And now for something completely different. Utterly, otherworldly, goosebumply different. POETICA, a collaboration between alt-folk-pop act Rachael Sage and cellist Dave Eggar, it began as something beautiful to pass the time during lockdown, but then metamorphosised into something even more beautiful.
Poetry and jazz and neo-beat and neoclassical combine to tell the tales of humans and what’s deep down in their souls, and the result is nothing short of mesmeric. POETICA – you can call it an album, you can call it art, you can probably call it anything you want – at turns doffs its cap to the likes of Leonard Cohen and Patti Smith and Laurie Anderson as much as it does to those dusty old speakeasies the above would’ve frequented, whisky (or similar) in hand. Each hand, probably.
And the video for the lead single from POETICA – ‘Magenta and Blue’ – has just dropped, and it’s every bit as evocative as you’d expect. Sage’s mellifluous tones are set against genre-defying arrangements, and the result is a sonic intimacy like nothing you’ve heard before.
‘Writing song lyrics is very different for me than writing poems,’ says Rachael. ‘Poems come from a much more subconscious, mysterious place that I would almost describe as a kind of soul-searching. It’s a very spiritual process for me and I usually learn something after the fact, once each poem is written. I’ve been really enjoying the absence of any kind of song structure while creating these arrangements, and I also greatly credit Dave Eggar for supporting this vision, and my writing, unequivocally.’