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This Isn't Kiddie Music: An Interview with Sage Francis

Sage Francis is stressed out. He's about to release the bravest and best album of his career, Human the Death Dance, and embark on 35-city tour with a full backing band. He's also coming off a two-year stretch in which he was subjected to a burglary, two robberies, and a painful breakup.

But despite it all, Sage remains, in his own persnickety way, surprisingly upbeat. His career is going well, he has a new girlfriend, and he's relishing the chance to exorcise some demons onstage. He remains one of the most fascinating and contradictory figures in rap music—a white, teetotalling Rhode Islander with the heart of a poet, the mouth of a longshoreman, and the spastic, rubber-limbed stage presence of an '80s b-boy. He's signed to punk label Epitaph, gets his beats from underground heroes like Buck 65 and Odd Nosdam, and when asked who he'd most like to meet, answers "Tom Waits." No wonder the hip-hop world has never quite figured out what to make of him.

In this freewheeling, raw-nerve interview, Sage talks about the new record, the importance of clean underwear, his early days as a student of Too Short and Chuck D, and why he doesn't care whether people think he's "real" hip-hop.

Hearing about what a tough couple of years you had, the thing that surprised me most about the new album is that the first half is actually pretty playful. You even have an old-school dis track on there with "Midget and Giants." When you went into the studio to record this album, was that sort of a goal—that you wanted to have some fun, and not just vent the heavy stuff this time?

Yeah, I wanted to balance it out. The last album, Healthy Distrust, was so heavy and aggressive, and I think it lacked a playful quality that I've had on my albums previously. So on this one, I didn't want to abandon the fun side. However, the first few songs I recorded were just gloomy, gloomy fucking songs—just morbid shit. And everything evolved out of those, because I was like, I can't go further down this route. I really want to switch it up; I really want to go at some other things that I've been thinking about and working on.

What were the first couple of tracks you recorded?

"Hell of a Year" was the first song.

Which seems like kind of the theme song to the whole album.

Yeah, that's the mothership of the album. I recorded it in early 2006, and it really was just my book report on 2005. I was just exorcising a lot of shit—it was really just my way to get it out and look to greener pastures.

I can't even remember what came after that. I think "Going Back to Rehab" was the second song, but that wasn't even completed until recently, because the beat was happy and upbeat when I first recorded it. It had a whole other feel to it, because like I said, I was trying to go in a whole other direction—I didn't want it to be just "slit your wrists to my music."

But after that, everything else evolved out of that. I had, like you said, just an old-school dis track, where I'm not trying to be deep, I'm not trying to be anything, except just dissing the hell out of everything. And the intro track, which is really just a simple play-by-play of my whole career—it's not like I got heavily involved with poetic phrasings there. To do that kind of stuff and show all the styles I've acquired through the years—the end result is you get kind of get a mixtape feel. You're getting stuff from all different areas of my life, with all different producers. That's sort of typical of a Sage Francis record, where I work with so many different people but I'm the only voice on the record, as far as rapping goes. That's what keeps the cohesiveness of my projects—I don't throw a bunch of my friends into the rap mix.

Right. You do have other vocalists on the album, but they're singing and doing spoken word—you're really the only rapper on the record.

Yeah. I don't like to share my rap time with anybody.

Because you have too much to say?

Or I don't like what other people have to say. And I don't want to chance it. I actually thought this was gonna be the first record I'd have with guest vocals. I was working with Slug [from Atmosphere] on a couple of things, I was working with Buck [65]. But it didn't materialize in time. We had to leave it behind, but we'll do something in the future.

Speaking of collaborations, I wanted to ask you about the producers on the album and what your process with them is like. Do they bring you beats and arrangements, and you match your lyrics to what they've already done? Or is it the other way around, or more of a back-and-forth collaboration?

My favorite thing to do is to get a beat from a producer that has all the arrangement, that goes all different places, and let me ride that, as if it's a train track. But I often don't get that. People are very reluctant to send anything that's developed too much. They just send very plain, straight-up loops, bare bones beats—and that takes a lot more work, because there is a lot of back and forth. I'm comfortable and confident enough in my own abilities, but these people may be working with samples or tempo changes or—I don't freaking know. So I'm at the mercy of other people's limitations, but luckily I have a great group of producers, who continually are giving me material that I enjoy. My catalog of music is pretty deep—I mean, a lot of these beats, such as the Ant beat, Ant from Atmosphere sent me that five years ago.

The one on "High Step"?

Yeah. So I finally got to use it. I mean, it's been sitting around and me wondering what to do with it. I have a lot of productions sitting around, and then I have tons and tons of writing, and I just try to connect the dots—see what fits with what. Then I'll do a demo recording, send it back to them, sometimes they're able to switch it up. And if they switch it up enough, I usually have to go back and rewrite some stuff and rerecord it, just so it fits perfectly.

On this album, a few songs, like "Going Back to Rehab," went through so many changes, it's fucking retarded. The engineer almost had a nervous breakdown—he just like, "This is too much, this is too much." We had 36 tracks on that one song—a lot of live instrumentation.

Speaking of "Going Back to Rehab"—one of things I really like about your lyrics is that you're always mixing the personal with the metaphorical. Are you comfortable revealing how much of "Going Back to Rehab" is based on personal experience and how much is meant to be taken more metaphorically?

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