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by
14 April, 2010@11:58 am
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Sage delivers another track from L(i)fe, dropping May 11th, produced by Amelie composer Yann Tiersen. Sage speaks on the track:

Yann Tiersen is my favorite modern composer. Has been for years. In fact, Amélie (the film he did the soundtrack for) is one of the first movies my girlfriend and I watched together. There’s a lot of synchronicity involved with the making of this song which I won’t bother getting into. Not right now anyway.

When I heard that Yann was willing to provide music for my album I was as excited as I was nervous. The nerves were mainly a result of me receiving the music just two days before my Chicago recording sessions were scheduled to end. The instrumental piece that Mr. Tiersen sent, as you can now hear, has a slow build that gradually gets more chaotic until it crescendos and finishes around the 6 minute mark. This certainly isn’t the kind of music I could plop backlogged lyrics on top of, and in order to maintain an organic feel I had to write the lyrics to the builds of the music. I don’t enjoy writing on the spot. I like sitting on lyrics for a month or a year to let them marinate while I obsess, but with only one night to write this song I had to pull out all the stops. No time to get too tricky. Time to just…”write what ya know.”

I listened to the instrumental repeatedly waiting for images or words to pop into my head. Nothing came. As a last ditch effort I referenced an old letter I had written to my girlfriend while I was touring Europe a few years back. The first line in that letter was, “It’s been a long and lonely trip but I’m glad I took it.” I borrowed that first line for my song and the rest of the song flowed from there. I didn’t have time to filter anything or get tricky with the language. What resulted was a string of raw and revealing moments from my upbringing that seem to have molded my adulthood. Vulnerable and embarrassing tidbits of info that sit in the back of my head at all times. Fuck it. That was my mentality. Fuck it. When all was said and done I felt very satisfied with the outcome. In fact, the thesis of the song seems to be about how we tend to fool ourselves into thinking that the tough and embarrassing moments of our life are much bigger than they actually are. Especially as kids, when we believe that every obstacle is the potentially the end of the world. That’s probably the greatest lie of our lives. It’s a lie that is so convincing that some of us kill ourselves over it. It’s important to remember that when all seems lost it really isn’t. As the old credo goes, “This too shall pass.”

It’s worth noting that the letter I borrowed the first line of this song from went on to explain my desire to rid myself of the grind that has come to own me. It’s time for something new. A new ending and a new beginning. In fact, I haven’t written a new song since I finished this track back in July of 2009. I’ve never gone that long without writing at least a verse, but instead of feeling anxious about it I feel strangely content. “It was the best of times. It was the end of times.” [Source: lifeisjustalie.com]


Sage Francis – “The Best Of Times” (MP3)

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