Diandra Interviews Rachael Sage: From #MeToo to The Need For Empathy

Rachael Sage is one of the most altruistic singers out there. She embeds her music with compassion, and, through the years, has learned to make her personal journeys feel universal to listeners. To hear hear music is to hear her pain and love as if you were listening to your own. Thus, I was excited to see what inspired her as an artist, and how she feels the need of her heart and society, have grown in time. 

Diandra: Your biggest influences are The Beatles and Carole King. If there is one Carole King song that describes who you are and one Beatles song that shows who you want to be, what are they and why?

Rachael: It’s true as a young person I was very much inspired by both The Beatles and Carole King; I heard the former via my Beatles-obsessed father and the latter through my mom who gravitated more toward singer-songwriters. While it certainly would change from day to day, today I feel like “Blackbird” really distills my senses of both vulnerability and resilience. The idea of art and creativity comprising broken wings that have or will heal somehow resonates deeply with me, and is something I think most people can relate to, along with the song’s beautiful melody and simplicity. As an independent artist, as well as just a human being making my way in the world, I always feel like I’m “arriving” and spend a lot of energy convincing myself to just keep persisting: to keep trying even when hope is elusive. It’s such a gorgeous song I’m getting “varklempt” just thinking about it!

My favorite Carole King song is “So Far Away”, and I covered it on my last album “Choreographic”. As someone who is constantly on the road and ever-moving, yet who inevitably falls in love and yearns to have a solid relationship, I relate to the lyric even more now than when the song first touched me as a child. I grew up with a father who worked overseas and who was often far away, so that’s how I first related to the song, which I heard in 7th grade through my best friend who had excellent taste in 70’s music!

Diandra: How do you feel you have incorporated, even more, your history as a dancer in your newest music styles and performances?
 
Rachael: For many years, I, admittedly, felt very disconnected from my body, after I stopped doing ballet. I’ve been told this is pretty common for people who’ve done a sport or dance form so intensely, and then somehow abruptly “quit” (in my case, my parents pushed for college over a career in the corps, but either way!) I watched myself become less in shape, focused on my more cerebral passions like music and theater, and essentially forgot I’d ever been so expressive from my toes to my fingertips.

My latest album is very groovy-based actually, and a lot of that has to do with my last album being so inspired by dance, by my rekindled relationship to movement via appearing on the show “Dance Moms”, and to a general sense that as I’ve gotten older the only thing I really should be worrying about with respect to my body is if it works! I have more gratitude every day for my limbs, my sensuality, my freedom of movement, and just generally feeling alive and aware of the power of my physicality. I have a song on the new album that I am really enjoying playing live that’s based on a Flamenco groove, with clapping and stomping, and it’s fun to get up and dance a bit when I perform it. Another song on the record, “Alive”, has now become a collaborative video featuring choreography by Gianna Martello of “Dance Moms”, featuring the amazing Elliana Walmsley – also from that show – performing her signature lyrical dance moves.

Diandra: Through the years, you have gone from a creator, focused solely on her craft, to a more explorative artist opening up to her perspectives/ experiences to life. What perspective have you gained in the last year that you hope to add to future music?

Rachael: It’s funny – I feel like I want to swap those two ideas you’ve just suggested! I feel like I started out very much focused on the personal experiences and feelings I was carrying around that made themselves inevitably into my songwriting. As a young person in my teens and 20’s relationships were overwhelming, and I had my share of “me too” disasters in college. Thereafter, I could only recover by writing about them, however thinly veiled, on my first few albums. These days I am less apt to channel my very personal life-details into my songs, as much as I am to want to try to create stand-alone, imaginative or sociopolitically-driven songs that reflect less of my own persona. It’s not as much of a conscious change as it is a natural evolution of how one orients to craft I think; my goal more and more is to write timeless, lasting songs that could even be covered by other artists. I want my music to be more relatable, universal, and accessible than ever while also reflecting my very strong creative aesthetic. I’m not using music as much as a tool to heal myself: i.e. a therapy as to try to connect people to each other like, more of an outward-thing. I would say my perspective is “less compromising”. Maybe that’s what people call “not giving a __, the older you get”!

Diandra: You write music with social value. What are certain social issues you hope more music, including your own, could focus on? What is one song, about a particular cause, that you feel perfectly marries the beauty of music with a social need?

Rachael: When I write, it’s a very reactive thing usually. Something happens, or I see, hear, or feel something I just can’t ignore and for me the language I use to react is musical. So it’s difficult to suggest what I hope other music might focus on because I would never want to tell other artists how to create – that kind of takes the fun out of it for me, as a music fan. But I would say that I think these are very interesting, provocative, and expressive times for artists across the board. Everywhere I look and listen, I’m witnessing artists doing their very best work because they are recognizing the power of their ability not only to ignite change but to sustain and uplift dampened spirits.

David Poe, for instance, just released an amazing track called “What The President Said” and I’ve never heard him compose anything quite like it. Strong opinions and emotional turmoil often yields the boldest, creative responses.

Diandra: You have said that vulnerability is inevitable. Name one moment, in the music industry, that made you vulnerable, as an artist, but taught you strength.
 
Rachael: When I was 14 years old, I worked with a team of pop producers whose behavior was confusing and inappropriate. Within weeks of “working” together, they felt at ease enough to use drugs in front of me (in which I had no interest but which scared me nonetheless), and sexually provocative language/behavior was exhibited by these individuals that I did my best to ignore but absolutely made me uncomfortable and feel downright discouraged.

Looking back I can see that crystal clearly now, but at the time I was young, vulnerable, and, for some inexplicable reason, ashamed. I finally had the strength to tell my parents about it and thankfully they “heard” me and I was removed from the situation. But it also left me with feelings of regret that I didn’t face up to these individuals myself, and somehow I felt I’d failed by not being mature enough to just “hang” and therefore lost a meaningful opportunity to develop my music. After that experience, I became much stronger, a more direct communicator, a more articulate feminist, and a better judge of character. So that was the upside!

Diandra: On one hand you are a private person, but, on the other, you write music that can feel so emotionally raw. What, of your songs, left you feeling most opened as a person?

Rachael: When I was in my early 20’s I was not yet Out yet as bisexual. I was dating a wonderful woman who was also in my band, and had been nervous for my family to find out. In spite of this, I wrote a song called “Cyanide & Cinnamon” that very boldly revealed my feelings for this particular person and was a bit, shall we say, “racy”. I was nervous to include it on my record and even at the mastering session – with the incredible Greg Calbi at Sterling Sound – but the engineer encouraged me to not only include it, but put it first. That was about 10 albums ago…I felt very open and vulnerable at the time, but of course now I’m like “aww, that was cute” and would never worry about anything like that vs. just living my truth. I’m grateful to have grown during that time in a way that allowed me to become more myself, and to hopefully encourage others to do the same!

Diandra: You find the core of your creativity through empathy. Do you feel art, at least the best art, is founded in compassion?

Rachael: That’s a very interesting question! I majored in theater and at the program where I studied, at Stanford University, there was a common precept being instilled in all of us at actors that you must, MUST love your character. Regardless of how unfair, cruel or despicable his or her actions might be, you need to truly empathize, understand, and ultimately find some way to love your character or you’d never be able to convey the part truthfully. I have carried that with me a long way through the years, and even in my song “Sympathy Seed” – my next single from my new album – I am singing from the perspective of a misanthrope but doing my best to understand/relate and even feel compassion for this person. So I suppose I do feel that way!

Diandra: How has your own work empowered you as a woman?

Rachael: I think the question is “how hasn’t it empowered me?”…because in every way I can imagine – in terms of helping build my personal confidence, my skills and experience as a business owner, my willingness to speak up/out for what I believe in, my desire to be expressive and not worry as much about being judged…this journey as an independent, female artist has empowered me. My mistakes have been numerous but, at the end of the day, they have been mine to own and from which I could learn. I’m very, very grateful to be able to live this adventurous, creative life!

For More Information on Rachael Sage and to see her at City Winery On March 2 or 3 Click Here.