Rachael Sage

Rachael Sage is a New York City singer/songwriter whose music playfully avoids simple categorization. Weaving together bits of folk, pop, rock, blues, jazz, and cabaret while stirring in Celtic and Middle Eastern accents, Sage has created an eclectic body of work that's witty, graceful, and powerfully intimate. A prolific songwriter and recording artist, she introduced herself with Morbid Romantic in 1996, and played with her eclectic orchestrated piano-pop sound across albums like 2004's Ballads & Burlesque, 2010's Delancey Street, and 2020's illness-informed Character. Her pandemic-influenced 15th studio album, The Other Side, arrived in 2023.Born in Port Chester, New York, Sage developed a taste for music at an early age, listening to her parents spinning the Beatles, Billy Joel, Buddy Holly, and George Gershwin on the family stereo, and by the age of four she was learning to play piano. It wasn't long before Sage discovered she had a gift for learning songs by ear, picking out tunes she'd heard on the radio. By the time she was in second grade, she was honing her talent for writing and performing songs, finding it was a good way to distract the bullies at school, and in time she would formally study voice, drama, and dance (she was admitted to the prestigious School of American Ballet, and attended the MFA program at the Actors Studio). When Rachael received a four-track recorder as a bat mitzvah present, she began learning the nuts and bolts of audio recording and production, and after enrolling at Stanford University, Sage was soon regularly performing at local coffeehouses. In 1996, Sage recorded her first album, Morbid Romantic, and released it on her own MPress Records label. (In time, MPress would grow into a successful independent label, releasing albums by Melissa Ferrick, Seth Glier, and A Fragile Tomorrow as well as Sage's body of work.) By 1999, Sage had released a second album, Smashing the Serene, and performed on the Village Stage on the 1999 Lilith Fair tour, as well as being chosen to open for Ani DiFranco on a tour of Europe. Sage released no less than a half-dozen albums during the next decade, beginning with 2001's Painting of a Painting and the next year's Illusion's Carnival, both of which found her working with a handful different producers. Issued in 2003, Public Record's collaborators included co-producer Andy Zulla, the Fab Faux's Jack Petruzzelli, and string and brass players. Featuring a similar crew, the following year's Ballads & Burlesque favored her tenderer side, and 2006's more assertive The Blistering Sun, while still collaborative, was self-produced, as was 2008's Chandelier.Arriving in 2010, her ninth LP, the city-life-themed Delancey Street, included covers of Daryl Hall's "Rich Girl" and the movie theme "Fame." The more intimate Haunted by You appeared in 2012, and by the time Sage delivered Blue Roses in 2014 (which included Sage performing a duet of Neil Young's "Helpless" with her close friend and mentor Judy Collins), she'd released 11 full-length albums and two EPs, brought home four Independent Music Awards, and won the grand prize in the John Lennon Songwriting Contest. Sage is also a published author and an accomplished visual artist who has displayed her work in New York galleries and provided illustrations for her album packaging. Blue Roses found her working with an outside producer again for the first time in over a decade, namely John Shyloski. In 2016, she released the Zulla co-produced Choreographic, which contained material she'd composed for dancer Maddie Ziegler. Two years later, Sage returned with Myopia, which explored themes of vision and visualization. It won her an Independent Music Award for pop production (with Shyloski).Produced with Zulla and released in March of 2020, Sage's next album, Character, was inspired by her recovery from endometrial cancer. The EP Character (Acoustic) followed three months later. Produced by Sage, Zulla, and Mikhail Pivovarov, her 15th studio LP, 2023's The Other Side, was informed by cancer treatments and the upheaval caused by the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic. Another Side (Reimagined/Acoustic) saw release in 2024.
© Mark Deming & Marcy Donelson /TiVo

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