BOY MEETS WORLD: TAIYE SELASI INTERVIEWS MOSES SUMNEY
Photo Credit: Brandon Hicks
About a month ago Solange wrote to ask if I would write this article. The email, sent at night in New York, reached me in the morning of a lazy summer Sunday at my flat in East Berlin. It shames me to confess that I had never heard of Moses Sumney. I roused my bedmate — my Macbook Air — and turned to Mother Google. And there he was, a tribute to the glories of Ghanaian genes, all sculptural face and flawless skin, radiating majesty, modesty. A few clicks later “Man on the Moon” came floating through my speakers. One deliciously dissonant harmony later, a music crush was born.
The nine tracks I unearthed on Soundcloud shared a kind of dreamy sound, recalling what I love about Phil Beaudreau, Sufjan Stevens and James Blake. This was the music of freewheeling daydreams, afternoon lovemaking, epic brainstorms—rendered with the playfulness that marks a musician in love with music. Sumney takes his time on these tracks, letting his sumptuous voice wander throughout its entire range (note, for example, what happens around the three minute mark of “Lindisframe”), letting chords melt slowly into one another, both honey-thick and feather-light. The effect is beguiling: one doesn’t listen to this music so much as enter into it, occupying the space created by the sound, the space that created the sound.
Indeed, spending a morning hearing Moses felt like meeting the man himself, lounging around his apartment chatting, strolling through LA. The honesty of his lyrics, the clarity of his voice, the obviousness of his passion draw the listener into his world: a place of tenderness, truth and freedom. Listening to the diminished chords of “Man on the Moon,” the hum-and-breath effects of “Mumblin’,” the re-imagined barbershop quartet quality of “Lindisfarne,” the neo-Greogrian chants of the “Outro” — I could imagine the artist at work, at ease, scribbling lyrics, humming chords, a breeze at play in gossamer curtains, sunlight gilding floorboards. To interview him would be a joy, I knew, but also somehow redundant: I felt that I already knew him, that he’d already made himself known through his music. No, I wanted to speak to Moses Sumney not to ask him questions, but to thank him for writing the kind of music that opens the heart of a writer.
All of my writing is inspired by music, and I mean that very literally. Each piece I’ve published was brought into being by very specific tracks. Music, with its incomparable ability to expose the workings of the heart, lures the stories from the mind. It loosens the emotive muscles. The strongest characters, the deepest insights, the most vividly visualized scenes come to me when listening to music. The catch: I can’t write without silence. For years it seemed a kind of curse to have to choose between two loves: writing prose or hearing music, never both at once. It was only while writing Ghana Must Go that I recognized the relationship: music was to my writing, I saw, what walking was to some painters. One can’t paint while taking walks, but in walking one finds what to paint. I can’t write while listening to music, but in listening I learn what to write.
Moses Sumney, I knew at once, would lead me to new writing, opening up a channel to the field of creation. In his voice I heard new characters with open hearts and broken ones, new stories of home and homelessness, new landscapes of emotion. By tapping so bravely (and yet so gently) into his own vulnerability, he tapped directly into mine. This is what I wanted to say when I called him at home in LA last week. His rich, almost self-effacing voice was just as I expected, with light touches a Ghanaian accent discernable in the Californian delivery. What surprised me was his wisdom: at twenty-four, he is more grounded than artists twice his age. What follows is a truncated transcript of our conversation.
Read more on http://saintheron.com/featured/boy-meets-world-moses-sumney/
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