With her new album Canopy, Rachael Sage brings together resilience, inclusivity, and a fearless sense of creativity. She speaks to Maverick about collaboration, identity, and finding light in dark times
It’s been just over a year since we last featured you in Maverick. How has life and work been for you since then?
I’ve done an enormous amount of touring since the spring, some of it unexpected. I had just recorded Canopy and thought I’d lay low for a while, maybe book a few shows for the autumn. But then my wonderful peer Kristen Ford invited me to go on a co-bill tour with her.
It came at a moment when things were very heated politically in the US, and as LGBTQ+ artists we felt we needed to do something positive—creating a safe space through our live performances. That became the Joy = Resistance Tour. We’ve been criss-crossing the US and I’ve also played shows in the UK under that banner. It’s been incredibly gratifying to be out there building community and sharing music every night.
Canopy is your first full-band album credited as Rachael Sage & The Sequins. Why did now feel like the right time to embrace that format?
After nearly 30 years of doing this, I realised just how vital musical community is to me. It wasn’t a sudden epiphany, more a gradual awareness that the recordings people know me for have never been just me.
Yes, I write, produce, arrange, sometimes co-produce—but these albums are the result of extraordinary players I’ve been lucky to work with. I’ve toured with some of them for almost a decade now, and they are truly among the finest musicians in the world. There’s a unique chemistry when we come together, and I wanted to highlight and honour that by putting their name right there with mine. It’s giving them their flowers.
The title track opens the album with a direct, almost mission-statement quality. How did Canopy set the tone for the record?
It’s one of the most straightforward songs I’ve ever written. I tend to be cryptic and poetic, but Canopy begins with “I believe.” For me, that line framed the whole record.
I was writing in the first person, but it was also a reflection of the beliefs of many people I love and care about. Once the song was born, I realised I had the chance to curate songs—old and new—that carried the same ethos of inclusivity.
It’s about connecting even when we disagree, about listening. That’s something I experience deeply in the UK, where conversation after shows often inspires me as much as the performance itself. The album really grew from that urge to connect.
The record moves between jubilant energy on songs like “Live It Up” and more contemplative moments such as “Nexus.” How did you find that balance?
Honestly, I joke that my ADD is useful musically. I get bored by sameness. Whether painting or composing, I like to approach the same themes from multiple angles.
So if I’ve written a contemplative ballad like “Nexus” or “Underneath,” my next instinct is usually to lighten the mood, to soothe myself with something upbeat, even if the lyrics are equally fraught. It’s about dynamics. As a listener, I love records that take me up and down emotionally, and I try to offer that same experience.
You were recently named the first artist ambassador for Rainbow Mind. How does that role connect with Canopy?
When Rainbow Mind approached me, I was enormously honoured. Their work feels vital right now, when divisiveness and rejection of difference seem so widespread.
Their approach—LGBTQ+ individuals helping other LGBTQ+ individuals—is unique and powerful. It’s peer-to-peer support, which can make a world of difference. As someone who came out long before social media, I can hardly imagine navigating that today, with so much hate out there.
The album reflects that same mission: to create safe havens, to say that mental health matters, and to remind people they are not alone. It’s music aligned with empathy…
