progressive and forward-thinking, Last Resort Motor Inn pairs its more traditional compositions with sonic journeys that fall far outside the folk realm and that offer Milonovich’s take on some songs by other artists. An unexpected cover of King Crimson’s “Starless” turns the prog-rock staple into an ambitious Americana anthem, featuring pedal steel, hurdy-gurdy, and overdriven fiddle riffs amplified by a full Marshall stack. There’s an unplugged spin on American Aquarium’s “Me + Mine,” too, with banjos replacing the guitar-filled crescendoes of the original. The gorgeous, understated “Camille” — originally written by Gretchen Peters, Matraca Berg, and Suzy Bogguss — shows that Milonovich is not just a creator, but an interpreter as well.
“In The Field,” one of the album’s six originals, finds her mixing Woodstock references and newgrass textures into a combination she proudly calls “a jam-band-meets-’60s-pop song.” “Tale of Two Cities” examines gentrification through the lens of two upstate river towns: one polished into an arts destination before eventually pricing artists out, and the other left hollowed-out and forgotten. “Analog, Anodyne” spotlights the changes wrought by time with haunting melodies and sweeping fiddle. Taken together, these songs don’t just describe a place; they create one, too. And if these eclectic sounds don’t make sense on paper, they certainly make sense as the building blocks of an album that’s every bit as diverse as its creator.
Raised on a family farm in upstate New York, Milonovich grew up surrounded by bluegrass, folk, old-school country, and the earthy sounds of an agrarian area that still relied on agriculture. By nine years old, she was turning that rural landscape into music of her own, leading her first band as a top-shelf fiddle player. By her late teens, she was touring internationally as a member of the Celtic/bluegrass fusion band The McKrells. By the time she launched her solo career with 2009’s Daisycutter, she’d earned attention from folk legends like Pete Seeger, appearing on his Grammy-winning album, At 89.
As Milonovich’s musical horizons grew, so did her attachment to the region that first inspired her art. Albums like Northeast focused on those roots, chronicling the struggles of rural Americans weathered by geography and hard circumstances. Her storytelling may focus on the American Northeast, but her travels — and her accolades — reach beyond New York. Several years before releasing 2015’s Waiting for the Stars, she toured with the US State Department-sponsored cultural program “Rhythm Road: American Music Abroad,” performing across Kosovo, Bulgaria, Moldova, and Türkiye. As the years progressed, she began playing other European countries, too, matching her success back home in America (where she was named “Americana Artist of the Year” by the Capital District Thomas Edison Music Awards, also known as the Eddies) with growing attention overseas. Those international experiences didn’t just broaden her perspective; they helped distill her sound into something singular, too.
For Last Resort Motor Inn, joining Milonovich (who sang and played acoustic and electric fiddles, baritone violin, and acoustic guitar) and Anderson (who played guitars, bass, and other sundries) were Bob Buckley (harmony vocals), Leigh Gibson (harmony vocals, acoustic guitar), Bruce Molsky (harmony vocals, nylon string banjo), Boo Reiners (harmony vocals, electric guitar, banjo), Cody Kilby (mandolin, resonator guitar), Abbie Gardner and Rob Ickes (dobros), Nicolas Boulerice (hurdy-gurdy), Lloyd Maines and Larry Campbell (pedal steel guitars), Jeremy Baum (Hammond organ), Leo Traversa (electric bass), Viktor Krauss (acoustic bass), and Justin Guip and Ben Wittman (drums). The album was largely recorded at Guip’s Milan Hill Studio in Red Hook, NY, with additional recording at The Nest Box in Beacon, NY, The Studios at Bethel Woods Center for the Arts in Bethel, NY, as well in several other places around the US, Canada, and Japan. It was also mixed at Milan Hill, and mastering was done at Dave McNair Mastering in North Carolina.
Milonovich has shared stages, tours, and collaborations with the aforementioned Seeger, as well as Richard Shindell and Eliza Gilkyson, among others, and she performed on Broadway in the Tony Award-winning Come From Away. She plans to tour in support of Last Resort Motor Inn and already has some US and UK dates on the books.
Oct. 29 – Soho Folk and Blues | London, UK
Oct. 30 – Hen and Chicken Southville | Bristol, UK
Nov. 4 – Ebenezer’s | Crewe, UK
Nov. 6 – Semitone Studios | Marple, UK
Nov. 11 – Baldock Folk Club | Baldock, UK
Nov. 12 – St. Pancras Old Church | London, UK (w/Richard Shindell)
Dec. 3 – Cock ‘n’ Bull | Galway, NY (Wynotte Sisters show)
Dec. 4 – Southern Dutchess Country Club | Beacon, NY (Wynotte Sisters show)
Dec. 5 – Old Town Hall | Brewster, NY (Wynotte Sisters show)
Dec. 20 – The Chapel Restoration | Cold Spring, NY (Wynotte Sisters show)
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