Playlists for our Future Selves (feat. Moses Sumney)

You're listening to Object of Sound from Sonos. The show where we bring you in tune with the music that shapes our culture. When music lives in the air, it's one thing. When you know the undercurrents and the ideas that went into a song, when you can feel its weight, it becomes more meaningful. I'm Hennief Abderakib, a poet and culture critic, and I'll be your guide as we seek a deeper way of listening. I'm really glad to have you here with me spending time doing what I do most and probably best, thinking about music, talking about music, and finding thoughtful ways to connect with music. Each week, we're going to invite artists, writers, and thinkers to talk about what's happening in the world and the music that helps them to make sense of it. Connecting with a song is a very personal and emotional thing, so this isn't about me telling you what to listen to. We're not looking for answers on this show. My hope, really, is to ask more questions, to find new music to fall in love with, and to build a community of listeners that I hope you'll be a part of. I'm someone who grew up making mixtapes on cassette, and I was one of four siblings competing for a finite amount of tape. So back then, a mixtape was only as long as your physical tape could hold, which meant I had to be careful about what I picked, and the arrangement I composed with my precious 60-minute cassette. It was most important for me to just pull the best songs I possibly could and place some next to other songs I was excited about, but in an order that made sense. So for example, I remember a mixtape where I blended Alia into the locks. In the late 90s, when both of them were kind of having a moment, because these two albums had songs that I loved a lot, but I didn't have space for the full albums. And so I learned at a really early age, the importance of curation, in picking a set of songs that tells a specific story, or that speaks to something I want to think about, that I want to feel, that I want to immerse myself in. I still think of myself as someone who tries to be a very responsible curator, who understands that when I place one song next to another song, there's a real opportunity for a story to be told, and within that story, some emotions can be ignited. So in this episode, we're going to think about the power of the playlist from a few different directions. What is a playlist? It is a storytelling apparatus. It is a way to use music to drill down on a single idea or emotional concern. The playlist is much like mixtapes where a labor of love, something you give to someone to show the many ways you've been thinking about them, and the many tunes that have soundtrack you're thinking about them. All of these things fit within the mold of what a playlist can be at its highest form. And sometimes, it's just a few songs you throw together that you want to hear in order while you're doing something mundane, like cleaning your house or folding your laundry. So in this episode, I'm going to be talking to the innovative artist Moses Sumney, whose work keeps appearing everywhere on best of lists, on playlists, and I'm excited to talk to him today. And functionally, the playlist is going to be a big part of what we do here every week. With each episode, I'm going to unpack the events of moment by sharing songs and sharing stories about those songs. In this week, since we're still at the turn of the new year, lingering with some glimmer of possibility, I've created a playlist that is also kind of a seed. It's a collection of songs for my future self. You can hear that over on mixcloud at mixcloud.com/sonos, and we'll leave a link to the playlist in the show notes. And then to wrap up, I'll share a personal story about my own battle with a playlist that won't go away. My guess this week is Moses Sumney. Moses Sumney is a singer and songwriter who released his second studio album, Gray, in two parts in 2020, the first part in February and the full album in May. As a vocalist, he's known for having a range that oftentimes feels otherworldly, with a background in folk and soul music, his work often resists categorization. And this is fitting because Gray is all about the duality, the multiplicity, and the blurriness of what lies between black and white. Moses, how are you? I'm well, honey. How are you? I'm doing well. You know, it's so ridiculous to ask people about linear time, it feels like, but are you someone who turns over the new year with any kind of intention, or are you just kind of rolling from one moment to the next? Wait, did the year change? Did. It does feel like it. Oh. All right, there was, oh, it's, yeah, it is a new year, darn, I observe it, I definitely observe the year, turning. So this is the first episode of this show, and I've kind of centered it around playlists and curation, which I am excited to talk to you about the idea of curation and crafting an album in an arc. So first, are you a playlist maker, are you someone who makes mix tapes and/or playlists and/or compilations of songs for yourself and others? Yes, I'm a big playlist maker, for sure. And, you know, I'm embarrassed to admit that my playlist making is now predominantly on streaming, but I feel like I was part of the last generation of people who actually burn CDs. I mean, I, and made cassettes when I was like a little child, and so I do recall what it meant to actually make a mix tape, but yes, I am a big playlist maker, and I love making playlists for myself, and then sharing them with others. What's your process? Like, if you are making one where you do have the time to kind of like really drill down and have the songs flow into an arc, like, what's your process for that? Well, I like for a playlist to be arranged, similarly to albums, purely by the sonics, and so I would typically not arrange a song according to the lyric or, you know, what it's about. I like to base flow and the feeling, the way something moves through you and the kind of tones and the colors that are coming out of a song, and so I try to just make those feel very fluid and consistent. That's beautiful. I would love to talk now about albums and the crafting of those albums. I don't know if I can even say it goes without saying, because album has got so much praise, but it does go with saying, for me, to you, I love, I love Gray. Thank you. It was one of my favorite joints of last year. I'm a big album consumer, like point A to point Z, album consumer, like put on a record here and all the way through. And I think I've been trained in a way to kind of listen to albums differently now because so many albums are kind of just like, well, here are 10 to 15 good songs that I've put in any order, but I felt like Gray was something that pulled me away from that and took me back to a place where it was like, okay, there's a world on this album that is not necessarily easy to move through, but it's immensely worthwhile to move through. And I'm interested in your ideas around curation. First of all, do you think about Gray as a double album? Like I think about it as a double album, even though it wasn't released at the same time. It made me think of these like double albums that this is maybe a funny comparison, but I think about the album that T.I. put out with T.I. verse, T.I. album where like one disc was T.I. and one disc is like we're dealing with two different modes of person, but it's the same person, you know, and I thought about Gray and that in a more refined version of that. I remember having a concept of double albums from that age, you know, from 2000s, also from like, you know, speaker box in the love below, it's always been something I've wanted to explore and Gray was not supposed to be a double album to answer your question. Yes, I do think of it as a double album. There was not meant to be one. And in the studio, I was just like, damn, this should have long. And because I had sequenced it according to the sonics, it just made sense that the second half of it felt like a very different beast than the first half, the second half was more intimate, more introverted, perhaps more cerebral in some ways, more lyric focused, more minimalistic. And so I came away from it feeling like I had made two records and then I ended up wanting to explore a release model that felt as experimental as the recording model. [BLANK_AUDIO] curious to know if you listened to it all, if you waited to listen to it all at once since you're an album listener or if you listened to it in parts. I listened to it all at once. I kind of fucked up because I didn't know at first that two albums were coming and so I heard a couple tracks off the first album and then when I learned that there was another one coming, I was like, "Oh, I'm going to sit this aside." And I think some of that is because of what I understood your intentions to be and some of that's just because I, you know, a thing I loved about your first record was it also felt like it had an arc and I didn't, you know, it felt like it would be a more fulfilling process to listen to it as intended or at least the full body of it. But I think I missed, you know, I like craved that double album feel and I craved kind of being able to straddle the two different worlds of it. Was this a thing where you recorded a lot of songs? I did record a lot of songs, there was probably like 40 songs. I mean, when I went to mix the album and, you know, by the time you get to mixing a record, the album is supposed to be done. But by the time I got to the mixing sessions in London, there were about 30 songs and I was kind of panicking but it had become part of my process that I couldn't decide what was right for the album until the songs had been mixed or had been partially mixed and so the very end of it was kind of this psychotic period of working on way too many songs and then each day being like, all right, that song's out, all right, that song's off the album and we got down to 20 and I was just like trying to chuck songs out and take them off and they just kept fighting me. They're like nah, we're staying. So there were, there were quite quite a bit and it was interesting because I had actually said that I wasn't going to release a double album. Okay, I said that publicly because I didn't feel like this was the right era for it, maybe 10 or 15 years ago, I'd say 15 years ago would probably have been a more ideal time for a double album because the average music listener doesn't really have that much time or attention span anymore because of the ways we've been kind of reprogrammed to listen to music. So I was quite hesitant to do it and I think releasing the quote unquote to albums was probably part of that. We were trying to explore like how can we break this up, how can we explore the relationship between the listener and the music and how can we direct it but I also kind of came away from that feeling like people are going to do what they want to do. They can listen to it however, it best suits them and some people don't consider a double album and that's also valid. But there's also something that I'm interested in in terms of just like pure curation. How do you curate the self in a way that serves your musical ambitions? Well, you know, Gray is inherently a bit of a cheat code because it's saying I can do whatever I want, I can be a bunch of different things and so on one level I could have taken a song about Honey Not Cheerios and put it on the record and kind of excused it away by saying it's about multiplicity so it can be about anything and everything. So the challenge was actually not doing that. The challenge was to try to keep it lyrically and thematically consistent without being random or seeming random, you know, for the sake of eccentricity. And I think that it's either subject matter or the kind of material production of the songs. Those are the two things that determine whether or not a song gets to stay on the record. And I think that everything on the album thematically either fit into the school of exploring loneliness and solitude or exploring multiplicity and the idea of being, I don't know, untraceable or well, the idea of being Gray. Yeah. I think one of the reasons I've so fell in love with Gray is because I have, I don't know what your situation is that I'm someone who lives alone and who has largely been alone for months like a lot of people or has been like, you know, in my own little cavern with occasional trips out into the world but not really ones that feel safe or comfortable. And so I'm craving, I think I'm craving a kind of music that puts me in dialogue with an understanding of my multiple selves and the complexities of that but also the pleasures of that. And I'm wondering if you learned anything new about yourself through the process of putting the record out, especially since the records lived most robustly in a time where people were, there are some people who are isolated and kind of on their own and floating through the world detached from others. Hmm. That's a great question. I don't know if I learned anything new about myself through the process of releasing Gray, certainly the process of making it. And I would have thought because, you know, this two came out in the very early stages of the pandemic. And so I was being asked this question already a lot before we even really knew what lockdown was. And so I kind of went into lockdown with that top of mind like, okay, what am I going to learn about the experience and about myself and my music from this? But I'm not quite sure yet that I learned anything. Maybe I need even more distance from it. I think that the listener is better suited to answer that question because I think it's possible that people interacted with the album differently than they would have interacted with it. If things hadn't been locked down, I think it's potentially convenient to release a record that requires a lot of listener, a lot of attention, a lot of repeats, a lot of introspection. It could be in benefit of the record, I think, to have everyone stuck at home. But I also know that some people wanted to listen to Doleiba because being sad and alone all day. And then at night you listen to a record that makes you feel sad and alone is a bit much. But for myself, I don't know, I enjoyed being alone. And I wasn't so much thinking about, okay, what are, what am I getting? You know, once you release the record, it's not yours anymore. And so I'm not so much thinking about it after it comes out. I'm kind of like, well, it's up to y'all. It's not yours. Yeah. I'm like a morning, I don't know why Doleiba is the vehicle, the sole vehicle for this. But in the Doleiba energy was something I needed in the morning. So I was like, listen to those type records in the morning. And then at night I found myself most often thinking into the sad, like lonely records, which is maybe this year, assuming I'll still be inside for a while, maybe I'll reverse those things. I'm the same way because that's like, I'm like cleaning in the morning. The cleaning guy's promise and I would do before I went to bed. I'm doing it in the morning. And so maybe I need like something to keep me moving. Yeah. Shout out to Doleiba for goodness cleaning. Always. If we're talking about self curation, that's one thing, but there are a lot of ways ourselves are curated or attempted to be curated for us by the general public. And the one thing that draws me to you in general is your kind of immense resistance of categorization and I think that's important for black artists and artists of color in particular because there is a desire to kind of for critics, for listeners to kind of use a binary lens with which to describe our works. And you're so vocally and smartly resistant to that, not just in your music, but in your presence. And do you feel that the needle has moved at all with the way that people view or consume your work or are you not even that interested in what other people, how other people consume it anymore? I'm less and less interested in defining how other people consume it just for the sake of my own sanity. I don't feel like the needle has moved enough in how people talk about me or my work. I think that when I say something like, "I'm expansive," and then people turn around and say, "Okay, so he's expansive." I'm like, "Why do you have to define me?" Or I find that every turn, it's not that literal. I find that every time I try to say like, "Oh, I shouldn't be defined," then people just try to find a bit of a broader definition. And maybe the question is, how do we talk about artists and music and how do we describe something without limiting it? But I think especially for black artists, those descriptors are often very limited and very limiting and in order to kind of sell something and sell it in a quick time period. You have to both pick the thing that is the most overarching attribute of that thing or that artist to you or the thing that people will grasp onto and the thing that will be the shiniest and so I find that in discussions of me or my work, people are trying to communicate what it is that they like about it or don't like about it and they're often getting it wrong because it's just broad, it's expansive and I think we all kind of as individuals come to a point in our respective lives, where. we realize life will be easier if we just kind of accept the coat that we're being put into. If we just like, okay, pick the box and maybe it's two or three boxes, then you all have to explain yourself every five minutes and you won't have to feel like you're on the defense all the time. And I reached a point where I was just like, well, I feel actually really oppressed by a lot of the definitions that I'm given. And then any of the, of course, that's often so much about like genre, right? It's like, you know, the thing I was railing against was like R&B artists, R&B artists, R&B artists. And now I'm like, what if I want to make some R&B music? I've spent so many years screaming about how I'm not an R&B artist, but that is also part of my DNA. And so I find that in defense of trying to get people to understand me more, I end up diminishing myself and having to sacrifice parts of what I do. And it just does a disservice, I think, too. And I'm borrowing the language that you've put, but it does a disservice to the expansiveness of black artists, I think, in particular, who were, at least in my case and in the case of many, I know, who were raised operating under so many different modes of creativity that we have no choice but to pursue all of them at once at times, right? Or always. And it is fascinating to me that there is still not yet language for that in the American discourse, even though black artists have been not only at the forefront, but really like pacing the creative art of the country for a long time. I totally agree. And I feel annoying all the time because I'm always going on, yapping on and on about it. But I think what's further annoying is that I am far from the first. And I'm far from the most successful to do it. If we look at Stevie Wonder's catalog, he went all over the place. If we look at Prince's catalog, he went all over the place, Nina Simone, even Aretha Franklin. I think these are people who are blending genres and doing it so interestingly. And I think even if we look at some of our biggest black artists today, like Beyonce and Kanye West, right? I think there is a constant amalgamation. And I think that black identity in America is understanding, yes, how to code switch, but also understanding how synthesis works inherently and how to work different things into your everyday being. And so it is quite fascinating, as you say, that there is not language for that, because I think the act of canonization, as we canonize these artists from the '60s, '70s, '80s, who were so forward looking in genre bending, we steal away a part of what they do. And I think it's a shame to not acknowledge that, because we've done that for so long. There isn't a path forward for genre bending or barrier breaking artists to just be without being limited. - Yeah, and I think there's so much of that canonization that makes someone like Prince a mythical figure and not an actual person, not an actual person who created in a lineage of other creators, and who inspired a lineage to come. And I think that without a god, I'm sure we both love Prince a great deal. So you know what I'm saying? There's a part of that magic making that removes a black artist from the historical place in there, or removes them from the historical lineage. It makes it seem as though they kind of just arrived, and then bless the world and then left and left nothing behind. And it's that part of it too, disrupts the idea of a language for it, because there's no understanding of history. - Yes, and there's also no acknowledgement of the craft and the learnedness that is required to do that. You know, it's like, we often think, when we think of black artists as like mythical or like magical or just intuitive, I think we erase like, oh, no, but there's like learning. (laughing) There's craft there as well. - Hey, there's work. Yeah, we went down a road I didn't intend to go down, but I'm glad we did. I'm interested in hearing about what you're listening to now and what you think might endure for you. Are you someone who listens to something in the moment and thinks this is something I'm gonna listen to years from now? Or are you kinda just like, eh, I'm listening to this and it's good right now, but who knows? - Oh, I know instantly when I listen to something and it's going to be important to my life, definitely. And then sometimes I'm like, this is nice. (laughing) - What are you listening to in the moment that you feel I's gonna kind of be an archive of the moment? - Well, I mean, I've been talking about this record so much that I feel like a stalker, but Kia's album from last year. - Forever you, girl. - Forever you, girl. ♪ Then I could flex my love, yeah ♪ ♪ Get your poop off my neck ♪ ♪ So are we ♪ - I was just like, this is important to me and is my life changed quite possibly. (laughing) La Melda from Texas. - Oh yeah. - I had an album last year called Hannah. ♪ Looking at the end of morning's day ♪ ♪ I can't believe I can't ♪ - Every time I listen to it, I'm like, whoa, this is really speaking to my soul. - Moses, I'm here, thank you so much for joining me. - Hannah, thank you for having me. You are a legend in the streets, so I'm quite honored. - That was Moses Sumney. His album Gray is out now, wherever you get your music. You can follow him on Instagram @mosis. A final thought. So back in maybe 2011, I began this running playlist. It's a running playlist, meaning that it grows exponentially every year with no sense of time, but it's also literally a playlist I listen to while running. If a song comes to mind, it goes on the playlist, and then I put it on shuffle. On a run recently, co-heated in Canberra is welcome home, came on after something I had put on more recently. ♪ You're dead ♪ ♪ Will you see this thing alive ♪ - If it carried me back to the place I was emotionally when I probably put that song on the playlist or when I thought that song was a good idea to run to, and it was not ideal. At the start of every single year, in this year, it's no different. I make one resolution, and it's to tear that running playlist down and start a new one with more intention and more thoughtfulness so that I'm not running along happily and then being kind of assaulted by the past version of myself who thought running to the starting line was a good idea. But I keep it. I feel connected to that playlist. It reminds me that I love this music once, and I can't outrun my past self even while trying to run into something new for my new self. And I use my running playlist as an example of the understanding that a playlist can endure even when we don't want it to, even when we're trying to outrun our past selves. (upbeat music) And so, as we close out, here's an invitation for this week. Create a playlist for your future self. It does not be long, maybe five to 10 songs. But think about where you are right now, how you're feeling in this moment, the ups and downs of it, the overwhelming sadness is in the small joys in between. And think about a series of songs that creates an arc to capture all of those emotions. You put together a little playlist that you might want to hear three to five years from now. I would love to hear them. You can send them my way at [email protected]. (upbeat music) This has been Object of Sound from Sonos. Thank you to our guests this week, Moses Sumney. To hear all the music in the full version of this show, listen on Sonos Radio, or find us at mixcloud.com/sonos. And while you're there, check out some of the other great shows on Sonos, including Specials from Dolly Parton, Unsung from Crack Magazine, and Radio Hours with Tom York, Erica Badu, Jaypeg Mafia, Michael Kiwinuka, and more. Subscribe to our podcast on Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen. If you love this show, rate it, and share it with your friends. Also, tell us what you like about the show and what you're listening to. This is a communal thing, music discovery. Email us at [email protected]. Follow us on Instagram @sonosradio. This show is produced by Work by Work, Scott Newman, Gemma Rose Brown, but that Thomas, and by me, Heneath Abdurrakeed. The show is mixed by Sam. Bear in Josh Ham, extra gratitude to Joe Dawson inside of Blount at Sonos. I'm always talking about music online on Instagram and Twitter @NiethMohamed. Thank you for listening.