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Sage.
Rachael Sage flashed the audience at Never Ending Books a wide smile. “What a revelation to be here performing for human beings in person,” she said. Like several other recent touring musicians visiting New Haven recently, Sage remarked that this was among the first times she had performed live for people, after months and months of livestreaming.
The Friday show at Never Ending Books also marked the return of East Rock Concert Series, presented by New Haven-based music promoter Fernando Pinto; the next shows in the series will feature Hubby Jenkins (formerly of the Carolina Chocolate Drops) and Laura Cortese & The Dance Cards, on Nov. 14 and Nov. 16, both at Cafe Nine. The Never Ending Books show was an intimate kickoff, as an enthusiastic and fully masked crowd filled the bookstore’s storefront space and rewarded each song with cheers that could have easily filled a larger venue.
Rachael Sage was a dynamic performer who combined acrobatic singing, sweeping piano, and body percussion to create the sense of a music full of rhythmic, melodic, and lyrical ideas, twists and turns. In between songs she revealed a quick, offbeat wit that flooded the room with laughter in between songs. She began by thanking the crowd for their consideration in keeping masks on. “I don’t know what to expect as we take our tour to other parts of the semi-United States,” she said. Remarking on the cozy size of the stage at Never Ending Books, she said “this is almost like a New York apartment.”
One thread of Sage’s music turned out to dovetail with the current state of society. She explained that a particular song was about “coming out of my own treatment” for cancer several years ago, “and coming into my own energy again, and being grateful” — a gratitude perhaps all the deeper for being tinged with weariness and the wisdom of having confronted mortality once and knowing it must, ultimately, be done again. She switched from piano to guitar to introduce a song from an album that “never got to have its proper release party” due to the pandemic-related shutdown, and talked about how playing livestreams left her “a little sick of normal songs.”
That provided a segue to Sage’s latest project, Poetica, a collaboration with cellist Dave Eggar and other musicians that was put together remotely during the pandemic. Sage teased the project with spoken-word pieces delivered solo, explaining that they were fleshed out with various and sundry instrumentation, making the album “the most musically ambitious thing I’ve ever done.”
“You may not have expected poetry and I don’t want you to freak out,” she added.
“You are fabulous,” someone said from the audience.
Inspired by the word, she improvised a quick, funny song on the spot on the piano about fabulousness and hoarding iPads, to the audience’s delight.
“Hey, you’re fabulous!” another audience member shouted. Everyone laughed.
Toward the end of her set, she announced that “we’ve come to the singalong portion of the evening, otherwise known as Folk Alliance New Haven.” Joking aside, she coached the audience through an energetic vocal for the chorus to one of her songs; with that part in place, Sage could do even more with piano and vocals, and the space was alive with sound.
Pettis.
“We’ve all had different pandemics,” Grace Pettis said at the beginning of her set, acknowledging that it has hit poorer people harder than richer, Black and Brown people harder than White people. She then focused on a commonality: “We’ve all figured out what actually matters to us. That moment belongs to you. There’s always going to be someone who tells you that it doesn’t, but as long as we’re breathing, it’s ours.”
Pettis then delivered a powerful set of music fueled mostly by her voice, a rare instrument that, in the tradition of the best country singers, she could lower to a raspy whisper and unleash to a rafter-rattling keen. Unapologetically defiant — “I make setlists because I do better then I have something to fight against,” she said — raw, and honest, Pettis made a case for country songwriting, done right, as a vehicle for driving us into the future.
Pettis grew up in Alabama and Georgia and currently resides in Texas. “Agency is important to me, and I do not do well when I feel like I have choices taken away from me,” she said. Of Texas, she said that “I love it. It’s big and wild” but “hard to be there because it’s infested with Covid and troubled by an idiot in charge.” She knew far too many musicians who had ventured out on tour earlier in the year only to get sick. “It’s just been apocalypse after apocalypse.”
But a bright light came for her in signing in Sage’s record label, MPress Records, and in recording an album, Working Woman (out now!) — with all women, from backup musicians to producer and sound engineer — in Nashville. In the days of recording, she said, “there was a lot of rage and fear and anger, but also a lot of bliss and hope, because we were playing music together, with other people.”
That an album was produced entirely by women is a rarity, “when it’s the norm for men,” Pettis pointed out. Changing that, however, required her to make it happen for herself. For Pettis, it was a lesson in the broader changes still sweeping the country.
“The cavalry isn’t coming,” she said. “We are the cavalry and we have to be there for each other.” Though she acknowledged that could be hard. One song she sang was an apology to a young man who came out as gay in high school, and she wasn’t there for him then. (They have since made amends, she said, and he loves the song.) Change depended on friends, on loved ones, on everyone pushing just a little bit into a new way of living.
“Thanks for getting vaccinated, you guys,” she said. “You are my heroes.”
