A lot can happen in a two year pandemic, even in isolation. Like everyone, Sara Leib spent most of her time sequestered at home during the 2020/2021 coronavirus pandemic. She acquired solitary new skills, like learning to cook on an outdoor wok burner and finally taking the time to take online lessons in Spanish and music engineering.

There was time spent with her immediate family, time spent looking at past travel photos to quell the wanderlust, and then, while redoing her teaching studio, Leib decided to make sure she had digitized records of all of her past recordings, live shows, and radio appearances. In the cataloguing process, she rediscovered a set of recordings she had made but never released years before with pianist Jed Wilson. Leib and Wilson met as classmates at the New England Conservatory in 2001. In 2012 when recording her sophomore album, Leib got the blessing from Wilson and his longtime collaborator, singer Heather Masse, to record their arrangement of Secret Love, the 1953 Paul Francis Webster and Sammy Fain song made famous by Doris Day. Sara had long adored their arrangement, and while the recording of it on The Lost EP may be the musical predecessor to what she later released on her sophomore album, “Secret Love”, she finds the recording here special because she was able to record the arrangement with half of the duo that created it.

The recordings on this newly released EP of six songs were demo’d back in 2007. Never released, they languished on Leib’s hard drive for years until she rediscovered them. Leib and Wilson listened to the recordings and weighed their opinions about them, deciding ultimately that the recordings had merit all these years later, and certainly weren’t doing any good sitting on a hard drive. Without access to the masters (long gone), they decided to have them mastered and release them as is. What you hear are six songs without intervention, recorded and mixed live in four hours, and finally mastered and released fourteen years later.