Life of rhyme
Hip-hop artist Sage Francis to take stage at Meow Wolf
Sage Francis is sitting on his couch with a laptop on the armrest. A cup of coffee, a notepad and holiday scratch tickets are in front of him.
The glass coffee table in front of him is occupied by scraps of fabric, sewing needles, scissors, glue and glitter.
It’s another day in the life of the hip-hop artist.
Soon, he will be hitting the road for a short tour, and it will take him to Meow Wolf in Santa Fe.
“The most distinct memory I have of (my last Albuquerque) show is when a fan jumped off the stage into a bunch of bass cabinets rather than into people who could catch him,” he says during a recent interview. “I think about it from time to time when I need a good laugh.”
Francis has been in the music industry for well over a decade, and he has released a handful of fulllength albums, as well as more than a half-dozen mixtapes. His most recent album is 2014’s “Copper Gone.”
He’s also a spoken-word poet and is the founder of Strange Famous Records.
For Francis, music was an obvious choice.
He began writing and recording at age 8 and began participating in rap battles at 12.
Lately, he’s been working on the Epic Beard Men project with B. Dolan.
“We’ve been busting out writing, beats, recordings, and demos since the summer,” he says. “We’re swimming in material at this point, but we still need to take more time and shape it up so that it’s as fun and brutal as possible.”
Francis says the actual act of writing is about 10 percent of the process.
He admits to not writing too often, but when he does, it’s a result of ideas, concepts, rhymes or word combinations that have been building in his head.
“I tend to write more frequently when I’m traveling and I’m stuck to a confined space without access to the internet or other distractions,” he says. “I mostly write in seclusion. Even when writing songs with B. Dolan, we write in our own space and then we get together to share the material to see how we might want to build off of each other’s work. There are a select few people who I’m down to get opinions from. If what I’m saying doesn’t play off of them well, that usually means I need to keep hacking away.”