Phto Credit: Anna Azarov
‘Under My Canopy’, the latest record from Rachael Sage has taken the songs from last year’s ‘Canopy’, a fuller, more widescreen studio album, and walked them back indoors, lit a few lamps, and asked everyone to sit close. What comes out is warm, a little bruised, and stubbornly hopeful, which is a combination Sage has always done better than almost anyone working in folk-pop.
The title track ‘Canopy (Acoustic)’ is built around the kind of hook that lodges itself in your head for days, but the new arrangement, with Kristen Ford’s voice woven through Sage’s, gives it a communal feel, like a song people could actually sing together in a circle. And the lyric doesn’t flinch: Sage sings that if the world were run by women there would be an end to war, and she delivers it without grandstanding, as a plain statement of belief. Her stated hope is for the song to be an invitation “to gather, to feel safe, and to start by doing no harm.” In a year that has felt short on all three, it works as exactly that. Trina Hamlin’s harmonica and James Mastro’s slide guitar give it a dusty Americana glow that suits it beautifully.
Then there is the stretch of the album that stopped me in my tracks. ‘Nexus (Acoustic)’ is Sage’s response to the death of Nex Benedict, the nonbinary teenager who died after being beaten by classmates, and it’s hard to overstate how carefully it’s handled. She isn’t writing from a distance. She has talked openly about losing a bandmate and friend to suicide in her teens, someone who couldn’t be fully themselves in a world that was too cruel, and you can hear that history in the way she holds the song. It’s mournful but never defeated. When she sings about wanting to make “this tide of torturousness mean something,” there’s no melodrama, just a steady insistence that grief has to be turned into something. Kerry Brooks’s upright bass, Hamlin’s harmonica, and Dave Eggar’s cello give it a gentle, aching gravity. The video, shot at Brooklyn’s Jalopy Theatre with a cast of LGBTQ+ artists and allies, is worth seeking out, but the song stands entirely on its own.
Sequenced near the album’s close, ‘God Bless America’ and ‘Underneath (Acoustic)’ form a pairing that is among the bravest things Sage has put her name to. Irving Berlin’s standard is reframed as a deeply patriotic act, the kind of love for a country that cares enough about the human cost of gun violence to demand change. It sets up ‘Underneath’ almost like a held breath. That song, written in response to a school shooting and first performed the very day it was written, is quietly devastating. The central image, of wondering if “the guns that guard us” will ever stop causing grief, or if souls shining like stardust will lift us out from underneath, is simple enough to be unbearable. I’d defy anyone to come out of it unmoved.
‘Colorized World (Acoustic)’ is a coming-of-age love song written in Sage’s mid-twenties, around the time she came out as bisexual. Here, with lilting accordion and cello, it carries a weight that has changed since the song was written: the woman who first inspired it has recently died. You can’t unknow that while listening, and Sage doesn’t try to hide it. Her hope that the song makes “even just one person feel more seen, and less alone” is the whole spirit of the record in a sentence.
And then there’s ‘Everyday’. Sage has called Buddy Holly’s classic perhaps her favourite pop song ever, a love that goes back to watching The Buddy Holly Story at the cinema with her dad as a kid, and that devotion is audible in every second. The finger cymbals, handclaps, violin and cello give it a lightness and a playfulness, with Christie Lenée’s acoustic guitar adding sparkle. What strikes me most is how she describes singing it: that it demands she exist in pure love for as long as the song lasts. For a woman who calls herself a “cancer thriver,” the plain, repeated joy of “every day” carries more than it ever did in 1957. She’s included it twice, once in the acoustic arrangement and again in a chamber version with piano and strings, and I’m glad she couldn’t choose. The proceeds going to the Buddy Holly Educational Foundation is a lovely touch.
If you want the full-throated energy of the original Canopy, this is a different experience, and some of the pop exuberance is traded for intimacy. At fifteen tracks, including two alternate versions at the end, it asks for patience, and a couple of the lighter moments don’t carry quite the same urgency as the heavyweights around them. But that’s a minor quibble for a record that clearly wants to be listened to closely, not skimmed.
Sage has spent a career blending art and activism into songs that refuse to look away, and ‘Under My Canopy’ may be the most distilled version of that yet. It’s sad and it’s hopeful, often within the same verse, and it never mistakes volume for conviction. I came away feeling like I’d been trusted with something.