From power chords to Carnegie Hall, Navajo singer Sage Bond hopes to inspire people on reservation

SAM DINGMAN: Last summer, I drove up to Flagstaff to meet singer-songwriter Sage Bond. We met up on the NAU campus — Sage had just graduated a few weeks earlier. She showed up wearing all black — black jeans, black shirt, black boots. She had long black hair, and she was carrying a black guitar case, containing a black acoustic guitar.

BOND: The first way I learned how to sing, I was probably like 10, practicing the Cookie Monster vocals in my bedroom, and giving my parents an earful.

DINGMAN: What are the cookie monster vocals?

BOND: The Cookie Monster vocals — can I do it here? Are you gonna be able to get the levels? I have to back up. [SINGS]

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BOND: It’s very loud.

DINGMAN: Sage first heard what she’s calling the “Cookie Monster” vocals as a kid, growing up on a Navajo reservation in northern Arizona, not far from Tuba City. Her parents were huge music fans. Her mom used to sing R&B in the bathroom while she was getting ready in the morning. But her dad was into the hard stuff.

BOND: Thrash metal was something I heard a lot growing up — things like Metallica and Megadeth.

DINGMAN: When she was 9 years old, her dad started bringing her around to rehearsals with some of the local metal bands on the reservation. Sage loved it.

BOND: I just wanted to touch every electric guitar I saw — I was like, everywhere I went, I was like someone’s playing a guitar! I would like to play that guitar also, and take it away from them.

DINGMAN: Sage’s dad could tell she was a metalhead, and once she did get her hands on a guitar, he taught her everything he knew. Which — wasn’t much.

BOND: The only thing he taught me was a power chord. And then, that was it, and I took off from there.

DINGMAN: It was enough to get her started.

BOND: I would come home after school and other kids would be outside getting on their bikes and riding around all evening. But I’d come home and plug in, turn on my amp, sit there for 2 to 3 hours before dinner was ready and just play.

DINGMAN: Between the power chords and the cookie monster voice, Sage could tell she was onto something. Her mom could, too.

BOND: My mom heard me sing one day, and she was, um, encouraged me to come to karaoke with her at our local coffee shop in Tuba City, and I was really nervous.

DINGMAN: The first time she sang karaoke, Sage felt her whole face flush. But she got through it, and she started to love the way it felt to perform — even if people didn’t always understand what she was doing.

BOND: After I would perform, people would come up to me and say, like, well, you should really sing in Navajo, trying to put me down about playing the “white man’s music” — like if I play Iron Maiden covers somewhere, I’ll get that comment.

And I’m just like, “This is me — I am not a white man. I’m a Navajo and an Apache woman, and I’m playing these songs because I grew up with these songs, and I love the way they sound, and I love playing the songs I like."

DINGMAN: When Sage was in high school, a new teacher showed up to teach a songwriting class.

BOND: He was a metalhead too, I could tell. His name’s Michael Begay, and he was a part of the Native American Composers Apprenticeship Project. NACAP for short.

DINGMAN: Having NACAP come to her school was a big deal. There wasn’t much opportunity for music education on the reservation. Sage started bringing her guitar to Begay’s class. One day, she was running through one of her power chord sequences, and Begay heard something he liked.

BOND: So I was just sitting in the corner jamming my little thing and he looked up and he was like, “Wait! Play that again.”

DINGMAN: Begay helped Sage organize the chords into a song. Which meant adding lyrics. A lot had changed since she was a little girl, going to band practices with her dad — and Sage had a lot of complex feelings she’d never really expressed out loud.

BOND: I knew I had struggled with depression for a long time, I just didn’t know how to define it as a child. A lot of that was caused by my father. And once my dad left our family when I was 15, the dad that taught me my first power chord.

And I had this, yeah, I felt so much, um, confusion. Like a lot of feelings of being torn, of how could this person just give up. Getting through that, I could use music as a way to heal myself and really be vulnerable with myself, and not lie to myself about, like, I’m tough, and I’m strong, and I’ll be OK, and really sit with my emotions and putting it into words.

DINGMAN: Sage didn’t hold back. She even gave herself permission to write about her suicide attempts in middle school.

BOND: When I showed my mom, while I was writing a song about holding my own funeral and stuff — that was a pretty heavy song. She got mad at me, like, oh my gosh, you’re being so selfish. My grandmother was like why do you wanna talk about your family that way? Why do you wanna talk about your dad and put him down in that way? I was like, it’s not my fault he was, like, kinda awful. But this was a story I felt strongly that I really wanted to share with people.

DINGMAN: Even if her family didn’t get it at first, her classmates did. Other kids told Sage the songs made them cry. They told Sage their own stories of depression. And that made Sage want to keep writing. By the end of high school, she had enough songs for an album. She called it “Prisoner.”

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BOND: The "Prisoner" LP was very satisfying to work on and create because it was a family effort.

DINGMAN: As hard as it had been at first for Sage’s family to connect with her music, they started to come around. Her little brother drew the cover art for “Prisoner.” And eventually, her mom got on board — with an assist from Sage’s recording engineer.

BOND: My stepdad recorded and mixed everything for me — who is Michael Begay, my composition teacher, mentor from NACAP. My mom saw him, and it was, from then … 

DINGMAN: Did they meet through you?

BOND: Yeah.

DINGMAN: That’s amazing.

BOND: He was teaching me and she would come pick me up from school, and she would be like, “we should make more appointments with him.” Like we should meet with him, like more. So you can learn more. And I was like, yeah sure. And I didn’t see what was going on.

And then way later I was like, “Why are they going to the movies together?” So he’s still been a really cool mentor, and not just musically, but being a father figure and stepping up literally in that way.

DINGMAN: And it didn’t bother you that they got together?

BOND: For a bit, it did.

DINGMAN: Yeah, of course. I can imagine it being confusing.

BOND: It was very confusing. And I was like, well, they like each other, I’m OK then. So we’re cool now.

DINGMAN: Sage kept challenging herself to write honest, personal songs. In 2020, she and her brother were watching news coverage of the murder of George Floyd by a white police officer.

BOND: My brother was asking that day we saw George Floyd on the news — he was maybe 12, very small — and he asked me why are the police doing that to that man? And it hurt so much, and I hated having to tell him, like, this is the reality that some people of color face, that we’re not always safe.

DINGMAN: Sage went to her room and started writing a song she called “Truth.”

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DINGMAN: After she posted the song online, Sage got a call from a woman named Dr. Zanaida Robles, who was working with a touring organization called National Concerts. Robles invited Sage to perform “Truth” live on stage in New York.

BOND: She was like yeah we’re just gonna, it’s gonna be at Carnegie Hall, you know. And I was like, I was just sitting in my room, in the middle of nowhere on the rez. I was like Carnegie Hall, that’s a very well-known place that I never thought I’d get to not just step foot in but be on stage and present my own song.

DINGMAN: Sage brought her family with her to Manhattan for the show. And when she got back to Arizona, she took another big step and enrolled in the music program at NAU. Now that she’s graduated, Sage is working on her next record. She hopes her story can inspire people back on the reservation.

BOND: Just something that will help like kids like me that really want that outlet, that really want to just touch a guitar.

DINGMAN: Not long after she started releasing original music, Sage joined a suicide prevention organization. She traveled around to high schools, speaking about her experience, and performing her songs. She told me that during these events, she would always scan the crowd, looking for the kids dressed in all black.

BOND: At a lot of high schools the metalheads are seen as, like, the outcasts. And I also went through that experience too — so I would reach out to fellow metal heads too and be like, “Hey — keep rockin’.”

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