Funeral director says music helps release emotions of job
Markham’s Sagen Pearse only began writing songs about two years ago
NICK KREWEN SPECIAL TO THE STAR You don’t hear about too many funeral directors seriously pursuing music as a sideline.
But Markham’s Sagen Pearse is determined to be one of the exceptions: He released his debut album, “Nuclear Home,” under the handle Hollowsage and the Three Mile Islanders about a year ago and has another unnamed album, which will be released this spring.
Even without a side hustle, it’s a demanding job: Funeral directors have to arrange the transportation of the deceased, submit paperwork and any legal documents, prepare the remains, consult with the deceased’s family and plan the logistics of the overall funeral, while handling it all with great sensitivity.
“Every time you’re going into an arrangement, you don’t know them,” Pearse says. “When you sit down, you’re trying to make a friend in a very cold, dark situation. You’ve got to be there for them and work through the process. So every situation’s different and so every case affects a funeral director differently. We’re there to help and we kind of put other people’s needs ahead of ours.”
Not surprisingly, Pearse has seen and experienced things that are difficult to share with others. “I don’t talk about my work a lot outside my work, except maybe to my wife and my mom,” he says. “Music is kind of an outlet to get some of the emotion out.”
Gifted with a deep, slightly gravelly and gripping tenor that seems perfectly suited to his darkish, open-tuned acoustic folk, Pearse says it was only about two years ago that he began writing songs.
Up until that point, he had become a regular at an open-mic night hosted in Stouffville at the Main Street Bakehouse by Kevin Ker, the musician who broke a Guinness World Record in 2017 for organizing and producing the longest concert by multiple artists, at 437 hours.
“The open mic opened up my horizons a bit. I used to do Dan Mangan covers and that’s about it,” Pearse recalls. “Then Kevin asked if I had any original music and I told him I had one song that I’d been writing.”
That song was “Monsters” — one of the more intriguing numbers on “Nuclear Home” — and Ker told him his days of performing covers were over.
“’You’re going to do original music from now on,’” Pearse recalls Ker saying. “So that’s when I kind of started writing songs.”
Originally from Sault Ste. Marie, Pearse is the great-greatgrandson of Harry Pearse, the leader of the Orpheum Theatre Orchestra, whose name is memorialized in a bandshell in the city, so music has always been a part of his life.
But Sagen Pearse was drawn to his full-time profession in his early teens.
“I got introduced to it quite young,” he says. “My stepbrother passed away; he was 12 and I was 13. The funeral director was a nice, caring presence during that whole time. I had a lot of questions for him and he answered them.
“I started working at it through high school. I was a coop student and then I started working in a Sault Ste. Marie funeral home when I was 15 before enrolling at Humber College.”
After a couple of internships, he arrived in Markham — and began attending the open mic nights.
When he began creating original music and started up a band, Hollowsage was the moniker he took — although he says it’s truly an extension of himself.
“Hollowsage isn’t really a character,” says Pearse. “Hollowsage is more me just being honest with myself.”
As for his songwriting, one might jump to the conclusion that the subject matter of tunes like “Monsters,” “Haunted” and “Ghost Town” is connected to late, solitary nights spent alone at his gig.
But Pearse says that, although he finds beauty in melancholy and that his songs are filled with “sadness and hope,” many of those songs have unexpected origins.
“‘Monsters’ came out of a story my dad told me about an acid trip that he had,” says Pearse. “He was at a party when he was 17, it was Christmas and someone spiked his drink. He had to walk home after the party and he thought he was taller than the street lights and that there were monsters after him. He had never done psychedelics before or after that.
“‘Nuclear Home’ is about family and divorce. My parents divorced when I was 12 or so. It’s about having a family at one point and then it was just not there anymore.”
At least two of the songs — “Great Lake Love” and “Ghost Town” — refer to his hometown and his on-again, off-again rela- tionship with his girlfriend at the time (they’re now married).
The sonic richness and lyrical prowess he demonstrates in his material is one thing that attracted former Lowest of the Low member Stephen Stanley to guest on several tracks on the album.
“I’d heard the song ‘Nuclear Home’ and I thought, ‘Holy cow!’” Stanley recalls. “He’s got a very solid voice; it’s familiar, but not familiar. And he has a really interesting take on the world.
“To put out a record with that many great songs on it is kind of rare.”
It was Stanley who landed Pearse his first and only downtown Toronto gig at the Rivoli. There was going to be a crossCanada summer tour, before the pandemic.
Although he’s waiting for the next time he can play before a live audience, Pearse is taking it all in stride and is grateful to have come this far.
“I’ve gone into music with no expectations at all, so everything is just a bonus,” he says.
Now for the job-related question everyone wants to know: How accurate was the portrayal of the profession on the awardwinning HBO series “Six Feet Under”?
Pearse laughs.
“I watched that in college,” he responds.
“It didn’t influence me going into the practice, but they got a lot of things right.”