“‘Magenta and Blue’ put words and music to the moment when love becomes ego-less, where walls come down completely, and honesty and acceptance are givens,” Sage shares. “The piece captures a peaceful, uplifting place where each person is embraced by the other with an expressiveness akin to the watercolor painting process, where colors and lines blur into something dreamlike, becoming more beautiful in the process.” She continues, “The music was co-written by myself and my longtime collaborator and cellist Dave Eggar, who has an innate ability to channel deep emotion into every note he plays, bringing his full spiritual self to the music. It was a wonderful experience working together (remotely) on this track, and as a producer, I’m always delighted to venture into new stylistic terrain - which I think ‘Magenta and Blue’ definitely does! I wanted the musical accompaniment to channel a sonic version of a Chagall painting…soulful, meditative, and hopefully, just a little bit transcendent. The lyric video for “Magenta and Blue” was a collaboration with the South Korean music company, Sound Republica. Listen now: Cinematic and stylistically expansive, Poetica is a creatively ambitious musical spoken word project distilling a poetic spirit through text, voice and music in the spirit of Leonard Cohen, Patti Smith and Laurie Anderson. Adventurous yet familiar in its intimacy, Sage’s voice is perfectly at home in the absence of typical song structure, while her musical arrangements fuse elements of jazz, classical, and Appalachian folk with surprising agility. Only rarely does Sage enlist her more widely-known singing voice to punctuate these recordings, from which her signature piano playing is notably—and intentionally—absent. Additional contributors to Poetica include renowned klezmer clarinetist David Krakauer, jazz trumpet player Russ Johnson (Elvis Costello), violinist Kelly Halloran (Michael Franti), and drummers Doug Yowell (Suzanne Vega) and Quinn (Janelle Monáe). Beginning as a duo collaboration under lockdown between Sage and her longtime cellist Dave Eggar (Esperanza Spalding, Duncan Sheik, Corinne Bailey Rae), the project soon evolved into a full-blown, cinematic spoken word album, with Sage producing and engineering the project in isolation with the limited gear she happened to have with her while on tour while sending files back and forth to bandmates and guest musicians from every genre. From over 200 poems written both during and prior to lockdown, Eggar—whose parents are both poetry professors—volunteered to help Sage select the 18 spoken-word pieces that eventually comprised the album, whose initial goal Sage admits “was to create something that would literally keep me from going insane while locked by myself in an attic for the better part of a year and a half.” Find out more here. Next, do people who are tone-deaf hear music differently?
