May. 26, 2010 - Issue #762: Timeland

Revue

Take off

Sage Francis's latest a departure

Sage Francis has always had what you might call a conflicted relationship with hip hop. Though he has never been one to hold his tongue when calling out the vacuity or hypocrisy of mainstream rappers, he's also held fiercely loyal to his hip-hop roots, sometimes even going so far as to call out his fellow indie rappers when they try to distance themselves from the genre. It might be a troubled scene, but it's his scene, and he sticks with it.

All that makes the music on his latest release, Li(f)e, all the more surprising. Eschewing the usual samples and drum machines for the live sounds of Califone, performing music written by indie-rock luminaries like Death Cab for Cutie's Chris Walla, the dearly departed Mark Linkous and Amélie soundtrack composer Yann Tiersen, it's a distinct departure not just for Francis, but from hip hop—his gruff lyrics are basically the only thing that marks it as such.

"A lot of people find their groove and stick to it, and say, you know, 'If it ain't broke, don't fix it,'" Francis explains over the phone from Detroit, where he's currently touring. "But at the same time, when you hear the same sound from an artist over and over, you just kind of know what to expect from them, and shrug your shoulders and that's there thing. I'd like my thing to always be something you can't predict."

Where Li(f)e takes off in new musical directions, though, lyrically it finds Francis beating a familiar drum. Full of his usual self-deprecation and caustic take-downs of modern life, it concerns itself largely with the subject of religion, something Francis finds to be an increasingly insidious force in America. And while he's not aiming to put an end to religious hypocrisy—"It's at least 5000 years old, so I don't think it's going to die out soon"—he is hoping that by continuing to speak his mind, he can provide a voice for the similarly disaffected.

"Artists have that opportunity to share a message among a lot of people, so I feel it's an obligation to use their craft to speak out against something they see as a plague on society," he explains passionately. "If it helps one person who listens to it, and I think it does, at least it gives them some type of solace to know, 'All right, here's someone speaking what I feel deep down inside, but I don't have the opportunity to voice it.'" V

Fri, May 28 (8 pm)
Sage Francis
With Free Moral Agents
Starlite Room, $22 vueweekly.com comments: powered by Disqus