Name: Sage Hatfield
Occupation: Singer, songwriter
Nationality: American
Current Release: Sage Hatfield's new single "Wet Brick & Roses," featuring Jonah Siegel and Gia Calabrese, is out via Oak Honest.

If you enjoyed this Sage Hatfield  interview and would like to stay up to date with his music, visit him on Instagram.

For an even deeper dive, check out our earlier Sage Hatfield interview about the Science of Vibration, and a World without Sound.



When I listen to music, I see shapes, objects and colours. What happens in your body when you're listening? Do you listen with your eyes open or closed?

If something really grabs me I’ll close my eyes when I listen, and I see flashes, like scenes from a movie or someone’s life. A lot of the mood comes from the chords and melody, the scenery takes shape, and the lyrics inform the specific images. Parallel minor at the end of a phrase feels like someone dropping their hand in their hands, defeated, modal interchange becomes a plot twist in the story I’m seeing, but it’s always fragmented.

That’s part of how I write too. It usually starts with a feeling or a snippet of a scene that I need to find the music to. My song ‘wet brick and roses’ was written after a show I played in Portland (the one in Oregon, not Maine) with Melissa Dollar, (check her out), she’s a therapist as well as a brilliant musician.



I saw an image in my head of someone walking to a therapy session and back home, with their emotions on their face and in their posture. I grabbed a guitar and based on that feeling, the song was done in less than an hour.

How do listening with headphones and listening through a stereo system change your experience of sound and music?

I prefer a stereo system, something about the sonic field in a broader space gives more nuances and panning room to breathe. Headphones are nice because it’s personal feeling, more intimate, but on a nice stereo system (I prefer listening on my studio monitors) there’s just something realistic about everything, and you know it’s how the artist and engineer made the song to be heard. Headphones have their perks though, I would never blast a boombox on the T, but I admire the confidence of people who do.

I like writing parts meant to fill out the stereo field, ‘I thought you’d never ask!’ is a good example, there’s a lot of parts panned pretty hard that you would miss if you only listened with one earphone in.



I love songs like ‘your mother should know’ by the Beatles, the vocals are panned hard to one side, then they switch sides every verse or so.



It’s way more interesting to me than a song fully in mono, we have two ears after all, that should be part of the artform.

Tell me about some of the albums or artists that you love specifically for their sound, please.

There are a lot of albums whose sound inspires me. I’ve been on a real Aimee Mann kick for about a year now, her record I’m With Stupid has one of the best overall sounds I’ve ever heard.



It’s sheer genius through and through - except that song “Superball,” it’s just ridiculous and a total non sequitur.

That whole album is just sensible, tasteful, everything is right where it wants to be from effects to levels and panning, the arrangements, it’s super dynamic but not jarring, just exquisitely crafted and engineered. Jon Brion produced that one, and anything he touches has that magic quality to it. His solo record Meaningless has a clean sound and a punch that I adore.



I think Elliott Smith is one of the most obviously discernable influences on my sound, Either/Or has a balance of lo-fi, amazing craftsmanship and sonic mystique that’s not really too complicated, it really engages me.



It’s intimate, and explosive, it’s beautiful almost in an implied way, despite its lack of high budget production, I really have a thing for things that make sense even though they’re incongruous in a way, cohesive opposition.

I also get a lot of inspiration from Beatles records, Carpenters, the Zombies, Loggins and Messina, James Taylor, and especially Jim Croce. I like the clean, present, no frills style of the 60s and 70s a lot, there’s an underhanded magic to all of that work in my mind, it’s just perfect without being complicated.



Good music should speak for itself.

Do you experience strong emotional responses towards certain sounds? If so, what kind of sounds are these and do you have an explanation about the reasons for these responses?

I’ve always responded very strongly to sounds and music. I remember being a little kid sitting in my mom’s shopping cart at a grocery store, a sad sounding song came on the speaker system and I just bawled my eyes out. That still happens, even with my own writing at times.

Sounds in nature move me a lot too, rivers put me in a trance, morning birds bring a gentleness to my heart, wind in the leaves is hypnotizing, it all makes me feel both small, and connected to the world.

Church bells are really pleasing to me as well, they make me aware of community, and fellowship.

There can be sounds which feel highly irritating to us and then there are others we could gladly listen to for hours. Do you have examples for either one or both of these?

Nature sounds often please me more than those of man. I love the sound of rain, the ocean, thunder, birds, chicken coops, the flapping of wings is a good one. Farming has great noises. I could listen to the sound of a hoe running through dry, well tilled soil for hours, or a scythe shearing through grass.

The sound of dialing a number on a rotary phone is pretty great too, and the sound of a wood stove, the flames crackling, the heavy grind of the steel handle on the door. I especially love the creaking of forest trees, random trees falling, and the sound of wind through beech leaves in the winter. A snowy forest has a muted, soft sound that I love, it’s like nature’s recording booth.

There are some pretty bad sounds out there, cities in general, traffic, airplanes, the old dial up tone. Under-rosined cello screeches are pretty heinous, same with clattering dishes and stone countertops, the world needs more wood fixtures.

Are there everyday places, spaces, or devices which intrigue you by the way they sound? Which are these?

Greenhouses full of tall plants sound cool, they’re both echoey and dampened, trying to communicate in them is funny because you just hear muffled speech with a big reverb tail. I love the sound of temples and churches, that grand, sonorous open sound, even in silence you can feel it.

I like the sound of a shower, it’s echoey and full of different tones, they make me hear these phantom melodies that aren’t really there. Maybe that’s just an early sign of schizophrenia or something, but either way I enjoy it.

Have you ever been in spaces with extreme sonic characteristics, such as anechoic chambers or caves? What was the experience like?

I’ve been in a few caves, I like the natural reverb in a big space like that, it’s pretty other-wordly. I’ve been in some pretty sonorous concrete warehouses and basements, that’s gotta be the worst sound maybe in the universe, that slapback delay with the weird hollow ring.

I’ve never been in an anechoic chamber but i’ve been in a few studios, snowy woods, and rooms full of tall tomato plants that were pretty sonically dead. It’s always calming to me when it’s so quiet you can hear your heartbeat in your ears, but you have to calm your mind enough that you notice it.

Really that can happen anywhere I guess.

What are among your favourite spaces to record and play your music?

I really like playing music in people's homes, sitting on a bed or a couch. Casual is king. I enjoy performing, I’ve played on a couple fairly renowned stages, but I really enjoy something more low key, little bookshops and DIY venues, it feels more intimate, more personal.

I like recording in homes too. I never recorded anything in a studio, it’s mostly been bedrooms, laundry rooms, campers, that kinda stuff. I do all my own recording nowadays, I enjoy being able to experiment and challenge myself, find the best mic positions and room treatments to get the sound I’m after. I’m not a control freak or anything, I just know what I want to hear.

I think the slightly lower production value makes music feel more personal too. Not that I really chase a lo-fi sound, but I’d rather my music sound more organic than say a Mariah Carey record where everything is so perfect it almost doesn’t sound real.



Not to disparage her though, ‘all I want for christmas is you’ gets stuck in my head a lot actually.



Do music and sound feel “material” to you? Does working with sound feel like you're sculpting or shaping something?

Absolutely not. I used to paint portraits for a living, briefly. I’ve been a visual artist all my life as well as a musician, and music is the most intangible, numinous artform I can think of. It only exists while it’s actively being played or heard, I can’t even conceptualize what it is, whereas a painting you can hold, you can feel the brushstrokes, it’s actually a physical product of creative effort.

Music feels less like something I personally created. I agree with a lot of musicians who feel that there are just songs floating around ‘up there’, and sometimes you get lucky enough to be the one to sort of channel a good one down. My best work always writes itself for the most part, the more effort involved, the more vapid it becomes a lot of times.

Sound, song, and rhythm are all around us, from animal noises to the waves of the ocean. What, if any, are some of the most moving experiences you've had with these non-human-made sounds?

I have a lot of powerful moments with non-human made sounds. Whenever something significant happens in my life, I see three crows, and hear them caw, seemingly to, or at me. I used to meditate on a beach in Maine a lot, just let my “self” dissolve into the waves, letting external noise guide your internal quietude is a powerful thing.

Rain and thunder are powerful too. I remember one morning, I hadn’t meditated in a few years, and I woke up before dawn with a sudden urge to go sit under a tree. An hour or so passed by, and as a strong feeling of bliss and connection rose in my heart, reaching a vibrating zenith, a huge crash of thunder ripped through the atmosphere, and a torrential downpour swiftly rushed towards me and cascaded an unimaginable rain on the land. That was a special morning.

I have a lot of synchronicities like that in my life, often sound related. I always say I would write an autobiography some day, but nobody would believe it wasn’t a work of fiction.

Many animals communicate through sound. Based either on experience or intuition, do you feel as though interspecies communication is possible and important? Is there a creative element to it, would you say?  

Oh it’s definitely possible, I do it all the time. I’m semi fluent in Crow, and Black Capped Chickadee. I’ll sit and listen to their calls, call back and get a good back and forth dialogue with them.

Ravens are more reserved, their tongue is different from crows at a point, some of their sounds are just unreplicatable, which makes communication difficult. Juncos are bad conversationalists but you can get a few responses out of them. Grackles are like obnoxious teenagers, mocking and cruel. Catbirds are the worst, I lived in an old camper in the deep woods of Vermont when I was recording my second album, any time I recorded vocals they would just get deafening, that’s why the opening track has bird sounds, I just decided to make it a part of the song on purpose finally.

I think it’s somewhat important to be able to communicate between species, I was a farmer for a long time and sometimes a plant tells you it doesn’t want to be harvested. I think it’s disrespectful to disregard that, you just have to learn how to listen. Some of my best melodies were given to me by tomatoes and trees, and that’s not a joke. When you get quiet inside, there’s a symphony that becomes noticeable that we usually block out with mind chatter.

I wouldn’t say there’s an inherent creative element to it, it’s pretty fundamental, but creativity is extrapolated from life experience, so it’s no more or less potentially creative than anything else I suppose. I did have an unintentionally creative moment with a rooster once, if you listen closely in the beginning of my track ‘hunger artist’ you can hear a rooster crowing in the background.

I only noticed it after I released it, and every time I hear it, all the frustration of re-doing take after take because of that little monster just comes right back.