Ladies and jellybeans, Rachael Sage!
Five-time OUTMusic award-winning singer/songwriter and producer Rachael Sage has become one of the busiest touring artists in independent music, performing 100+ dates a year throughout the US, UK, Europe and Asia.
She has earned a loyal following for her dynamic piano playing, delicate guitar work, soulful vocals, and improvisational audience interaction.
Sage has performed at London, New York, Los Angeles, Dublin, and San Francisco Prides, and has shared stages with Ani DiFranco, RuPaul, Sandra Bernhard, A Great Big World, Justin Tranter and Indigo Girls, among many others. Her brand new MPress Records release, “Myopia”, showcases the NYC-based multi-instrumentalist’s confident, sophisticated songwriting and features appearances by members of Rufus Wainwright, Patti Smith and Bruce Springsteen’s bands.
A former dancer who performed with New York City Ballet in her teens, Sage has also had a record-breaking 22 songs placed on the hit reality show “Dance Moms”, on which she also made a cameo appearance.
Since founding her own label MPress Records two decades ago, NYC-based alt-pop artist Rachael Sage has steadily released a dozen albums of vibrant, dynamic music with poetic, image-rich lyrics spanning subjects as wide as her inspirations. Raised mainly on classical music, doo-wop, 70’s folk and British pop, Sage possesses a rare combination of musical ingenuity, visual dynamism and emotional insight.
Her songs are cinematic and beautiful, her production layered, lush and laced with orchestral surprises.
Myopia the title track from her 13th album, is the crystallization of countless studio hours and hundreds of shows in the U.S. and around the world. It’s also a new kind of anthem for Sage, who sings passionately about a “screen of judgement / in my face all the time” being lifted.
With its Bruce Hornsby-esque piano riffs and hushed choruses, it’s a declaration of self-assurance and vision that perhaps could only be made as disarmingly in the middle of a cultural crisis.
“The idea of things coming in and out of focus depending upon which lens you might be looking through seemed especially provocative right now. As someone who is legally blind without glasses, and who’s also used to squinting to see something more clearly, I started to think about nearsightedness on a much more macro level.”
Produced by Sage and her longtime engineer John Shyloski, Myopia was recorded last summer at Carriage House Studios in Stamford, CT as well as at Sage’s home studio in NYC’s East Village, and you can feel the swelter.
The heavily electronic “Haunted By Objects” – on which Sage plays Moog synthesizer – describes the psyche of a hoarder whose only potential recourse may be to set everything on fire, while “This Darkness”, a bluesy lamentation about the Dakota Pipeline, reflects the urgency and courage of Native Americans’ resistance to environmental desecration; the enemy in the dark is indifference, the iciest kind of blindness.
Sage explains: “This is a warm-weather record. These are songs about getting out there, thawing things out, and unearthing the truth. Sometimes you can’t do that in the dead of winter. But when the sun is shining, even the murkiest future appears hopeful.”