Artist: Poetica (Rachael Sage)
Hometown: New York, New York
Song: “Sleep When I’m Tired”
Album: Poetica
Label: MPress Records
In Their Words: “I wrote ‘Sleep When I’m Tired’ off the top of my head — sitting at my music workstation in Upstate NY somewhere in the middle of our first lockdown. The words just kind of fell out of my mouth very naturally, and before I knew it I’d made a little demo of it in GarageBand using a four-bar blues loop. The vocal that you hear is my first take, and I built the percussion tracks around that initial performance, in somewhat of an exhausted creative stupor. I was definitely living the content of the song as it came out of me half-asleep, and other musicians I recruited remotely to add various colors were likewise feeling a lot of fatigue and even depression during that time, from sheer isolation.
“For that reason, it was important to me that when we made the video, there’d be a surrealistic, dreamlike quality to it, prompting the viewer to ask ‘where exactly are we and what’s going on?’ while also feeling a kind of dissociation between the performance and the environment. This is a reversal of what we’re used to, where home protects us from the elements. But as we all learned during these unusual times, whether we’re alone or with others, we all need wide open spaces, nature, and plenty of imagination to stave off the blues.” — Rachael Sage
Photo credit: Tom Moore
