Rachael Sage’s tenth album, HAUNTED BY YOU, is a song cycle about passion. As the NYC-based artist explains, “I fell recklessly in and out of love multiple times while writing this record. I broke a couple hearts…and I also had my heart broken pretty badly.” Nonetheless, the crystalline-voiced singer/songwriter says she has no regrets, revealing she was “due to feel as deeply again as when I first started making music.”
For Sage, who is also a poet, actor and visual artist as well as a longtime record label owner (she founded MPress Records in 1996), music has always been her primary form of self-expression. By the age of three she had taught herself to play the piano, and by her teens, she’d won the ASCAP Pop Songwriting Contest. Upon hearing Sage’s winning entry, legendary producer Tony Visconti (David Bowie, T. Rex) told her she was “extremely talented” and offered to produce her demo. While her parents pressed her to go to Stanford University instead, it was an encouraging moment that gave her the confidence to self-produce her first record, MORBID ROMANTIC.
On the milestone of her tenth album, Sage admits, “I started writing songs to make sense of being bullied in school. I never envisioned music taking me around the world, or that one day I’d play the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Being part of the indie community is humbling though…it keeps you grounded.
