Rachael Sage in Concert
The Bridger Folk Music Society presents a concert with Rachael Sage on Saturday July 10, 2010, at 7:30 pm at Crumb Brothers Bakery, 291 South 300 West in Logan. Tickets are $13 and are available by calling (435) 757-3468, or take your chances at the door on the night of the show. Seating is very limited, so advance purchase is recommended. The concert is sponsored by Import Auto and Utah Public Radio.
Singer, songwriter and producer Rachael Sage has penned quirky, melodic pop songs since she was old enough to reach the piano keys. Over the course of her career she has steadily built a loyal grassroots fan base with a rigorous international tour schedule that has seen her sharing stages with such seminal artists as Eric Burdon, John Lee Hooker, Judy Collins and Colin Hay, and prompted Performing Songwriter Magazine to name her “One of the Top 100 Independent Artists Of The Past 15 Years”. Leaving aside set lists in favor of a more spontaneous approach, every show she performs combines top-notch musicianship with hilarious between-song banter, what The New York Times recently dubbed Sage’s “inner Fanny Brice”.
Delving into the writing process for her latest album DELANCEY STREET with her typical fervor, the two-time Independent Music Award winner turned to her immigrant Jewish heritage, combined with the prospect of finally moving from the same East Village Manhattan neighborhood she’d lived in for over a decade, as a creative starting point. Inspired by the Green Movement and her own very personal desire to “redefine what ‘environment’ means to me”, Sage decided to give herself exactly a year to let go of over a decade’s worth of accumulated miscellanea, and to move to the musically vibrant Lower East Side.
In January 2009, Sage recorded over two dozen tracks in one week with drummer/composer Quinn (Tracy Chapman, Marshall Crenshaw), whom she’d met only a few weeks before while on tour in Los Angeles. “We met through a mutual artist-friend, and ended up jamming in my hotel room until the wee hours. I decided immediately this was someone I wanted to make a record with. He’s completely spiritually connected to his playing, and I was so grateful to meet him exactly when I did.” Gradually whittling the track list down to a dozen originals and a couple covers, Sage enlisted an impressive array of NYC-based players to help her flesh out a collection she describes as “an album about enthusiastically embracing change…and breaking the patterns of behavior that can make that process so daunting.”
Sage’s previous album CHANDELIER, for which she received 2 OUTMusic Awards including Best Songwriter, focused on the theme of fragility, and was a very delicate-sounding collection as a whole. With her new record, Sage says she “wanted to begin with a burst, with the kind of energy that you generally need to shake you out of complacency.”
Sage, who has a degree in Drama from Stanford and has studied at The School of American Ballet as well as The Actor’s Studio, made her debut at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival with the critically acclaimed show “Sequins & Shpiel”, which The Herald (Scotland) called “the unlikely hit of Fringe 2009”. With respect to her new album, the seasoned performer confesses that “creating a show for Fringe definitely taught me that even the most serious musical material can be celebratory…I’ve learned to laugh a lot more at myself since I made my last record, and to realize how ridiculous it is to not tackle the things in life that intimidate you just because you might fall on your tuchus.”
“Rachael Sage has molded and shaped a sound beyond a mere current-day singer/songwriter, into a true soothsayer and storyteller…Four-Stars for ‘Delancey Street.'” – All Music Guide
“Genuine talent…Sage has a knack for writing melodies that will break your heart without making you feel manipulated in the process… Where there’s poignancy there’s also subtlety, unforced passion and knowing observation” – RollingStone.com