BluesClassic Rock
Provogue Records · 9 October 2026
“Mr. In The Middle” comes in on a dirty guitar riff and is done in three minutes twenty-one, which is a quick way of warning that “Running Wild” is not a twelve-bar record. It is Sari Schorr’s third solo studio album and her first since “Never Say Never” in 2018: in between came a live album, “Live in Europe” (2020), and “Joyful Sky” (2023), where she sang Robin Trower’s songs. Ten tracks, forty-three minutes fifty-eight, and every song on it is hers.
Four people make up the core of this record at Lucid Studios. Jamie Walker plays the electric and acoustic guitars and the bass, Luke Paget drums and percussion, Bennett Holland piano, clavinet and organ; Walker and Paget co-produce it between them and Paget mixes it, and Jon Astley, whose name was made on the Who reissues, masters it at his own Close To The Edge. Schorr says the two producers kept telling her “it’s your idea, you’re the artist, our job is to facilitate your vision”, and where that shows most is in who gets the foreground: “Monday Morning” turns on Holland’s piano over a funk pulse, and it is one of three tracks where the drums are Ewan McDonald’s and not Paget’s.
The centre of the record is “Man On Fire”, four minutes fourteen, which Schorr wrote for her father: it is the track with the fewest instruments around it and the one that leaves most of the weight to the voice, and it is where the record holds up best. The other high point is the opposite: “Call It Freedom”, five minutes and two seconds, the longest track, opens on a riff and an organ with a jazz charge to them and keeps the flame low far longer than this repertoire usually allows, until it catches in the final stretch. And “Finding My Way” closes with the accompaniment stripped back to almost nothing: the same test as “Man On Fire”, and she passes it again.
Across ten songs there is no duet, no second voice and no guest soloist; the only extra muscle on the roster is a second drummer for three tracks. The guitars and the bass come from the same hands that co-produce, so the counterweight Trower’s guitar gave her on “Joyful Sky” never turns up here, and on an album sold on the power of a single voice, that absence eventually tells. There is also a scheduling decision that is hard to defend in 2026: the record came out in Europe on 9 October and does not reach the United States until the 30th, a three-week gap for a singer born in New York and for an album anyone can stream the same day from anywhere.
Rating: 7.4/10
Text by Enric Vilaplana