Rachael Sage – Flowers for Free

Alt-folk-pop singer-songwriter Rachael Sage has released colorful new single “Flowers For Free” from her forthcoming album The Other Side. Co-produced by Sage with Grammy winner Andy Zulla and longtime engineer Mikhail Pivovarov, Rachael’s ‘60s-influenced “Flowers For Free” is poetic pop-rock at its most adventurous. Beatle-esque wah guitar, baroque trumpet flourishes, chamber strings, and Sage’s pulsing piano ground this psychedelic song about never giving up on this earthly life, or into the temptation of complacency. Sage’s band The Sequins drives the track, with guest guitarists James Mastro (Ian Hunter) and Jack Petruzzelli (Rufus Wainwright) bringing the retro vibes.

I wrote ‘Flowers For Free’ when I was a kid, and I guess – as we do when we’re young – I naturally went to a bit of a psychedelic place, exploring the concept of the stranger and whether someone offering you something in whatever context might be benevolent or have some kind of questionable motive. I was heavily influenced by The Beatles growing up, so I think sonically and harmonically that definitely comes through on the track.

Since founding her own label MPress Records over two decades ago, New York-based alt-folk-pop artist Rachael Sage has steadily released a slew of vibrant, dynamic albums. She has toured with an eclectic list of artists including Ani DiFranco, Beth Hart, Imelda May, Howard Jones, and Grammy® winners Shawn Colvin and Judy Collins – with whom she also recorded a critically-acclaimed duet of Neil Young’s “Helpless”. In addition to being a six-time Independent Music Award-winning musician and producer, Sage is also a John Lennon Contest Grand Prize winner who has released over 20 diverse albums and EPs. Sage has performed at the Edinburgh Fringe, and SXSW, and toured globally from Japan to Berlin with her band, The Sequins. Her 2020 album Character yielded the Billboard-charting single “Blue Sky Days”; her recent project Poetica, an adventurous fusion of poetry with jazz, classical, and Americana musical elements in the vein of Leonard Cohen and Laurie Anderson debuted in October 2021, and the animated video for her 2022 single “Revelation Ground” won Best Music Video at the Winter Film Awards Int’l Film Festival.

Sage decidedly stretched her range as a producer on The Other Side. String arrangements are equal parts intimate and lush, and there’s a sense of expansiveness that never overtakes her gritty-but-ethereal vocal delivery. Acoustic guitars, fiddles, tympani and trumpets and her signature piano skills amplify lyrics bound by an appreciation of freedom’s most desired consequence: peace.

Sage will be on tour this August throughout the UK in partnership with the charity Akt, which supports LGBTQ+ young people aged 16-25 in the UK who are facing or experiencing homelessness or living in a hostile environment.

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