Navy Blue on The Lyrics that Changed His Life
The rapper-producer, model, and skateboarder breaks down songs from Vashti Bunyan, Broadcast, and the late Brooklyn rapper Ka
Words Matter is an interview series where songwriters whose work means a lot to us talk about the lyrics that mean a lot to them.
The Sir Render in the title of Sage Elsesser’s tenth studio album as Navy Blue is an amalgamation of himself and a real person. John was a man Elsesser met some years ago, whose spiritual forwardness disarmed him during one of the lowest points of his life. “I definitely see him as an angel,” he says. “I think we all have those experiences where somebody just shows up and God makes themselves known through the presence of this person. These people are put here to teach us something, and I don’t necessarily mean through a lens of divination. I just mean those kinds of people who make you feel seen when you don’t feel seen.”
Lessons gleaned from John and Elsesser’s own maturation over the last six years are the silk interior that lines his searingly reflective music. His most recent trilogy of albums—2024’s Memoirs in Armour, 2025’s The Sword and The Soaring, and Sir Render—has its share of bloodletting, but a deeper understanding of self from years of mental cleaning girds a budding peace of mind. That comes through in a knight motif inspired by the Robert Fisher novella The Knight in Rusty Armor, which follows the story of a soldier who becomes so attached to his identity as a warrior, he loses himself as a person.
“The identity of a knight is someone who serves. It’s through the lens of the medieval, of course, but I’m attracted to the idea of Black knighthood. As Black men, it feels like we have this duty to ourselves and our community: Who am I supposed to be? versus Do I have the agency to be who I want to be? Who is that person?” For Sage, those questions began with nothing more than a suit of armor (Memoirs) and a sword (Soaring) before getting to the person behind both (Render).
To complement the tone, Elsesser tapped the late actor James Earl Jones, who happens to be his older cousin, for narration before he passed away in 2024. He’d initially written a script for Jones to read, but a conversation with Jones’s son Flynn revealed that while the elder Jones was willing to support his younger cousin, his fading eyesight and loss of confidence in his iconic voice made it difficult. So instead Elsesser bookended songs with sampled audiobook recordings to flesh out the narrative. Jones’s booming voice can be heard echoing over production from Alchemist, Mike Shabb, and QThree, among others, across the album.
Though it’s last on the docket, Render is made up of the oldest songs in the trilogy, having come together over five years and a dozen different sequences. Several songs were recorded in Elsesser’s Brooklyn apartment with nothing more than a mic attached to his laptop. Others, like the Earl Sweatshirt collab “Belladonna” and “Circa,” featuring the late Brooklyn rapper Ka, were recorded at Alchemist’s studio in California. Having it out in the world is a relief, though he’s content to let its depths reveal themselves to listeners with time instead of breaking it down to the atoms. “In [the Yoruba religion] Ifa, there’s the concept of awo that’s doesn’t directly translate to ‘secret’, but it’s just the essence you’re supposed to hold of something you’re not supposed to speak about,” he explains. “It’s the magic, for lack of a better term. Once you speak about it too much, you lose the magic.”
In lieu of digging too deep into his own work, Sage came to our series Words Matter with a lot to say about three very different artists. The seven songs he chose live deep in his bones, and are the bedrock to who he is as a songwriter.
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