Moses Sumney

Your music is a tool that aids me in being kinder to myself, thank you for being! ✨

also just wanted to say that as an trans, chinese, (kind of) aromantic immigrant - your music had such a profound impact on me and my life. songs like “colouour” “bystanders” “stoicism” “don’t bother calling” “keeps me alive” etc etc. were honestly the first time i felt truly seen / represented in any piece of media. so much of your lyrics made their way into my poetry, my art, and my outlook on myself and my identity as a whole. your albums have genuinely changed me for the better, and i can’t wait to see what you do next :)

last question: what is your favourite song that you have wrote? sorry that was actually 4 different questions lol

I'm very honored to have played any part in your identity construction -- thank you.

MOTM (Studio version) was cut because ... I think I was bringing too many old songs onto the debut album? The studio version is a crazy In Rainbows-inspired dream piece with a Thundercat arp solo. Maybe I'll leak it one day. It honestly slaps.

Two Dogs is literally a story about Two Dogs I had that died. It's metaphor but also true story.

been a long time

i shouldn't have left you

I was painstakingly self-conscious in the beginning of my career. I’d grown up accustomed to writing in a vacuum, in my childhood bedroom, in my dorm room, hiding my songbook inside my mattress or at the bottom of a drawer. I always thought I’d get to make my first recordings in total obscurity, clumsily clanging around.

But months before I began recording my first EP, things blew up.

After a few shows and 2 bedroom recordings, seemingly everyone from the Los Angeles music scene was suddenly peering into my window, waiting to see what my first offering would be, hoping for commodifiable gloss. I was wined and dined and unrefined.

But I didn’t want to record the “R&B record” that would make me famous. I wanted to make something experimental akin to the early recordings I loved – Linda Perhacs’ Parallelograms; Sufjan Stevens’s A Sun Came; the scratchy musings of Cody ChestnuTT and Milton Nascimento; the kitchen candor of Jessica Pratt. Instead I was often shipped to fancy producers’ and execs’ home studios and offices, forced to listen to them preach about how I was a star-in-waiting. I didn’t want to be a star. I wanted to be honest.

But secretly, I did feel like a star. Gaseous and infinite, distant and intangible, shining bright in the middle of a constellation, unable to touch the celestial bodies around me. I scribed “Man on the Moon” on a red guitar I bought on sale from a shuttering music store.

In one of these producer meetings, I journeyed to the top of a mountain to meet TV on the Radio’s Dave Sitek. He gave me a four-track recorder and told me to say “f*ck off” to everyone trying to sign or produce me. He told me to find my own voice or others would find it for me. He taught me how to record myself to tape, sparking an affinity for analogue processes. I “borrowed” the tape recorder, promising I would come back when I had found my sound. It sits now on the topmost shelf in my home studio. I guess I’m still searching.

Mid-City, Los Angeles was more of a concept than a place. Seemingly nobody had ever heard of it, and yet it was the geographic center of the city. Living there felt analogous to my disposition as a “rising” Angeleno – highly visible and invisible at the same time. It was an urban island and the sun beat its concrete ceaselessly. I sat on my bedroom floor and wrote “Plastic,” listening to Amy Winehouse demos and thinking about how we let our stars fall as long as they entertain us on the way down.

I recorded these misgivings straight to cassette on that Yamaha MT4X, feeling like a historian tracing my own origins. I loved that it sounded older than it was. I felt older than I was. I decided then that I would press it to vinyl in 10 years. I couldn’t afford to make vinyl records anyway. Instead, I backpacked little cassette tapes I would sign and sell at shows.

I realized early on that being visible (but not necessarily seen) was just gonna be a part of my story. How blessed I was to push through it with clear vision – and now I’m forced to stop and reflect. 10 years later, I’m still thinking 10 years ahead. Ask me about now in 10 years. Shoot, ask me in 20.

- M

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"Mid-City Island," our limited-edition 10 year anniversary black vinyl, is available to pre-order now: mosessumney.bandcamp.com/album/mid-city-island

Blackalachia, my feature-length conceptual concert film, is out everywhere now.

In early 2020, my band and I gathered in my home in Western North Carolina, living and breathing together, re-arranging songs from my first 2 albums into a live odyssey. As the year unfurled and international tour was wiped off the schedule, we took to the Appalachian mountains and filmed and recorded Blackalachia.

David Wojnarowicz - Close to the Knives