Q&A: The Beauty of Impermanence: Saint Motel Releases ‘Symphony in the Sky’
INTERVIEW
INTERVIEW
☆ BY KIMBERLY KAPELA ☆
Photography Credit: Oswaldo Cepeda
SAINT MOTEL HAS NEVER MADE A RECORD QUITE LIKE SYMPHONY IN THE SKY – Their latest 12-track offering that blends their signature infectious melodies with a newfound orchestral grandeur. While the band has always been known for their cinematic flair, this album marks an evolution—one that embraces depth, subtlety, and a mature reflection on the beauty and impermanence of life.
At its core, Symphony in the Sky is about transience – the fleeting nature of relationships, personal growth, and existence itself. Frontman AJ Jackson drew inspiration from a Japanese philosophy that views impermanence as an essential part of beauty. “The very fact that nothing is permanent, that everything is constantly changing, is part of the cycle of life,” he explains. Coming out of the pandemic, Jackson felt the band was entering a new chapter, both personally and creatively. The album became a way to process those changes – gaining and losing loved ones, shifting perspectives and embracing what lies ahead.
To fully realize this vision, Jackson sought outside help. Enter Bekon, the Grammy-winning producer and songwriter known for his innovative work across genres. A classically trained violinist surrounded by a handpicked team of jazz virtuosos, Bekon brought a fresh perspective, pushing the band into even more dynamic and vibrant spaces. He encouraged Jackson to experiment with his vocal delivery, stepping into different characters and perspectives to find the right emotional depth for each track.
The result is an album that struts through orchestral pop with dazzling layers of brass, lush string arrangements, and unexpected flourishes that elevate Saint Motel’s signature sound. It’s a testament to their growth – a record that doesn’t abandon their infectious energy but refines it into something grander, intentional and undeniably cinematic.
To accompany their first full length album in years, Saint Motel will celebrate with an expansive 2025 North American tour, kicking off March 7, with new dates recently added. Angel White, Great Good Fine OK, Oliver Hazard, The Divorce, Stolen Gin, and Brigitte Calls Me Baby are slated to support select dates throughout the tour.
LUNA: Thank you for talking to Luna. Our readers would love to get to know you and your music more. What inspires you to push boundaries within your sound? Are there any specific experiences, artists, or moments that have encouraged you to explore new musical territories?
AJ: Every time you get the opportunity to make a new album or make new music, it's always an exploratory process. And for me, I always liken it to solving a mystery. You don't really know where you're going and that's the exciting fun of it. I never really had any real classical music training and so for me, starting writing music was smacking keys on the piano in my family's home and then that's slowly but surely trying to discover, ‘oh, why do I like that?’ I think what pushes me to explore the boundary is the nature of writing music itself, that's what it's for.
LUNA: You have released your fourth album Symphony in the Sky and a huge congratulations is in order! What is the inspiration behind the album and what themes and emotions do you touch on?
AJ: It’s about the beauty and the impermanence of life. There's this Japanese saying where the very fact that nothing is permanent, everything's ever changing, and we're all including ourselves and our relationships and our surroundings and our entire existence as things slowly die and wither away, that's all part of the beauty of the transient cycle of life. Symphony in the Sky coming out of the pandemic when we started making this album, there was a new chapter I felt for the band – for myself, our various personal lives, and gaining family and losing family. I think up into that point, we have been on a pretty much non-stop touring cycle since the early 2010s, and it gave us a chance to help take a moment and reassess.
LUNA: I would love to touch more on the creative process. Can you walk us through the creative process for Symphony in the Sky? How did the songs evolve from the initial idea to the final version?
AJ: Initially, we had really no intention of necessarily writing for anything album related. I think it took a while to get back into the mode of making music when the world opened back up, and I did it by way of making this mobile studio in my backpack. When I could start to move around and travel a bit more, that's how it all started. The first songs were written in Mexico, some were written in Turkey, some were written all around and the idea was to keep it as minimal as possible, what tools I had to write the music and try to soak up more of the feelings that I was being surrounded by. It started with “Fine Wine” and then “A Bluer Blue,” which I think thematically, are the mascots of this album and it just flew from there.
LUNA: What drew you to collaborate with Bekon on this album, and how did his unique background and production style influence the sound of Symphony in the Sky?
AJ: When we were a few songs deep and we had to put out some songs, we started to realize this was shaping up to be an album, and wanted to find somebody to take the helm of that album and give it a sonicality that I can't really do with my my production abilities, so Beckon can really cross off a lot of the things we're looking for. He is a classically trained violinist. He's extremely musical and knows harmonies and all sorts of things that we're looking for, and we have similar tastes in music, but he also really made his mark in the hip-hop community and a lot of that is from the techniques he's picked up from being in that world for so long. It seems like a perfect combination. A lot of times, Saint Motel’s music almost feels like it's a sample, but even though it's not and that sample feels like it's being reimagined and approaching that with the producer who's been in that world seemed to make sense. We started working together and were unclear of what the album was going to be and it all fell into place nicely.
LUNA: What is your favorite song from Symphony in the Sky and why do you love it? Is there a certain lyric or message that stands out to you the most?
AJ: They're all my children. Each one has a unique background and story. To me, I think the “Low Earth Orbit” is the last one to finish and it took me so long to produce that one because it's been a ride. When I finished that one, I sent it off to mixing and that's when I really felt this album was done. I could probably work on that one for another year and not be totally satisfied, but it felt like this is the perfect ending to the album process, and it also is the last song of the album sort but it's the perfect ending to the album itself.
LUNA: This is your first big album release in four years. Did you take any creative risks or experiment more either lyrically, emotionally or sonically with Symphony in the Sky since your previous work?
AJ: I think it has a very different sound than our previous stuff. Personally, I think that has to do with the mindset of how that whole album started and this tragic beauty of the pain of just going through life and maturing and seeing all these things changed. I think that's reflected in the music. You can hear it in “A Bluer Blue” and “Steady Hand” is slowly spilling out on the more ballad side of it, and then you get that same romantic side of that same concept comes through on other ones like “Get It At Home” and the whimsical nature of it, and “Life’s A Gas” and stuff like that. I think there's a few different factors that made it different. I think it's the mindset of going into this album from a reset of the world.
One of the big factors sonically from this album is when I was doing “Fine Wine,” I was sliding my fingers down the piano, trying to do this transition, and then somehow I put it on a string instrument, and it sounded like this beautiful string run. I based the whole song around this concept of the strings and couldn't get enough of it. I found this really talented string arranger who just tried on one song, and we just really hit it off. He ended up working on every song on the album, so there's this bringing symphonic nature to the album that is nothing like we've ever done and that's now translated into our live show where people that might have seen us play a couple times and they've never heard the songs like this.
It's a whole new era of Saint Motel right now. It's inspired by orchestral pop, complete 60s Capitol Records. Beach Boys are in the same studio next to Stevie Wonder and Burt Bacharach down the hall, and it's just these times when more orchestral and symphonic nature was more present in pop music. Bekon being involved with producing, you can hear that creative juice as well. They're very talented and they can make things sound bigger with less. I think there's a bunch of things that went into why it sounds the way it does, and why it feels like it's the right record for us at this time, and why it doesn't sound like anything we've ever done before.
LUNA: Saint Motel will embark on a three month long headlining tour to celebrate the Symphony in the Sky release. Are there any tracks that you're especially excited to perform live for the first time?
AJ: We started rehearsing them all and they're all really fun to play. Each one has something that's fun about it, like in “Life’s A Gas,” each member of the band has a little solo, which is really cool. “Steady Hands” is going to be such a fun, really emotional moment. It's going to be really nice to play that one live. “Get It At Home” is really fun for us to play. They're all really fun to play. We are planning on doing something with “A Bluer Blue” that is potentially going to be crazy, but still trying to figure out we can make work on this tour, like in the physical space of the venue, but we're planning something interactive with the crowd.
LUNA: Do you have any pre-show or post-show rituals or routines that help you get into the right headspace before hitting the stage?
AJ: I do cereal jingles to warm up my voice, and then we all slap each other to get our blood flowing. We do some mystical stretching, and we begin basically a frenzied state, like berserkers, and then we just psych each other up and then jump on stage. Afterwards, that's when we slaughter the cow. A lot of people slaughter the cow before they go on stage. We slaughter it afterwards.
LUNA: How are you feeling in this current era of your career and what does the rest of the year look like that you would like to share with Luna?
AJ: Feels good. I think we're all stoked to be here making music and playing bigger and bigger rooms and selling out shows and having the ability to make music still, and we still get along with each other, which is wild. I feel very fortunate. It's still just as exciting as it ever was. There's always new cities to go to, new music to create, new sounds to find and it's a good place. I'd say the goal for me for this year is I want to speed up our release of music traditionally, like we're slow at releasing albums and I want to go faster.
