Moses Sumney

Interview: Alice Butterlin, photographer: Crowns & Owls

Moses Sumney is first and foremost a voice – a pure, almost angelic voice. With a few EPs and a full album of minimalist soul jams under his belt, the artist is a relative newcomer on the music scene, but he has already surrounded himself with other talented musicians like Solange and Sufjan Stevens, opening for the latter on a recent tour. With Aromanticism, Moses set out to tackle a delicate issue: the absence of love and the inability to experience romantic love.

AB: You started playing with instruments quite late. What gave you the will to start experimenting with music?

MS: I always wanted to do it and I had always planned to do it, I just never found the right time or the right support. When I went to college, I felt like it was now or never. It was always my dream, I had the desire inside me long enough until I finally pushed it out.

AB: Was your college very music-driven?

MS: Yes, but most of all, I went to college in LA and a lot of people come to LA because they’re seeking more opportunities, especially in entertainment. That’s also the reason I chose to go to this university. LA can be a motivation to achieve what you dream of achieving.

AB: Did you start making music in bands at first?

MS: Yes, I couldn’t really do anything alone. I had been writing songs since I was twelve years old, but I didn’t know how to perform or play instruments. I had to rely on other people in the beginning. I was in an indie rock band and then I played with the jazz kids. I played a little bit of piano here and there whenever I could get my hands on one, but guitar was the main instrument for me. I just bought a really cheap guitar on eBay or Amazon and started playing it.

AB: You studied creative writing with an emphasis on poetry. Did that have a strong impact on the way you write your lyrics today?

MS: It really helped me hone my lyric-writing skills. That’s the reason why I studied that subject in the first place. It helped me learn how to communicate meaning and be more direct or less direct. There were no music or songwriting classes, it was all about words. I wasn’t a music student. Because I didn’t have a music background, I could never get into music programs.

AB: In college you also had a radio show. What kind of subjects did you touch on?

MS: Yes! This is so funny. I had two different shows, one was about covers where I would play different versions of a song and explore the way songs were reimagined over time. Then my other show was more regular and was called “Living in the City” or something like that. It really was just my excuse to play anything. When I was a student, every show had to have a theme, so I said mine was “city music” and I could pass with just about everything. Sometimes I would have local LA indie bands come out and play and I would sometimes interview them. I really thought I wanted to be a DJ at some point. I would love to have a radio show. There’s a band in LA called King who are amazing. They’re three women who are pretty successful here. They were the first band I interviewed. I stalked them and begged them to be on my radio show. They came on and played two songs and from that moment on we became really close friends. It was a friendship that really mattered because when I started performing in LA, my first shows were opening for them during a residency. Knowing them was how I got my start in music.

AB: So you almost became a journalist at some point.

MS: Yes, definitely. I also started writing for the LA weekly when I graduated. The thing is, when I first started living in LA, I did everything! I was so afraid that I wouldn’t be successful as a musician that I thought I’d do all jobs at once. I was a radio DJ, I worked for the school newspaper, LA weekly, I worked in sign language, I had a big corporate marketing job for a pizza company. (laughs) I also did so many things in music to be sure I’d still be working in that field even if I wasn’t on stage. At some point I stopped doing all that and relying on my back-up plans to devote myself entirely to music-making.

AB: Is there a certain pressure in LA to make it in the entertainment industry?

MS: There is a certain pressure but that is the reason why people come to LA. Not everybody here works in that industry but a lot of people that you meet will assume that you do. In this city, more than any city in the world, people love to ask you what you do. You do feel a pressure to either be successful or be constantly grinding. You feel the hunger here, which can be a good thing or a bad thing. I already had that pressure internally because music is what I’ve wanted to do my whole life.

AB: In music, did you know right away what direction you wanted to take? How did you find your voice?

MS: It was a very long process, specifically for this album. If you go back and you listen to my earlier recordings, you’ll see that it sounds quite different from the way the album sounds. It took me a while to find the sound that I wanted to embody. I knew I wanted to incorporate soul and folk into my project, that was the base. I also liked jazz a lot, as well as indie rock. I needed to find a way to combine all of these elements. I was really obsessed with the idea of making music that didn’t already exist. It took me three years to develop this album. I ended up working with a lot of different people whose work never made it in the album. I wrote more than sixty songs in total. I honestly discovered my sound by experimenting a lot.

AB: Did you sing in falsetto from the start? Was it natural or did you have to work on it?

MS: I had been practicing falsetto singing for a long time. When I was a kid I had a really high voice, I could sing whistle tones. Then, when I hit puberty, I lost all my range and I got really afraid. I became obsessed with practicing falsetto all the time. Also, I was very shy and would sing very quietly. It’s interesting because I also sang in choirs in college and high-school and I was a bass, I always had the lowest part in the group. When I started my own music, I would record stuff in my low voice but it always sounded better higher. For the second album, I’m trying to use my lower voice more. People don’t know that it exists and I need to get better at that.

AB: You had a real thought-out concept for your debut album

Aromanticism. How did you work around it? Was it nice to have certain guidelines?

MS: It was really nice. It was also hard, because if I wrote a song that was outside of the main theme then I knew I couldn’t use it. I had to cut a few songs in the end because they didn’t fit the description. It guided me to keep my writing cohesive. I chose a theme because I wanted to explore so many different sounds, a style that was a mixture of so many different things, and I was afraid it wouldn’t make any sense. I wrote about the same thing on every song as a way to connect them lyrically.

AB: What was the concept behind the album?

MS: It was just about lovelessness. Aromanticism means the absence of romantic love or romantic attraction. I really connected to the idea in different degrees and on different levels. It is a subject that isn’t discussed a lot in our culture. Our culture is obsessed with love, especially the French. I blame the French actually. (laughs) The export of that stereotype affects everything. Art had always been obsessed with love, which is fine, but sometimes it is talked about in very simplistic ways. I wanted to explore a concept that was complicated but that recognized that some people don’t feel romantic attraction.

AB: What do you think about the notion of love in 2018? Do you feel it is consumed by social media and hypercommunication?

MS: People have always struggled to connect with others, but it is more difficult now than ever before because of the way that, not only social media, but also the internet and technology affect our brain. It actually creates more barriers between us and other people.

MS: I think love is more confusing now than ever before but also, access to the internet and the ability for new ideas to be distributed gives us the opportunity to discover new ways to love. I would never have been able to learn about aromanticism if it wasn’t for the internet. It’s difficult to access love but we also have access to a lot of other things. (laughs) I generally think that social media is bad.

AB: You are playing at Coachella this year. What are you expecting from it?

MS: My name is very small on the program. (laughs) I’m not sure I’m making it big yet. It’s definitely a big step, it’s a milestone. It’s something that I’ve always wanted to do. I’ve been to Coachella so many times and I promised myself last year that I would never go again unless I was playing. Now I’m playing, so I can go again. (laughs)