Award-winning recording artist Rachael Sage makes her highly anticipated return to UK shores with the release of her twelfth studio album, ‘Choreographic’ October 28th, preceded by the release of the first single from that album on August. 26th. With ‘dance’ inspiring the heart of this album, Rachael gave her celebrity support to International Dance Day 2016 by releasing exclusive behind-the-scenes footage of her forthcoming video ‘I Don’t Believe It’.
Sage herself is a former dancer who studied at the School of American Ballet in her teens, and she has been thrilled to see her music widely embraced by the lyrical dance community over the past several years (videos featuring young girls dancing to her music have received over 9 million hits on YouTube). Her forthcoming album CHOREOGRAPHIC delivers a musically ambitious and emotionally accessible tribute to dance, her very first love. She “envisioned each song as a fully-choreographed multi-media experience”; the result is an inspired set of piano-based chamber-pop merging orchestral elements with her signature blend of folk, pop and rock.
CHOREOGRAPHIC, is a tribute to her very first love: Dance. “Making this album was a meditation on my lifelong relationship to ballet and more recently, to lyrical dance. Connecting to music through dance is what prompted me to become a songwriter in the first place. It was time to get back to my roots.”
Sage, who attended The School Of American Ballet as a child and studied with luminary dancers and choreographers like Suzanne Farrell, Edward Villella and Jacques D’Amboise, first began playing piano by ear at 2 and a half years old. “I started writing music right after my mom put me in a pre-ballet class, and it was pretty clear that both dance and music were going to be inextricably connected for me.” Though self-taught as a musician, Sage says her early discipline for the craft of songwriting sprang from the intense rigors of being a dancer. By 12, she was dancing at Lincoln Center in classical ballets like “The Nutcracker” and “Coppélia”, while also balancing schoolwork and making demos of her songs.
“The quintessential definition of dance, to me, is freedom. We’re in a moment where we realize how precious creative freedom is, and what a gift it is to be able to share it with each other, across all borders, and all boundaries.” On disarmingly honest songs like ‘I Don’t Believe It’, incisive lyrics and yearning melodies merge into something expansive. The lexicon of ballet may be French, but in Sage’s hands on CHOREOGRAPHIC, ballet-pop becomes a decidedly universal musical language.