Rachael Sage releases ‘Under My Canopy’, a reworking of last year’s ‘Canopy’ with the songs pared back to acoustic guitar, strings, accordion and harmonica. It’s out on her own MPress Records, and it arrives a couple of weeks before she heads out on the road in the UK.
I’ve been listening to Rachael for a long time now, long enough that I remember when “folk-pop” felt like too small a box for her, and long enough to have watched her turn out record after record without ever seeming to run low on things to say. So I’ll admit I came to this one a little differently from a newcomer. I wasn’t asking whether the songs were good. I knew they were. I wanted to know what she’d find in them the second time around.
What she found, it turns out, is the person behind them. Anyone who has seen Rachael play knows she’s at her best when the room goes quiet, when it’s just her, a handful of friends who happen to be remarkable musicians, and an audience leaning in. ‘Under My Canopy’ feels like a document of that. The production leaves a lot of air around everything, and the effect is that you hear her think.
There’s a thread that has run through Rachael’s work since the early records: a refusal to separate the personal from the political, the tender from the angry. Her fans have always understood this. She’ll write a love song and a protest song in the same week and see no contradiction, because for her there isn’t one. This album might be the clearest expression of that in years.
Take ‘Canopy’. When she first described it as a mission statement, I smiled, because it is, and because it sounds so much like her. She has long said she’s been teased for being too idealistic, too open for her own good, and she has never once let that change her. Hearing it with Kristen Ford’s voice beside hers, it feels less like a manifesto and more like an invitation. The chorus is made for singing along, and the message, to gather, to feel safe, to start by doing no harm, is as plain and as brave as anything she has written.
‘Belong To You’ deserves a mention too, because it’s the song that most reminded me why people hold on to her music. She has described it as a gospel ballad about the loyalty of friendship, and having so many of The Sequins sing on it, rather than layering her own harmonies as she might once have done, is the right call.
I’ve written about Rachael for a good many years, and what I admire most is that she keeps going, through a changing industry, through times that would have made a less stubborn person cynical. ‘Under My Canopy’ is the work of someone who has every reason to be tired and instead chooses hope, again and again. It isn’t her flashiest album, but it might be one of her most honest. For those of us who’ve been listening for a long time, it feels like a conversation with an old friend. For anyone new, it’s a very good place to start.