Tori Sparks

Sarasota, Nashville and a contract worth walking away from

Victoria Suzanne Sparks was born in Chicago on 5 December 1983 and grew up in Sarasota, Florida, where she started piano at three before moving on to cello and guitar. She took an academic and theatre scholarship to Florida State University and left with a degree in international business, with minors in languages, theatre and music — a combination that reads oddly for a blues singer until the business end of her career comes into view.

The debut EP Tidewaters appeared in 2003, when she was eighteen. Rivers + Roads followed in 2005 on Platinum Plus Universal, and in 2006 she walked away from the deal over the label's practices. From 2007 she released on her own imprint, Glass Mountain Records: Under This Yellow Sun that year, The Scorpion in the Story in 2009, and the double EP Until Morning / Come Out of the Dark in 2011. The Nashville records drew on session players including Viktor Krauss and Will Kimbrough, with guest turns from Mike Farris and Shawn Mullins. By her own accounting she has played roughly 150 concerts a year since she was eighteen, across 24 countries.

The Barcelona turn

Until Morning / Come Out of the Dark was already a record split between two cities. Around 2011, after seven years in Nashville, Sparks moved to Barcelona looking for a European base, and has described the decision as instinct rather than strategy.

What happened next changed the music rather than just the postcode. El Mar, in 2014, was her first Spanish-language album and her first work with the flamenco fusion trio Calamento and the guitarist Francisco Guisado, known as El Rubio. She has characterised the result as electric and flamenco guitar against bluesy rock vocals and bulería rhythms. La Huerta followed in 2017, a second run at the same collaboration with the electric guitar pushed further forward, mixing originals with readings of Led Zeppelin and Camarón de la Isla. La Vanguardia called it an unclassifiable album that set out to connect Camarón with Led Zeppelin and, against the odds, managed it; Songlines in the UK found the emotion genuine and the arrangements daring. Spanish recognition followed — Popular1 named her among five of the most important female voices in Spain in 2018, and No Solo Cine made her its rock artist of the year in 2019. The band has headlined at the Montreux Jazz Festival and shared bills with Joe Satriani, Eels and Gilberto Gil.

A live album, then no voice at all

Wait No More, her seventh album and first live recording, captured a concert at Luz de Gas in Barcelona on 14 September 2018, with Calamento, El Rubio, the singer Alba Bioque and the dancer Lena Nouart. A selected-tracks vinyl came out for Record Store Day on 13 April 2019, with the full twenty-song concert on double CD on 26 April. Andrés Giraldo recorded and mixed it at Panaba Studio; Yves Roussel mastered. Lockdown produced the compilation Amor en Los Tiempos de Cuarentena, and the El Mar Electric EP arrived in 2022.

Then the instrument failed. In 2023 Sparks suffered a serious vocal cord injury, compounded by a bad case of COVID caught during recovery, and lost her voice entirely. Rehabilitation with doctors and vocal therapists ran into the following year; she was back on stage in March 2024, with the voice still recovering, and spent that year on a live project billed as Roots Music Revival, including a date at Luz de Gas in February 2024. The Spanish magazine Dirty Rock, reviewing her in 2026, argued the voice had not merely returned but come back with a new maturity.

Cabinet of Curiosities, released four songs at a time

Her eighth album, and first studio record since La Huerta, was built as a Renaissance collection rather than a single statement: 21 original songs in five volumes, issued across 2026 instead of all at once. Sparks has said she wanted an album called Cabinet of Curiosities that gathered songs which did not appear to belong together but shared a unifying theme. Each volume leans a different way — blues and gospel, folk, noir country, rock and soul, trip-hop and nu-jazz — around subject matter including religion, family, technology, depression, death, politics and injustice.

Volume I came out on 17 April 2026, followed by Volume II on 15 May, Volume III on 12 June, Volume IV on 18 September and Volume V on 23 October. The records were made at BeatGarden Studios in Barcelona, produced by Sparks with additional production from Pau Romero, mixed by Andrés Giraldo and mastered by Yves Roussel. The core band is El Rubio on electric guitars, Ramon Vagué on electric and upright bass and Carlos López on drums, with Romero on keyboards and, on Volume I, theremin, and Pere Miró on baritone saxophone. Guests include three gospel singers from the Tennessee Mass Choir in Memphis, the soul vocalist Nuri Thunder of the Catalan band BigBlack Rhino, and the violinist Fats Kaplin, a Jack White and Beck collaborator, on Volume IV.

The reception has been warmer in Spain than anything she has released before. El Periódico gave Volume I four stars out of four; Orpheo called Volume III the boldest and most experimental instalment so far; Ruta66 and Exile SH covered it, as did TV3 and Rockdelux, alongside sessions on Radio 3, Radio 4 and Cadena SER. The 23 October release also brought the physical consolidation: a CD carrying all 21 songs, and a limited red vinyl of Volumes I to III. Volumes IV and V are held back for a vinyl LP on Record Store Day, 17 April 2027.

Where she stands in October 2026

The project premiered live at the Teatre de Sarrià in Barcelona on 29 April 2026, in a band format deliberately unlike a standard club set, and the year since has been relentless rather than celebratory: Kulturfabrik Kufstein in Austria on 8 May, Barcelona in the Round XV at Sant Cugat on 23 May, a Los Conciertos de Radio 3 taping in Madrid on 15 June, the Festival Sonidos en la Naturaleza in Aisa on 26 July, and the Festa Major de Gràcia on 19 August. A handful of dates — La Bisbal d'Empordà, Cambrils, Íllora — were postponed.

On 11 October 2026 she played Madrid's Plaza Mayor at one in the afternoon for the Festival de la Hispanidad, with her flamenco fusion quintet and a set built partly around a homage to Nat King Cole. The run to the end of the year is the busiest stretch: the Aclam Club presentation on 30 October, two nights at the Vully Blues Festival in Praz-Vully, Switzerland, on 6 and 7 November as a trio with El Rubio and Javi García, a solo acoustic set at La Ràpita Poética on 14 November, Barcelona in the Round XVI at Sant Cugat on 22 November with Jodie Cash and Alan Pardo, an Italian tour from 25 to 29 November taking in Venice, Bassano del Grappa, Verona, Cesena and Cormons, an acoustic date at Can Ramon in Lleida on 10 December and a vermut musical with El Rubio at Sagrades Tannines on 13 December.

The shapes the show takes

There is no single Tori Sparks concert. The same month can contain a five-piece with horns, a trio, a duo with El Rubio or Javi García, and a solo acoustic set in a small hall, and the material is re-arranged to fit rather than shrunk. Dirty Rock's verdict on the Cabinet of Curiosities material in performance was that the songs sounded bigger live than on streaming — crediting the use of space, the calculated silences and guitars entering late.

Barcelona in the Round, which she founded and has now run to a sixteenth edition, is the Nashville import: three songwriters on stage together, playing stripped-back and swapping the stories behind the songs, with new material tried out and unplanned collaborations. Editions have sold out in Spain and France. Outside the music she has been secretary of the Catalan musicians' union until 2020, has spoken at South by Southwest and the International Folk Alliance, mentors through the Dotlinesdot education programme, and has campaigned with the Spanish free-speech movement No Callaremos.