Sage Francis remembers the fun and games that filled the days at his childhood summer camp in Blackstone, Mass. The rapper was 9 years old when one of the games took a turn for the morose, inspiring a lifelong fear — and one of his most memorable rhymes.
“It was beautiful / It was brutal / It was cruel / It was business as usual / It was heaven / It was hell / I used to wonder if I’d ever live to see 12,” Francis rhymes in “The Best of Times,” the sprawling epic on his 2010 album “Li(f)e.”
The game that inspired Francis’ fear of dying young? A Ouiji board that a buddy brought to camp.
“It blew my mind, and we were convinced it was real,” said Francis, one of the headliners at this year’s UMS, recently from his Rhode Island home. “We were all asking it when we would die, and it was a horrible thing to ask anybody. And it told me I would be hit by a car when I was 12 years old.
“And needless to say, I was very cautious crossing streets after that. It was one of those things that stuck. I logged it into whatever awareness section of my brain that never goes away. I still have anxiety levels about it.”
Francis talks about his anxieties intelligently and eloquently — oftentimes in very public spaces, such as the Denver Post Underground Music Showcase, where he’ll play the Sailor Jerry Main Stage in the Goodwill parking lot at 9 tonight.
Ever since the MC broke into the conscious-hip-hop underground with his 2002 debut, “Personal Journals,” he’s been telling stories and questioning authority. While that’s nothing new in underground hip-hop circles, Francis has adopted a musical approach that sets him apart from the Atmospheres and Mr. Lifs of the world.
Francis has been collaborating with champions from the indie-rock world for his unique brand of contemplative, occasionally folksy hip-hop ever since his brilliant 2005 work with Will Oldham on “Sea Lion.”
He’s worked with Chris Walla from Death Cab for Cutie, Jason Lytle from Grandaddy and even the Denver-based Slavic-inspired musicians of DeVotchKa.
“Cross-genre collaborations have happened in hip-hop for ages,” Francis said. “When Run-DMC met up with Aerosmith and helped hip-hop slowly go mainstream at that point, something magical happened. A lot of times, these collaborations also fail.
“The MC format is flexible and can work with any genre of music, if it’s done well. I was really lucky with the Will Oldham track. That’s probably the most popular song that I’ve ever done. And to have somebody of his caliber hand over a guitar line and a chorus . . . I basically sampled it. That’s it.”
Part of what works with the single, “The Best of Times,” is Francis’ connection to the music, which came courtesy of Yann Tiersen, the French musician best known for his soundtrack to the 2001 film “Amelie.” Unforgiving truths and bare-all admissions fill the jam, which Francis called “the most biographical song I’ve ever written.”
“I didn’t have time for much artistic license when I was writing that song,” Francis said. “The music came in from Yann, and we had one day left of recording in the studio I was in Chicago. I hunkered down and let out a lot of things that had been sitting in the back of my consciousness. I never thought I’d talk about a lot of that stuff.”
It’s fair to say his 9-year-old self would be proud.
