“Joy = Resistance” Tour Blasts Off

Here’s a “wild” idea: Fight back. By having fun.

Indie singer-songwriter Kristen Ford does that on a trans anthem called “Wild Heart,” a single from her soon-to-be-released album Pinto on musical soul mate Ani DiFranco’s Righteous Babe Records. She’s singing it in venues from New England to the South to the Midwest to L.A. on a joint “Joy Equals Resistance” Tour with fellow veteran singer-songwriter recording artist Rachael Sage. (The tour comes Saturday evening to Hamden’s Cantean coffeehouse; click here to reserve one of the remaining available seats.)

Ford sang an unplugged version of “Wild Heart” during a joint song-swapping appearance with Sage on WNHH FM’s “Acoustic Thursday @Studio 51” program. Above her custom insistent rhythm guitar she sang:

You can’t control me
my pride or my joy
I don’t owe you a damn thing
if I’m a girl or a boy —
I’m not waiting on you,
no I’m just getting started
way out here beyond you
I was born for this I was born
with a wild wild heart

Underlying the song, underlying the title of the tour, is the idea that this political moment of rampant White House-directed hate and prejudice requires standing up for justice and personal freedom — by cutting loose with a mixture of rage, pride and abandon.

Ford said she got the idea for the song while living in Nashville during a successful 2023 campaign to ban the presence of minors at or near drag shows.

“It just made my blood boil, and I needed to express that through a song,” she said in between performances on WNHH. “While I don’t identify as trans, to be a queer person in America right now, you need to step up and say, ‘This isn’t OK to scapegoat.’ Especially trans kids are really struggling. They don’t want to go to school because they can’t use the bathroom, or they can’t get a passport, or they can’t use an airport because they’re worried about security.

“I would love to just be the rage of everyone, it’s certainly fun for me to get sweaty on stage and scream and shout and smash around and turn it into something.”

New Haven music fans got to see Ford and Sage up close during their career rises in the twenty-teens including a 2016 night when Ford had Cafe Nine chant along to a chorus of “Donald Trump is a big fucking asshole.”

Sage, a Connecticut-born professional ballet dancer turned “folk Americana” touring recording artist, said that sharing bills with Ford is rubbing that joyous risk-taking spirit on her, as she, too, promotes a new album of her own, Canopy, on Empress Records.

“I believe with every beating of my heart,” she sang from the title track on WNHH, “if the world were run by women, there would be an end to war.”

Click on the video below to watch Kristen Ford and Rachael Sage (with violinist Sarah Jean) perform unplugged on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven” program.