“You’re Sage Francis and I want to take a picture with you, ‘cause I have missed you for fuckin’ three years. Cory! Take the fuckin’ picture of me and Sage Francis, right now.” I moved out of frame as Sage posed for the shot. I’d later meet that fan after the show, where we’d talk about his favorite rapper, the interview I had been conducting, Sage’s poetry and the power of his music.
This was a person who loved Sage Francis, and not in an obsessive or even annoying way. Though he may have come off as a bit blunt in his speech, he had nothing but respect and admiration for the man whose music had touched him so deeply.
In reference to the struggle between artistic expression and pleasing one’s fans, Sage explained, “I have a sense of wanting to entertain people. And that’s not just by telling jokes, and that’s not just doing a song and dance, or whatever. Depending on your skill level, no matter what you do, it can be entertainment…” He continued, “Why would I do this if I didn’t want people to enjoy it? If I thought people would not like my stuff – like, there are things that I don’t think people like, and I keep that to myself. I don’t share it. Maybe it’s too off-the-wall, maybe it’s just too personal. Maybe it just doesn’t fit the criteria of what I think people would be able to adapt to somehow, so I just keep it to myself. But other stuff, I like to share it with people, and yeah, I keep that in mind when I put my material together.”
Sage started writing as a young boy, influenced by the rhymes of the Fat Boys and Run-DMC, among others. He practiced by first copying their raps, trying out style after style, before discovering the west coast and a slew of other rappers to learn from. “I really did it all for myself. I wasn’t like, really taking it seriously, but for me, I wanted to be able to do it.”
When it comes to performing in front of audiences, he broke himself in early on, facing stage fright in front of odd crowds. He refers to one experience in junior high, for example, “I have people who are in that class, who message me on Facebook and stuff, like, ‘I still remember your book report on The Lost Horizon, man. It’s fuckin’ awesome!’” Laughing, he went on, saying, “I remember it too, ‘cause I remember how fucking… I was like, shitting my pants. Like, shaking, in front of a podium, like, reading my rap off of a paper, with my boombox playing a Tim Dog beat.”
He continued to train his flow up until college, though he was still unsure as to what to do with his life: “I was a really dumb kid. Like, I was just not smart at all. I wasn’t aware of a lot of things. All I cared about was rap. I was so fuckin’ stupid – I didn’t know the order of months of the year. I had no ambitions to really dedicate myself to something that would be a career that wasn’t music-related.” Eventually he decided on music journalism as a way to stay close to the art form, having been an avid reader of Source Magazine.
During his collegiate years he hosted his own college radio show, using it to promote his own name. “It was so shameless, man. It was so shameless.” In addition to playing his own songs for the public at large, he would record tracks by rapping on-air over instrumentals. Some of these would later appear on the ‘Sick of’ series of releases.
“I just kind of played it by ear. I had no direction, I wasn’t going to intern for a fuckin’ newspaper. There was no way I was going to sit in city hall and listen to town meetings or whatever. I was not interested in working in general. I had no work ethic – unless it involved music somehow.”
Sage counts himself lucky for having made the connections he made, and learning the things he learned from extra-curriculars. College also provided a respite from small-town living, introducing him to the world at large. “I graduated with a class of ninety-nine people. It was super small. And we all knew each other from kindergarten all the way through high school.” He recalled that, “…Once I got to college, it opened me up a bit more to other personalities, and cultures… …which I was really hungry for. I was rebelling against the homogeneous, like, style of small-town America. Big time. I mean, to a degree that I should’ve seen a psychologist or something. I was just infatuated by every culture that wasn’t white. Like, I couldn’t deal with white people. I was like, ‘Please, anything! Anything but these fucking white, Christians in my town – I need something different.”
Francis originally came to prominence as a battle rapper, having won Scribble Jam in 2000 (by that time he had actually quite battling, returning for what he saw as another opportunity to put his name out there). Having seen his performance, I was stunned, and wondered if he had kept his abilities intact:
Chris Homa/MishMash: So can you still improvise?
Sage Francis: Yeah, I improvised all day in the van. You should’ve been there.
CH: If I request for something right now, does that make me kind of a douche? Or…
SF: Naw, it just makes you unreasonable.
CH: [laughs] OK.
College actually became a phase of change for Sage, who was faced with an audience that was less receptive and less interested in battle raps. “I started writing other things that wouldn’t work in a rap setting, but then, a few years down the line I melded the two – I melded the vulnerable writing style with the rap style, and that became my signature style. That became my signature sound.”
Eventually Sage would graduate and quit his job from Ben and Jerry’s, thereby fully committing himself to his music:
CH: Was that a scary moment?
SF: It was scary… It was scary, because that was the moment where I was cutting all my safety nets.
Through perseverance and a DIY ethic, Francis rose through the ranks to become a celebrated artist, recently releasing what is roughly his fifth studio album, Li(f)e. From do-it-yourself to becoming a signed artist, he discussed the privileges vested in the former, while noting the drawbacks solved by the latter: “It’s tedious. More expensive, too. Well, in a weird way it was more expensive for me. ‘Cause once I made enough money from selling the stuff I had made by hand, and all I had to do was pay a thousand dollars to get a thousand CD’s shrink-wrapped and with artwork… I was like, fuck. No, I had to spend like a month burning all these CD’s and writing on every single one of them, and then some people would, look at them with a screw-face, like, ‘What the fuck is this? You’re trying to charge ten dollars for… You made this by hand.’ I was like, exactly! I fuckin’ made this, man! Like, that’s why it costs ten dollars, dude.”
Li(f)e presents a much different offering than the rest of Sage’s catalog, trading in conventional sampling and loops for a live backing band on each track. However, it was a point of reminiscence for him to note that his first album, Voicemail Bomb-Threat, had been recorded in the same manner. Still, it seemed like quite a departure, so I asked him if it was a conscious decision; an intentional break from past practices. He replied, “Oh yeah, totally. We wanted to do that a long time ago. And we didn’t have the time or the resources to do it, and we kind of waited around for the opportunity to arise. And this being my last record with Epitaph, and them having access to so many different musicians, and writers, and producers, and we’re like, let’s do it this time… ‘Cause I didn’t want that opportunity to pass me by without being able to make a record like that.”
Although most of the cuts on the album went through years of tinkering and tweaking, one was written in the midst a single night, due to the late and unexpected arrival of an instrumental and lack of studio time:
CH: …so you said that you recorded ‘Best of Times’ in one session. Like, one night, right?
SF: Yep.
CH: You only had a couple days left, I guess, and did that just kind of piss you off, when you realized, ‘I have to do all this right now’? Or did it kind of help? The time limit – did it inhibit you, or did it motivate you?
SF: It probably motivated me. Almost every song, all the other songs on that record, took many years to write, and I would sit on those lyrics for years, let them marinate… I changed them, I’d overthink them, I’d go back – go back to the original, like, it just gave me too much time to think about the material.
CH: Yeah.
SF: And then, when I got this music and I knew I had to write it in one night, I was scared, and I didn’t think I would be able to do it. That’s not how I write songs. And, what I pulled out of me, for what became ‘Best of Times’, is the stuff that is always there inside of me, that… You know, people might be like, ‘maybe you should always write like that, then’. You know, ‘we like the song so much, you should always…’ But I don’t think I could do that. Like, that’s what came out of me for that one song, for that one – me having to pull out all the stops in one night, that’s the kind of song that came out of me. And it’s probably the same exact song that will come out of me the next time if I have to do that.
Many fans, perhaps including the one from before, feared that Sage had quit penning lyrics. Having heard of this, I brought up Francis’ supposed writing hiatus, to which he replied that he indeed, although, not definitely, had stopped writing: “I’m just a writer. I have creative impulses, and I cater to those things, but… I got burned out on life. I got burned out in music, and in the business, and when I was done making this record, and with ‘Best of Times’ being that last song that I wrote, this great weight was lifted off of me… and something about my conscience wouldn’t allow me to be riddled with the need to keep writing, to keep doing stuff. It was just like, ‘chill out’. You know, like, I’ve been thinking about this shit non-stop for too long. ‘Just give it a rest’. And I did.”
He admitted however, while laughing, “The other day, I cheated a little bit. I wrote one line. But I didn’t rhyme it with anything. And Twitter, it’s kind of like my Nicorette. It’s cheap, admittedly very cheap, but that’s what I do.”
With the clock nearing show time and my tape all but used up, we concluded the interview and parted ways. But unlike the fan, I left with no photograph or Facebook picture. I walked away, only with my memories.
Those, and an autographed poster.
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