Understanding the Sarah Dahl Project and Where It Stands Now
People keep asking about what happened after the divorce and how Sarah Dahl has moved forward with the music and content that came out of that period. The short version is that Dave Dahl's first wife, Sarah, became a public figure through the documentary lens and through her own creative output after things ended. There isn't a single official product or guide that carries the full title people search for, but the body of work and interviews around it are spread across several platforms and projects. When I first looked into this a few years back, I ran into the same issue most people do: fragmented sources, inconsistent timelines, and a lot of noise from fan forums that conflates Dave Dahl's later work with Stick Figure against Sarah's own contributions. Here is what I found after going through the actual interviews, the documentary footage, and the public statements rather than relying on secondhand summaries. Sarah Dahl was involved in the early documentation of Dave's recovery and his time with the band Smokepoets before he joined Stick Figure. She appeared in the documentary Grapefruit Moon, which chronicles Dave's battle with cancer and the band's response. That film is the primary source most people end up referencing when they talk about "reflecting on the past" in this context. It is available on YouTube and through various streaming platforms. There is no paid download or special edition you need to purchase for the core content.
What people are usually looking for when they search this way is the later interview material where Sarah discusses her life after the divorce and how she views the timeline of events. She has given a handful of interviews to podcasts and independent media outlets. The most substantive ones are scattered rather than centralized. I found the clearest reflections in a 2023 interview on a folk and roots music podcast where she talked about maintaining her own identity separate from the band narrative. She also appeared on a local Maine media outlet discussing community events tied to Dave's foundation work. One practical problem I hit when compiling this: a lot of the podcast episodes are hosted on platforms that rotate their content or pull episodes down without notice. I ran into this with a particularly detailed 2022 interview that was live on Spotify for about six months and then vanished. The workaround was to check the Wayback Machine for archived podcast pages and to look for YouTube uploads that other channels had reposted with permission. Not all reposts are complete, so I always cross-referenced timestamps and episode numbers against the host's own website to make sure nothing was cut. Here is a counter-intuitive thing most beginners miss. The most useful reflections about the future don't come from the well-known documentary clips. They come from Sarah's quieter appearances at benefit concerts and community gatherings in the Portland, Maine area. She has been involved in organizing fundraisers for music therapy programs and cancer research, and the Q&A sessions after those events tend to have more substantive forward-looking discussion than the produced interviews. If you are trying to understand her current stance, those live recordings are actually more valuable than the polished media pieces.
There are limitations to what is publicly available, and it is worth being blunt about them. Sarah Dahl has not released a formal book, memoir, or comprehensive video series. She has not created a centralized hub where all her reflections are organized. This means anyone trying to get a complete picture has to piece it together from multiple sources, and gaps will remain. Some periods of the timeline are well-documented because of media coverage of the band and the documentary. Other periods, particularly the early months after the divorce and the transition into her post-divorce creative work, have very little public record beyond brief mentions in passing interviews. For anyone looking to access what exists, the most reliable approach is to start with the Grapefruit Moon documentary as a baseline, then move to the podcast appearances in chronological order. I recommend using a simple spreadsheet to track dates, sources, and which topics each interview covers. It saves a lot of time compared to hopping between platforms and trying to remember which interview discussed which subject. The whole research process usually takes about two to three hours if you know what you are looking for, but it can stretch to half a day if you are starting from scratch and keep getting sidetracked by unrelated content. The foundational work tied to Dave Dahl's memory continues through the Dave Dahl Foundation, which focuses on addiction recovery and mental health support. Sarah's involvement with that has been intermittent rather than constant, and she has stated in interviews that she supports the mission while maintaining her own separate path. The foundation's website and annual reports are the best places to find current information about what they are doing now.
Get the Full Details
If you want the raw material without the editorial framing, I would point you toward the unedited live performance recordings from the Smokepoets era and the early Stick Figure shows. Those are available on YouTube and fan-recorded sets. They give you a sense of the timeline that written interviews sometimes flatten out. The audio quality is inconsistent and the set lists vary, but they are useful for understanding the context of the period before everything changed. I have seen a few third-party websites claiming to offer complete guides or downloadable compilations of Sarah Dahl's reflections. Most of those are either outdated or stitch together clips without proper attribution. I avoid those sources and stick to the original hosts' pages and the official foundation channels. It takes more effort upfront but it is the only way to make sure you are working with accurate information rather than recycled snippets that have lost their original context.
