Abby Sage’s hauntingly intimate new single “18 Years” is a vulnerable recognition of love’s depth full of confessional tenderness and indie folk warmth.
Stream: “18 Years” – Abby Sage
Love is so much more than meets the eye, and the sooner we reckon with its overwhelming, transcendent nature, the sooner we can begin that journey of understanding it and truly experiencing all it has to offer. San Diego singer/songwriter Abby Sage reckoned with love at the tender age of eighteen, and her new single captures what it’s like to feel love for the first time, and know you’re only tasting the very tip of the iceberg. Her hauntingly intimate new single “18 Years” is a vulnerable recognition of love’s depth full of confessional tenderness and indie folk warmth.
Ephemeral and ethereal, grounded in substance and significance, it’s the kind of song likely to put Abby Sage on the musical map for good.
18 with my tongue tied
You were the fire in the night
Break my body hold me tight
In 18 years hope you’ll
be screaming out my window
Saying I just need to know
When the sun comes up
Will I be alone
Will you keep me warm
until you bury my old bones
Atwood Magazine is proud to be premiering the Chanler Allegaert-directed video for “18 Years,” Abby Sage’s second single of 2020 (independently released on July 2nd). Following a recent wipe of her music pages and the subsequent March debut release of “Holy Water,” “18 Years” arrives as the second single off Sage’s forthcoming debut EP.
The new track packages soothing and effervescent energies into a four-minute ballad of forlorn inner wanderings and open self-discovery. Hailing from the Bay Area and currently based in San Diego, Abby Sage has been actively putting out music over the past three years, and it’s in 2020 that she seems to have found her sweet spot at the intersection of muted Billie Eilish and lush Lana Del Rey sounds.
Unapologetic and singing with unwavering sincerity, Sage glows with the confidence of an artist slipping into a new, perfectly-fitting skin. This is especially evident in her new track’s aching chorus, whose subtle inflections elevate “18 Years” to stunning, memorable heights:
I will always love you just wait 18 years
You don’t have to hold me now
But I hope someday you do
just like the summertime in June
“’18 years’ is an important story that I’ve been attempting to tell the right way for a while now,” Sage tells Atwood Magazine. “For me, ’18 Years’ represents both a solidified age and an estimated measure of time. I fell in love at the age of 18, but I needed 18 more years to understand it. I needed 18 more years to figure out what that meant for me.”
You first feel love in fleeting glances and first romances, but you get to know its strength through shared experience, support, loss, and celebration. Love is deep – and as Sage so poetically recognizes, it is much more than what we get at the surface. In premiering “18 Years” last month, American Songwriter noted how Sage’s gentle guitars and wispy vocals are “all wrapped in a melancholy box.” Yet we do not feel sadness or pain, heartache or sorrow in listening to this song or watching its accompanying video; rather, we feel the depth of reflection and bittersweet sentimentality driving this artist and her music forward.
“It’s a love ballad longing for the right place and time,” Sage says. “I wrote it about a year ago and sat with it for so long, but every time I played songs of mine for friends, this is the one that resonated the most. Having that one fleeting love that you hold onto, make excuses for, and keep in your mind as that “maybe someday” person is such a universal human experience.”
She recalls, “I had a moment where I was driving on my own back from the studio one day and I felt this overwhelming feeling of love for someone in my past. The beautiful thing was that it wasn’t a feeling of longing, it was pure appreciation for someone who I so deeply loved before. Regardless, I still carry that question of “maybe someday down the road,” but now that I’ve written about it, the feeling is less pressing; it’s off my chest and into the world now.”
Abby Sage doesn’t claim to have any answers or even a big, overarching answer to love in “18 Years.”
What she does come away with, however, is acceptance: Acceptance for that which we cannot know or understand in an instant; acknowledgement that love is both of the moment, as well as a long, never-ending cycle of ups and downs, shared memories and experiences. Watch Sage’s new video exclusively on Atwood Magazine, and be sure to add this exciting singer/songwriter’s single to all your indie folk and rainy-day playlists. Bewitching and delicate, “18 Years” owns a special niche in our hearts.
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Stream: “18 Years” – Abby Sage
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