Q&A: Kaz Moon Experiments With Feelings and Music Poetry With New Song "A lot to explain" and Upcoming Album ‘ST*R *NISE’
GROOVY AND GRUNGY, PRECISELY CHARGED AND — full of moments reminiscent of pop, Kaz Moon’s new song, "A lot to explain" drags with calculated cool.
"A lot to explain" gives little answers to the “explaining” in question. With unexpected sound glitches at almost every turn, the 26-year-old Chinese American songwriter sets up a sonic maze for his upcoming album, ST*R *NISE, and "A lot to explain" is just the first clue.
Pondering and critical all at once, Kaz Moon’s new single feels like a soliloquy at the end of the first act: leaving no answers behind but certainly a lot more clues and next-moves.
Cryptic Spotify bios tease the upcoming album’s title, as mysteries linger across Kaz Moon’s online profiles. Collectively, every puzzle piece seems to be carefully planted for the world-building for his upcoming project, with elements of poetry and art, as he toys with color schemes and old photos.
Read below as Luna catches the songwriter at the dawn of "A lot to explain" in search of more of the puzzle pieces.
LUNA: I'm going to start with a very simple question: How are you doing today? What’s one song you're currently obsessed with?
KAZ MOON: Oh, man, okay, um, how am I doing today? I'm doing great today, I guess. I live in New York. Today’s the first really temperate day in a minute — that's the main draw of it. The winter is pretty harsh, but once you get out of it, it feels like you really earn it. So that is lifting me through today.
Yung Lean has this side project where he makes this different style of music. I don't know what he calls it… like Elton John–type music. It's something really, really special. Musically, it's the equivalent of holding your hand over an open flame just to feel something. It's really hard to put into words. It’s such a strong dose of something. It's the only thing I can listen to right now that really makes me feel something.
LUNA: What's the name for the side project?
KAZ MOON: Jonatan leandoer96. I try to make good music for whatever that's worth because I'm a practical person, so I think because of that I'm really drawn, charmed by, and really entertained by music that feels like it doesn't care about good or bad, like something that exists beyond that dichotomy of good and bad. That is really freeing and exciting to me, because I personally don't feel like doing that right now. But that stuff always felt really, really special to me — anything that gives me that vibe.
LUNA: Well, one thing that I was going to bring up later is that I definitely get the sense of an artist who's very concerned with world-building. I was looking at your Spotify bio and I was very intrigued by it. You said that this side project of Yung Lean made you feel something — that's what your Spotify bio did for me, but I'm not sure how to pinpoint it.
KAZ MOON: Absolutely. I changed it recently. It's this thing I've been doing every release for the past two or three years. I’m at peace with the idea of “Well, I mean, probably no one's gonna read this.” I think the way you described it was the answer. If anything, I hope that the things I make stir people into feeling things that they can't put into words. I think that exact experience of feeling something you can't necessarily put into words is really the only thing you get out of music. It's the point, to some degree. That's kind of what the bios are — they are for sure world-building. It's not so much for people to need this stuff to understand anything.
Me and the people I work with, we're all really into making things of quality. I hope that if anything, all I'm known for is making beautiful things. So I'll put the same amount of care into a song or into the bio, or whatever specific thing. I also just like writing and I don't get to do it that often. So it's this little side thing that shows up in the project.
LUNA: What’s "A lot to explain" about?
KAZ MOON: The song, along with a lot of the other songs — or basically the whole upcoming project — are motivated by my move to New York from my hometown of Dallas. Not in a literal way at all but in a tonal way. I think "A lot to explain" was the first thing that I made when I moved into an apartment in New York. Nothing was in the room, or it was like a storage room when I moved in. But it did have a table. So I could just kind of work off the table in this storage room looking place.
LUNA: When did you move from Dallas to New York?
KAZ MOON: That would have been August of 2021.
LUNA: I'm assuming the project we're talking about is the new album?
KAZ MOON: I approached things in a really scatterbrained way, so please ask a question if you need to ask a specific question. But there's a writer/poet [who] I used to like a lot, her name is Jenny Zhang. She's Chinese American, and I used to read her a lot in college. She has this thing that’s part of her style [where] she would use sort of a broken Chinglish in her poetry and in her writing. I always thought that was the sickest thing because it was like the way native Chinese speakers approach English. Oftentimes it just sounds really clunky from an English perspective, but she would use that and find these really interesting mangling of English phrases and sayings and words, sort of using the poetry and finding a real beauty to it. I always thought that was really striking about that.
LUNA: I always appreciate the scattering of answers. We know very little about the upcoming album, but I want you to see if you can use sounds of nature and only sounds of nature to describe what this album sounds like and feels like to you. Some examples would be leaf shuffles or the squeak of a squirrel.
KAZ MOON: I could totally answer this, but I have to break the rules a little bit. They're not necessarily from nature. I don't think it's a very natural album. I had this idea of what it would sound like before I even made any of the songs. I usually approach the album with a mood or a feeling, which eventually the songs reflect that mood or feeling. I wanted the album to sound like some candies that you had forgotten in a pocket or something. Candies that are melted and just turned into this other thing and just left in the pocket and sun-dried or whatever. I think it also sounds like if you took a guitar and set it on fire, like in a backyard or something. Those are two images that I have in my mind when I think about the album.
LUNA: What were some words in your mind when you moodboarded the feelings of this project?
KAZ MOON: I mean, I don't know, I have things I might want to say. I kind of wanted it to be funny in some way, but I don't necessarily think anyone who listens to it without any context is going to be like, “Oh, that was funny.” But like, I think it's kind of funny. Like the cover art for “* lot to expl*in.” It's a photo of my brother playing ping pong many years ago. We were in the family house. We didn't have a ping pong table, but we had a dinner table. So we took all the things off the dinner table and we were playing ping pong on it randomly, probably a decade ago. I found these photos the last time I went to go visit my parents, and they were just really striking to me. He looks simultaneously really funny in the photo but also really sick — I thought there was some kind of magic in it.
LUNA: How do you think the new album turned out to be different from the last double EPs that you put out?
KAZ MOON: Um, that's a good question. I don't think I went into the other EPs with a sense of a mood or feeling, like I said. I think this helps to explain — I actually know what the next album is going to be called. I even know in some sort of way what the mood of it is, even though none of the songs have been made. I'm mentally, in the very back of my mind, prepping for that next thing. ST*R *NISE was like that for almost longer than the last two EPs were being made. I had the idea of ST*R *NISE before I even started working on the first part of those two EPs — in like 2019 or something. So the EPs before this, I was just making songs, and I needed to figure out a way to just have a reason to release them. I came up with this concept of just like, “How can I present these in a way where they're just going to be different songs, but there's no grand theme or mood?” So I guess the difference is just that the new album is much more cohesive and made with the whole picture in mind.
LUNA: Just to circle back to the single a little bit more, why did you choose "A lot to explain" out of all songs?
KAZ MOON: I'm really happy with it. I think it's just a really punchy, short, two minutes. It's short and sweet, and I'm really happy with how it sounds. I did the mix really well. I really like how my vocals sound on it. I really like the writing. I like the guitar riff. It all came together in a real organic way. This song took a very short amount of time [to make] and it was really free-flowing. I feel like those types of songs are good to lead with.
LUNA: You’re going on tour soon — what city are you most excited to play?
KAZ MOON: Probably San Francisco, just because I want to go to San Francisco.
LUNA: To close us off, besides to tour and release the album, what's one thing that you're excited about for the coming year?
KAZ MOON: Oh, that's a good question. I'm shaving my head. I've had long hair for probably four years now. So I've been meaning to just buzz my hair off for a really long time. I do this thing with hair where I feel like I earn that change with life choices. So I'm hoping that once all this stuff is said and done, I feel like it will be time to reset and cut all my hair off.
-
weekly tunes playlist has been updated! new tracks from @furtradeband, @pecqband, @garryfool & more! check it out! https://t.co/ToFU0R6YGo
