Allow me to set the scene. Midway through the music video for an R&B slow jam from the ‘90s, or possibly the early 2000s, the singer’s in his feelings, no longer confident in his ability to seduce or please, begging a woman to give their love another chance. You can tell how desperate he is by the fact that he’s beating his chest and dropping to his knees in the rain.
That kind of gesture isn’t what Moses Sumney has been known for. For years, he worked overtime to demonstrate that anyone who pegged him as an R&B performer simply because he’s Black — projecting onto him racially coded conceptions of genre — was way off. The reality was that he was doing fantastically unfettered, conceptually ambitious work, often pairing it with equally striking visuals.
The type of artist who selects his surroundings as carefully as the genres he works in, Sumney moved to the Asheville area in 2018, in search of a pastoral sanctuary. Removing himself from L.A.’s entertainment industry pressures, he further freed himself to explore his stylistic interests, which led to his 2020 opus græ, a sumptuous, baroque meditation on multiplicity that encompassed art rock and plenty else. The following year, he made his verdant, mountain surroundings a backdrop for the songs in his concert film Blackalachia.
But with the first project he’s released since — after a three-year break to focus on acting and fashion — the EP Sophcore, Sumney decided to finally play around with his own version of R&B. He’s even got his own “pleading in the rain” scenes in the video for his song “Vintage,” of course, executed with an elevated sense of style.
It wasn’t long after he released Sophcore, WNXP’s Record of the Week, that Hurricane Helene battered his Western North Carolina home with apocalyptic flooding. We talked about how he’s creatively drawn on the cycle of solitary cocooning and communal survival he’s experienced in the Blue Ridge Mountains.
Jewly Hight: So often you put yourself out on the front edge with work that you do. How do you look back on turning your first ventures into western North Carolina looking for solitude and quiet into a long–term home base for your creativity?
Moses Sumney: I’m very grateful that I had the foresight, or at least the presence of mind and the presence of self, to know at a young age what was for me and what wasn’t for me. And living in L.A. at the time was not for me. And yet I still did it for a few years in order to boost my career. And while I was in L.A., I would take trips to western North Carolina, Asheville and the surrounding areas to write and to be inspired, after discovering the city on tour. And it always just felt like home and where my soul and my body and my bones wanted to be.
I moved there in 2018. It gave me a stronger sense of self and a deeper connection with the universe. And I got to be there through the pandemic.
JH: When you entered the spotlight, people wanted to categorize you, which was just so contrary to the way that you think and create. It also seems very clear you were that you have an intentional and generative relationship with the settings that you choose to put yourself in. How you think that initial move to Asheville freed you up to embrace your multiplicity?
MS: I believe that everyone contains a multiplicity. And what happens when we are situated in social groups is that we often have to shave away the rough edges in order to fit in, in order to get on with community. I think it’s one of the negative offsets from capitalism is that we’re constantly packaging ourselves and digesting ourselves and spitting ourselves out as something simpler than we actually are in order to be understood.
And what moving to Asheville afforded me the ability to do was to kind of move away from living in a community. I think there is a community in Asheville, but it was not one that I was a part of. And I was spending so much of my time just kind of in nature, in isolation, I realized that I could find my true self, because I wasn’t immediately exporting my thoughts, my ideas to other people in order to help people get me.
JH: How’d it supply the grounding you were seeking so that you didn’t have to choose one style and could make an expansive, maximalist album like græ?
MS: Making an album like græ came out of that. I moved there right as I started writing it, and all I could think about was how much of a lie it is that we are as people one thing or two things, that we just fit into a box. I just found that I had been defining myself kind of in opposition for so much of my life. I was like, “I’m not that, so I must be this.” Living in Ashville, just let me say, “I am me, and me is really complex.” And hopefully I can give people a piece of art that allows themselves the freedom to see themselves as complex as well.
JH: I read that your concert film Blackalachia originated as kind of a plan B, because you had been conceptualizing a different approach that would have involved traveling the world and filming in different places. And you made it into such a distinctive, stunning work. When you look back, when do you feel like that film has added to your body of work?
MS: So initially before the pandemic, I had a bit of a fund to make a visual album for my second album. And then once the pandemic happened, I couldn’t move and couldn’t travel and I wanted to shoot in Ghana, shoot in Brazil and have a music video for every song. And once I was stuck at home, I realized that I needed to still use that little bit of money. What excites me the most about being an artist is utilizing the conditions that are available to me, and during quarantine, what was available was my surrounding environment, the mountains, the trees, the sky. And I was also learning how to photograph. I had bought a film camera and I was spending my days in isolation, driving around the mountains and taking pictures, largely taking self-portraits of myself in nature, which was really special for me, especially as a black person, getting to be outside, getting to be in nature and establishing a connection with the Appalachian earth.
I think what Blackalachia did for me was really let me lay my roots in my own artistic way into those mountains and say, “I’m here. We are here.” …I don’t think we talk a lot about Black people in the South. As someone who’s lived largely on the coast, there’s this monolithic idea of what the South is. And I think that’s especially important now, and will be for the next four years, to remind people that the South is actually really complex. It’s really layered. There’s lots of different types of people, lots of different types of histories.
Most importantly, for me, it’s really beautiful. So that work allowed me to say all of those things, but even more so gave me an opportunity to say, “Hey, I’m a director.” I directed that. I location-scouted it. I produced it, I made all of the choices. And that was very empowering for me as an artist to step outside of singing my song in the studio.
JH: I read in other interviews that you initially intended to keep a fairly cloistered existence in western North Carolina. But then you began to think about not only what the environment was giving you, but how you might want to uplift the creative community in the region, particularly Black and brown visionaries there. And I watched that short film that you did with the magazine i-D, that introduced some of those people. What sort of relationship you would say you’ve forged with those creative communities?
MS: I would honestly say forging, and especially maintaining, a creative community with the people of Asheville has been very challenging, mostly because now that the world is back open, I travel a lot for work. And I’m also, at the core, a really introverted person who quite likes being alone in my house and not talking to people.
But something emerged for me again during the pandemic where I suddenly was meeting all of these people, because I couldn’t leave and, and seeing a new beauty to being in community with folks. And it’s also been challenging to maintain that community, because Asheville can be a very transient city.
That was a lot of why I decided to make my life here a little bit more public, because I realized that I could be a signal to other creative folks
I’m really happy that I can be a signal in the couple of films that I’ve made. I have met people out in public who’ve been like, “Getting into your work helped me realize that I could actually live in the South, move to the South and live there. It’s a fight worth fighting. And it’s also worth saying that it is a fight.
JH: You are such a self-directed artist. It feels like there’s significance to the choices that you make artistically. And that made it really interesting after you had done the work of making room for your multiplicity, to hear you zoom in on a particular approach to R&B on Sophcore. When you released your first two albums — which definitely weren’t R&B albums — people placed a racially coded genre label onto you when they called your music R&B. So how did you find appealing possibility in working with R&B in the way that you that you have on Sophcore?
MS: I started to feel like I was really leading a resistance against genre-fying Black artists who are not easily categorized. And within that, I also began to wonder if I was denying a part of my own self in order to prove a point.
I feel really fortunate that the first two records I’ve made, I made completely from my own mind, from my heart of my own volition. And I did what I wanted to do. But there becomes a point when it’s like, “Are you identifying with what you like and what you feel and what you know, or are you rejecting something?”
I’m consistently checking in with myself. And the reality of the situation is, I love R&B music. So much of my foundation as a listener is R&B music. And I love jazz and I love experimental and I love rock and I love folk. The unfortunate thing about being Black is that all of those other categories fall away for people when they look at me, and they’re like, “R&B.” I spent so many years rebelling against that that I then came to resent that.
But at some point during the pandemic, I looked at my listening habits and I was like, “Wow. I listen to a lot of R&B music, a lot of SZA and Usher and Solange and Beyonce and a lot of neo-soul music.” I’ve always wanted to make that music.
I took a three-year break from writing music, which is very rare for me. I’d never gone a month without writing songs in my life. Coming back into it, what brought me back was my love for R&B music. I wanted to make something fun for once.
For me, making albums is a very agonizing experience. That has been because I’m mining the depths of my soul lyrically and conceptually and then sonically exploring, exploring, exploring, experimenting, experimenting, experimenting, trying to find something new, trying to create something I’ve never heard before. And as a return to music, I wanted to do it in a way that I just love. Getting to sing on some beats is something I’ve never done in my career. I was always very against that, because I needed to prove to myself that I was an artist and a musician that could make these sonic choices independently, or somewhat independently.
JH: There’s a line in the song “Vintage” where you say “I’m-a take it back to 1993,” which feels like a way of situating what you’re doing. Are you calling back to virtuosos of ‘90s R&B and the way that they expressed themselves and put their need, their desire right out front in different ways than we’ve heard generations of artists have come along since?
MS: When I was making especially the music video for “Vintage,” I was listening to a lot of K-co and Jojo and a lot of male R&B of that era, Dru Hill, Keith Sweat, Maxwell. It just used to be really cool, to be honest. It used to be fine to say, “I want you and I like you,” or “I need love.” I mean, I think R&B music has always been kind of about begging, Marvin Gaye, this pleading for love, Otis Redding pleading for attention. We talk so much in this day and era about male sensitivity and whether or not it exists, or how it can exist, or where can men be safe to explore, express their feelings.
I just thought that was just so adorable. As someone who not only is not incredibly earnest with discussing my feelings in real life, of course I do it in my music, but also I came up in indie music, and indie is all about being cool. Sometimes it’s all about being jaded. It’s all about being reserved and pretending you don’t care. And I think that’s really uncool, actually. What could be cooler than being honest about what you feel and what you desire? So I appreciated getting to take it back to 1993.
JH: You have such a command of dynamics, pacing, tension and space. One of the innovations that you brought with your approach on Softcore is you didn’t construct these songs in a way where you’re just inevitably building to a cathartic kind of moment. It’s not obvious where you’re taking us.
MS: I’ve been like, “I’m not doing R&B. But if I were to do it, this is how I would have done it.” I’m always going to want to experiment. No matter what genre I’m playing in, it is of utmost importance to me to try to take the listener to somewhere new. Ot was really good fun to play around and say, “I’m going to mess with song structure in this way.”
JH: You’ve talked about growing up, your experience not fitting in. How did you get to play with merging the confidence and braggadociousness of women and women of R&B in the past with that kind of acute self-awareness in shaping that song?
MS: “I’m Better (I’m Bad)” is largely parody and I’ve wondered if it comes off to people as such.
JH: I mean, it’s some of the funniest stuff you’ve written.
MS: All musicians really want to be comedians. So I definitely was trying to have some bars in there.
Jazmine Sullivan has a song called “Mascara” where she says, “Yeah, my nails and my ass fake. But so what? I get my rent paid with it.” And I was just thinking about how that was a wonderful send up of a certain kind of braggadociousness that modern R&B and hip-hop has while also displaying an underlying kernel of insecurity.
And in “I’m Better (I’m Bad),” I wanted to say, “Yeah, I used to be a freaking loser, but now I’m hot and everything’s okay. I’m better. I’m so good that I’m bad. No, really. I’m better. No, no, no. Really. But seriously, I really am better now.” And I wanted to kind of explore that theme, and in a fun way and with an aesthetic quality that really matched it. And it was really great to have a song that’s got trap drums and 808 kicks, but also a Thundercat bass part.
JH: “Hey Girl” feels like your version of seduction, because of how you bring your own insights about the fluidity of gender performance to it.
MS: I’m so obsessed with gender. Goodness, I am so obsessed with it. Every song, I’m like, “There’s got to be a little bit something about gender here.” And I’m always thinking about gender theory.
One of the first things I did in coming back to writing was writing for someone else. I have a friend — she’s an actress — who’s interested in making her first record, and I was just like, “Can I write you some songs? What do you like? What are you trying to make?” And she was like, “I love Sade.” So I was listening to a lot of Sade. I thought it’d be really fun to write a song from a girl’s perspective, trying to seduce another woman.
In the end, [the friend] didn’t end up using the song. But I had sat with it for so long and I’d fallen in love with it. I was just like, “Okay, can I have this back? Because I think I should sing this.” And it was interesting for me, because I had already written it for another person. I could play a character.
In my first days of songwriting, when I was 13, I kind of wrote like that. The first songs I wrote were about being in love, when I had no concept of what it was like to be in love. Because I had consumed so much music and largely pop music and R&B and [assumed] you write about love when you want to be a singer.
Then in my past records, I’d been like, “I must be as honest as possible talking about everything that is in my life and my mind and my soul.” And with this [EP], I got to be like, “Sure, it’s me, but we can also play around a little bit.”
JH: Getting in the nostalgic and wistful mindset of Sophcore, where you’re focused on objects of desire and sources of pleasure, often requires being in kind of a settled and secure state. It’s not necessarily where your imagination goes in the midst of crisis, because then you’re in survival mode. So it made it striking to listen to Sophcore after Helene came through and wrought destruction in your community. Has that experience altered your relationship to the work that you put out into the world just before?
MS: I think that the trains of thought that have emerged for me after Hurricane Helene have actually been very connected to what I was already thinking about. My first two albums are largely about isolation and loneliness, and at times the importance of being alone and at other times the pain of being alone, but always the beauty of being alone. And when I started to write Sophcore, I was thinking for the first time about community and romance. Obviously, community has become a larger theme in my life with the films that I’ve made in Asheville, but bringing it into my musical work [is new]. Sophcore is just the beginning of me really thinking about what it means to be in relation with other people, largely romantically, but also platonically and geographically.
With Helene, which has been really terrible, one of the beauties that has come from it is seeing the ways in which people have come together — the ways that people who may never have met or talked, people who are probably from different political backgrounds, were able to come together in this region, which is incredibly politically diverse, and support each other and be there for each other and rescue each other and take each other supplies. I was able to hike through all of these fallen trees to go to my neighbors homes and check in on them. And that reminded me of the importance of being there for each other, and the importance of connecting in real life, in person. So it hasn’t really affected my relationship with the music I’ve just put out, but it has really kind of strengthened, for me, the importance of being in community.
JH: I saw your Instagram post about the tree hitting your house. Where were you when the storm hit?
MS: I was in Paris for Fashion Week, and I was going home in 2 or 3 days. I started to see it on the news, these really awful videos of the flood and buildings and neighborhoods that I knew very intimately being destroyed. But I couldn’t reach anyone, because Asheville did not have electricity and did not have cell phone service. And I live even further out from the town, kind of in a little forest neighborhood. I just couldn’t reach any of my neighbors. So I didn’t really have updates for almost a week on whether it was safe to come back, if I still had a house, how are people doing that I know?
It was very crazy, because I was in this weird prism of fashion shows and fancy people and fancy outfits. You know, my life is split between living semi-rural in a small town in North Carolina, and then being in these really funny, fancy environments. The juxtaposition of that was not fun. I was trying to explain to people this hurricane hit the town I live in. And they’re like, “New York?”
A lot of people where I live were stuck. Hundreds, if not thousands, of trees fell, and people couldn’t access that neighborhood for days. And all the people who lived there had to create a network, cutting through the trees with people who had chainsaws just to check on each other. At some point, some volunteers drove down to North Carolina with tractors and forklifts and all of this heavy machinery, because the city couldn’t get to that area quick enough ,and cut everyone out. And that’s how I ended up being able to get to my house. Then I went home and tried to help out the best I could.
JH: It’s been a place for you to cocoon, to have that kind of existence that gives you the quiet you need, that connection to the natural world around you. What did your experience of the storm do to that?
MS: It was very disruptive. Ashville has long been considered by many to be a climate haven. There’s no earthquakes, there’s no mountain fires, there’s no tornadoes, there’s no hurricanes. Surprise.
What can happen is a little bit of a disconnection from the world. I mean, it’s happening with us all digitally. We’re constantly seeing tragedy, or state-sanctioned violence or environmental tragedy or war or genocide. It’s like we try to care about everything all the time, while also trying to take care of our own lives. And it was very sobering for me for this to happen to Asheville, because I’ve always just felt incredibly safe there, and safe from the world, even just safe from just having to consume the energy of the world, but especially safe from anything climate-related.
I think the reality, unfortunately, of our current world is that no place is safe anymore. We are reaching a point with the climate crisis and the literal erosion of our earth that there is not really going to be anywhere that is ultimately safe. It makes no sense that somewhere that’s 300 miles from the coast and way above sea level should be flooded with hurricanes. And it has never, ever happened there before. In that region, it was not expected and people were not prepared for it. It makes me want to get a lot more active with talking about climate change and learning about climate change. I’ve only ever been concerned about improving the conditions of the little place that I live. But that is just not enough. And as much as that’s not my responsibility, it’s absolutely my problem. And that’s the reality that we’re all in.