Tender / Wading

They say you can’t go home again. What you find when you arrive will be different from what you remember, and the people—including yourself—will have changed, too. Still, M. Sage was homesick for the dramatic natural scenery of his native Colorado. After nearly a decade in Chicago, he daydreamed about camping trips across the mountainous West. He had crafted an idealized countryside using artificial means on 2023’s Paradise Crick, conjuring chirping crickets and burbling creeks from software and synthesizers. But Paradise Crick is not a real place; it exists, in Sage’s words, “in your imagination, hopefully. In your heart and in your memory.”

Between the recording and the release of Paradise Crick, Sage took the leap and moved back to Colorado, to a rural patch of land in the foothills of the Front Range, 30 miles outside his home town. He recorded Tender / Wading in a barn-turned-studio on his new property, surrounded by untamed land and a young family. In a sense, it serves as a sequel to Paradise Crick: Where the earlier album presented a wishful simulacrum of the great outdoors, here we get the reality, captured through field recordings around Sage’s new home. In another sense, Tender / Wading is simply a continuation of the deep engagement with place that has marked his work for years, whether he is evoking the Wild West or suburban front lawns. The album’s truer predecessor is 2021’s The Wind of Things, which portrayed the vastness of the Great Plains with field recordings from Illinois to Colorado and Wisconsin to Texas, all accompanied by a large acoustic ensemble of friends and collaborators. Tender / Wading takes the same approach and shrinks it down to a couple of acres and one man: a personal encounter with the wild, an intimate study of the way nature can challenge and inspire.

We start in “The Garden Spot,” where a chorus of Rocky Mountain toads introduces a bright clarinet melody. No mere scene-setting or shorthand, field recordings are integral here and throughout the album; the instrumentation accompanies the sounds of nature rather than overpowering them. When Sage works his studio magic to sound like a full band, as on “Witch Grass,” one pictures it jamming on the back porch on a starry night with the full participation of the surrounding creatures—at one point, the session pauses and waits for the cue of a hooting owl before kicking back in.

Sage is an accomplished musician, but he’s far more interested in creating moments of serendipity than in showing off his chops. Much of Tender / Wading is naive in a positive sense. The primary instruments are piano and clarinet, both relatively recent additions to his skill set, and the feeling of woodshedding pervades—in this case literally, in his barn. Album centerpiece “Open Space Properties” begins with the sound of the metal door being unlatched and rolled up, and it’s important to imagine that door staying open. You’re likely to be swept away when the tentative, repeating clarinet melody gets taken up by piano, then guitar, then backed by drums and rounded out with fluttering electronics. The landscape, though, keeps spreading out beyond that rectangle of light, and its wildlife can be heard again as the song reaches its climax and slowly fades away.

Tender / Wading is less a wilderness retreat than a tactical one. Sage knows that technology is a rotten influence, so he has given the modern world the slip out there in the hills. The video for album closer “Tender of Land” dramatizes cyberspace and the real world: Sage found vacation slides of the Front Range at a flea market and fed them through a machine learning model. To a background of geese calls and quietly triumphant piano, we watch as the computer labels the sky as grass, the mountains as pasture. “It can't quite comprehend what it is looking at. It starts to name things, and in doing so, creates a kind of poetics of failure that sees a hillside as a hare,” Sage explains. They are images of a place beyond technology, unintelligible to surveillance. It’s also a vision from his childhood in a past that’s out of reach now. But Tender / Wading has a more optimistic message: Even if you can’t go home again, you can return to where you’re from, and maybe find yourself there.