Moses Sumney’s titties are bouncing a little too much for his liking. To be clear, his pecs, the sculpted result of months of dedicated exercise with a personal trainer and sticking to a strict ketogenic diet, are spectacular. Just, you know, a tad too expressive for this particular occasion. The 6-foot-4 singer is sloped over a MacBook Pro in the kitchen of his Asheville, North Carolina rental, reviewing an early cut of an upcoming lyric video. In the clip, it’s nighttime, and Moses is bare-chested and running vigorously in place, wearing a pair of cycling shorts with enough body-sculpting compression to make Kim Kardashian proud.
He stares at the screen. “Maybe the titties are actually OK,” he concedes, with a giggle. When Moses Sumney laughs, it feels like the entire room expands, rearranging itself to make space. Aside from a pair of plush slippers the color of a graham cracker, Moses is wearing, as he interminably does, only black: a black T-shirt with gaping voids where there should be sleeves; a black kimono-style wrap; black tapered sweatpants that, even with a tiny hole in the knee, look impossibly chic. On two shoe racks by the front door I count 15 pairs of black boots, along with half a dozen other black non-boot options.
It’s a couple of weeks before the release of the first half of Moses’ new 20-song opus græ, due out this week, with the second part coming in May. The album’s music is as ambitious as the man behind it. A hypnotic songwriter, guitarist, and producer with a glassy falsetto and an immense vocal range, he exposes unlikely connections between pop and experimental, with songs that are rooted in knotty emotions. In a few days, he’ll launch a residency and art installation at the Bootleg Theater in Los Angeles, the same venue where he played his first shows seven years ago.
He has a dizzying amount to accomplish before then. Moses, who prides himself on both independence and a keen sense of quality control, insists he’s a lot more involved in the day-to-day of his career than the average artist. “As a single person, it’s your relationship, it’s who you talk to every day,” he says. His abridged to-do list includes: finding an L.A. Airbnb suitable enough to house his band for a month; approving the flier announcing the residency; editing the accompanying press release; nailing down details for the music video he’s gearing up to direct; picking up his guitar from the repair shop; packing; spending two days humoring a curious reporter.
First, though, Moses will shoot another DIY lyric video until midnight, and then he’ll stay up another four hours, sending emails and grinding away on album obligations. This, he says, is his life in Asheville. His house, complete with a porch swing and a rocking chair where he takes business calls, is a peaceful homebase for the times when he’s not performing or recording across the globe. There is an open-plan living room with a velvet sectional and matching navy-blue rug, and a spacious kitchen stocked with nearly a dozen varieties of tea. Where most people would place a dining area, Moses, 28, has opted for a cozy reading nook, though he admits not much reading actually happens there.
Upstairs, he has converted an attic-style loft into an ad hoc meditation and exercise area. There’s a yoga mat and, against a window, a prim, curtained pile of grey pillows and fabrics he describes as his “princess bed.” He has a simple music studio, a minimalist bedroom, and a bathroom he jokes must be the size of my apartment in Brooklyn. For someone who’s explored perpetual aloneness in his art and his life—his first album, 2017’s Aromanticism, explored the lack of romantic love in his life; Olivia Laing’s isolation chronicle The Lonely City is a favorite recent read—I can’t help but notice the ironic luxury of his double sink.
Moses seems to take pleasure in insisting that his Asheville life is boring, a departure from the glamorous L.A. existence he once enjoyed. That is not the only sly rebellion he delights in. Both his identity and his art seem to hinge not only on defying categorization but in narrating that defiance. On the one hand, there is his willful stoicness—as a rule, he never smiles in photos or videos. And on the other, there is the everyday Moses, a charming diplomat with excellent comedic timing. Josh Finck, a video projection artist who has worked closely with Moses, knows firsthand that people often find his friend intimidating. “He’s so large and gorgeous and talented, but he’s totally a big softie,” he says. “It’s not a show, though. He’s both things simultaneously.” In case you missed Moses’ obsession with oppositional truths, he has recently rendered his face a slogan of multiplicity: one eyebrow is dyed blond while the other remains black, and a similar contrasting swipe covers the lower half of his head.
Asheville, which Moses describes as a “city full of weirdos,” offers him room to explore this multiplicity, and the headspace to harness it. “For my job, I am tasked with really knowing a lot about myself and having to communicate that constantly,” he says.
That introspection is on full display on græ, an album whose title acts as a one-word summary. His interpretation of greyness is not just the kind of cloudiness that sometimes marks his temperament, but the kind that rejects binaries, that asserts that life is not lived in blacks or whites but in the gloriously complex in-betweens. The album is sprawling and yet tight, dense but accessible, an elevated version of the things that have become his signatures in recent years: artful lyricism, conceptual depth, playful vocals and melodies, unexpected sweeps of soundscape. Throughout græ, Moses depicts a world where intimacy offers both sustenance and suffering.
The album comes at an important time for Moses, an unusual artist who occupies spaces that shouldn’t overlap. Though he is reticent to acknowledge it, græ has the potential to make him a star, or to cement his position as an indie fave. He, it seems, wants neither, and both.
In the Bible, the character of Moses embodies a prototypical hero’s journey: the low-born infant who first becomes a prince, then a prophet. He is a powerful, if reluctant, leader with both spiritual and political purpose. This parable is what Moses Sumney’s father was studying in Bible school when it was time to name his newborn son. “He wanted me to lead people,” says Moses. “Out of what, I’m not entirely sure. Into what? Who knows?”
On a frigid Friday afternoon, Moses leads me into Firestorm, a worker-owned local queer bookstore. There is one book in particular he is after, Valerie Solanas’ 1968 feminist bible the SCUM Manifesto. (He’s in loose agreement with her misandrist thesis, that men have ruined the world.) Moses also buys a copy of Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, an epistolary novel whose themes crisscross immigration, abuse, race, and sexuality. I offer a warning: The book is beautiful, but it will break you. “We love that,” he replies drily. Like Vuong, Moses began his career as a poet, and he’s excited about the prospect of enjoying a poet’s prose.
Although he has been up since 9 a.m. and the sun is now a couple of hours away from setting, it’s time for Moses’ first meal of the day. We make the short drive to a busy strip of West Asheville—everything in the city is a short drive, he points out repeatedly. Dobra Tea, a vegan café, is one of his regular spots. Next door is the Mothlight, where he recently played a surprise show that hit the venue’s 250-person capacity in 10 minutes. The last time he played there three years ago, the room was barely half-full.
Moses has a preferred set of tables in the café, a platform of semi-private, Moroccan-style floor seats. Later, when he sees a pair of customers who look like they might be leaving, he quickly springs into action. “I don’t want to seem thirsty but I do want to be the first,” he laughs, as he swoops in on the seats. Then he reconsiders. “Also, I’m thirsty. It’s so beautiful to just be thirsty. Why not? Be thirsty!” After orchestrating the move, he takes off his shiny platform boots and folds himself onto the ground. Pleased, he gestures at his temporary kingdom.
Moses orders a yam and cheese sandwich, almond butter toast, and an Earl Grey tea with coconut milk, and gamely launches into his life story. He was born in San Bernardino, California, the middle child of two Ghanaian immigrants who set out on a long journey to the U.S. without documents. His mom was pregnant with him when she crossed the Canadian-American border to join his father in Southern California. In an essay he wrote for a new anthology collecting writers’ responses to historic ACLU cases, Moses quotes his father: “What they call illegal, I call alternative entry.”
When the Sumneys settled in America, Moses’ mom and dad worked, respectively, as a seamstress and a cab driver. At one point, the family owned a thrift store. For people without papers, Moses suggests, it’s sometimes easier to operate as entrepreneurs. Moses and his older sister attended a private Christian school where his parents worked as groundskeepers in order to manage the tuition. Each day, he would leave the predominantly white school and return to the family’s five-bedroom house in a black and Latino neighborhood he describes as not in the “ghetto” but adjacent to it. Soon, his parents would become pastors, serving a predominantly Black-American congregation.
Moses’ mother and father ran a strict household. Once, when he was in elementary school, his mom learned at church that Pokémon were demonic, so she came home and threw out the collection he’d spent two years amassing. “I was so mad at her,” he remembers. But there were counterbalances. When Moses objected that choir rehearsal conflicted with the Friday night timeslots of his beloved sitcoms Boy Meets World and Sabrina the Teenage Witch, he was granted permission to stay home and watch TV. And his dad practiced a unique theology, one that incorporated radical pan-Africanism into his Christianity. In the years to come, the Sumneys would bring dozens, maybe even hundreds, of Black Americans to visit Ghana and reconnect with their ancestral roots.
When Moses was 10, the family moved to the Ghanaian capital of Accra; his older sister was starting to get into trouble, and his parents thought they could make a better life for the family there. The adjustment was a shock. A good student and preternaturally obedient child, Moses had a tough time at school. He was picked on by students but especially by teachers, who resented his foreignness and who liberally employed corporal punishment for minor offenses. He soon turned even further inwards—so much so that when he ran into an old friend of his sister’s at a party in Accra this winter, he was surprised to be reminded of the young person he once was. Moses recalls the friend telling him, “Everyone I know who knew you is shocked. How do you perform on stages? You used to come over to my house and you wouldn’t speak.”
Though he spent much of his life in some form of silence, Moses loved music, and harbored a secret dream of making art. Using a voice-recording application on his computer, he taught himself how to sing, teasing out the range that he would later become known for. He’d tape himself singing along to artists he loved—India.Arie, Nelly Furtado, Usher—and play the snippets back until they sounded right to him. For a year, the only CD he owned was a bootleg of Furtado’s 2000 debut, Whoa, Nelly!, procured by his father from someone at church. He logged on to her website, printed all the lyrics, and pored over them. “She’s such a good songwriter,” he says. “I learned so many words from her. I learned what ‘ambivalence’ means.” He would eventually dissect Beyoncé’s Dangerously in Love and Justin Timberlake’s Justified in the same way. “Every run, every riff, every song, every moment.”
Though his mom loved gospel and his father was partial to reggae, no one else in the family was especially musical. To Moses, that’s a sign that he was, not unlike his namesake, chosen. When he was 16, the Sumneys moved back to California, settling in the Greater L.A. city of Riverside. All the while, Moses decided that when he landed in America, he was going to reinvent himself. “I was like, ‘I’m going to dress well, I’m going to be interesting. I’m going to do music,’” he recalls.
In his final years of high school, Moses joined the choir, and began to teach himself more about music. He spent two years at a local community college, then transferred to UCLA, where he studied poetry and creative writing. He took on a handful of extracurricular activities, including copy-editing the school newspaper and hosting a radio show on the college station. During a semester abroad studying Shakespeare in the UK, he expanded his repertoire to include theater.
Back in L.A., Moses landed an internship at a brand agency, where his job entailed creating content for actress Alicia Silverstone’s wellness blog. When the Clueless star went viral in 2012 for chewing up and feeding her young son food mouth-to-mouth, like a bird, Moses was the one tasked with writing the official response to the uproar. Later, he interned at LA Weekly as a music writer. In a piece defending John Mayer, he wrote, “The haters need to realize that there’s more to him than kitschy sentimentalism and dick jokes. Dude can write a song.”
As Moses was gaining experiences in the media world that would inform his understanding of how to shape an effective public narrative, he was cultivating his music skills by learning guitar tabs on the internet and obsessively studying the work of rock, indie, folk, and experimental artists. After deciding at 20 to properly pursue music, he was eager and relentless. When his parents flew in for his college graduation, they implored him to get another degree. “Give me a year,” he told them, adding that if he couldn’t rake in a full-time living as an artist, he would get a masters or go to law school. Almost exactly a year later, he made enough progress in the industry to feel confident enough to quit his day job.
There is an alternate timeline in which Moses Sumney is simply Moses, a chart-topping, mononymous pop star working with Swedish producers and procuring guest verses from any given member of the Migos. That Moses has an active stanbase—maybe they’re called the Pharaohs—who create hashtags, populate multiple Instagram accounts with edits of his face, and put forth elaborate theories about future release dates. That Moses is also rich as all hell, with a mansion in the Hills and a presence on red carpets. He probably wears a whole lot of color.
This Moses is still dressed in all black as he drives his black Jeep through the Blue Ridge Mountains. He’s looking for the first place he lived in Asheville, in 2014, where he spent a spring month in isolation, with no internet and no cell service. (Years later, he’d learn that Nina Simone took piano lessons down the street.) The house looks mostly the same, but whoever lives there now has given it a fresh coat of paint, and erected a protective fence around its perimeter.
As the sun sets, we cruise through winding streets illuminated by the full moon and a cluster of stars. We take an impromptu tour of one of Asheville’s bougiest neighborhoods, where he dreams of living in a beautiful Craftsman with a wraparound porch and elegant bay windows. This area was once a black neighborhood, until a wave of gentrification in the ’80s and ’90s displaced the community. The singer-songwriter Angel Olsen, an acquaintance of Moses’, owns a home somewhere nearby.
Another neighborhood, just 15 minutes outside of the city’s staunchly leftist downtown core, is mostly farm country. The people who live there, he guesses, are likely Trump voters. Moses has just received his North Carolina driver’s license and is eager to vote here in the upcoming presidential election. “They need my vote more than California does,” he says.
Moses’ music career began in earnest a couple thousand miles away from here, in Los Angeles. After inviting the R&B trio KING onto his college radio show, they asked him to open for them at a series of local concerts in 2013. That was the first chapter in a kind of story you don’t really hear much anymore: Instead of going viral online, Moses went viral in real life. Even though he’d only written a few songs by that point, the KING gigs led to more gigs that showcased his virtuosity and charisma. When he had the opportunity to play three dates with Swedish singer-songwriter José González, he quit his day job sending tweets and showering customers with coupons on behalf of California Pizza Kitchen to join the tour. Soon enough, he was attracting the insatiable interest of a music industry looking for the next Frank Ocean.
A longtime friend who happened to be a talent scout at Columbia Records took him out for a meal at a Beverly Hills restaurant and confirmed what Moses had suspected: In the eyes of several labels, he was the Next Big Thing. “And I was like, ‘Ugh. Can they not?’” Moses remembers. “‘I’m not ready to be talked about.’”
In his tiny L.A. studio, he made an EP using a four-track recorder given to him by TV on the Radio’s Dave Sitek. He’d found his style—a lo-fi, folky sound, performed with a guitar and a looping pedal.
“I was so confusing to people. They saw this tall black person who could be marketable, but sonically, people didn’t know where to place me,” he says. “My opinion was I didn’t need to be placed. Like, ‘I’ll decide where to place me. Just give me a minute, stop blowing up my phone.’” He anxiously took meetings with potential managers and his pick of the major label litter. Pretty quickly, he learned to understand their veiled industry language. When they asked if he thought of working with other songwriters, they meant they weren’t confident that he could write hits. When they suggested getting him into a proper studio, they were shading his lo-fi sound. When they recommended R&B and pop producers as collaborators, they were implying that a black artist like him belonged in a very specific box.
Moses feared he didn’t have enough clout to secure a deal generous enough to allow him to find his voice without tethering him to a shitty label for life. “I went from being completely irrelevant to many people demanding a lot of me overnight,” he says. “But challenging myself artistically and challenging listeners mattered more to me than being rich or famous.”
So he walked away, confident enough in his destiny to pursue a more autonomous type of success. He began putting out singles here and there, and working on what would become his debut. The industry attention had put him in a new social class in L.A., and he had the ear of people like Beck and Sufjan Stevens, whom he’d long looked up to. Soon, he found himself folded into Solange’s circle, frequently appearing on her Instagram and palling around town with big names.
Even though he had shrugged off one type of fame, he found himself in the midst of another. As he mingled in mansions during Grammy weekend one year, he says, “I felt like I was losing myself and my self-worth, and I was embarrassed that I felt validated by being able to get into all the parties.” Sometimes, he says, he’d run into people who recognized his face but had no idea he was a musician.
As his social life was popping, he became more disciplined with his art. He eventually finished his album, and went about trying to put it out. But the industry players who were once so bullish on him had moved on, and Moses found himself reckoning with the decisions he’d made. He eventually signed with respected indie label Jagjaguwar in early 2017, and made plans for his debut album to come out that fall. Aromanticism, a sober, inward-looking project with existential themes, was enthusiastically received by the music press, but only found any kind of chart success in Belgium, where it peaked at No. 139. “I was living in a really, really gorgeous house in Beachwood Canyon with five other artists, but I hated that I couldn’t afford to live alone,” he says. “I hated my life.”
So he walked away again, this time from the city itself and from the life he had spent years building there. “I went from being handed everything in my early career to having to fight for everything all of a sudden, which made me so much smarter and stronger,” he says. “I feel incredibly grateful that it’s just now happening. I feel more ready for it than ever before.”
Earlier this month, Moses made his U.S. television debut as the musical guest on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert. Elegant in a pair of sateen flared trousers and a textured trench coat, he delivered a stunning vocal performance of the græ single “Cut Me.” Performed with a full band and a jaunty horn section, the song sounded warm, playful, and, in true Moses style, unclassifiable. A couple of minutes in, he shimmied out of the coat to reveal a fitted, ribbed halter top. It was delicious theater, and fully earned its standing ovation.
“Over the past few years, I just felt that people didn’t think I could do it,” he says a few days after filming the performance, thinking of the festival promoters hesitant to book him, and the major label A&Rs watching from afar. “So I needed to prove to myself that I can do it.”
Across the new album’s entire hour and six minutes, Moses does just that. While Aromanticism was insular and minimal, græ is decidedly bigger, with clear nods to his love of pop sprinkled throughout. “In order for something to be artful and valid and full of meaning, it doesn’t have to be esoteric, obscured, or mysterious,” he says. He made much of the album in collaboration with producers in London, New York, L.A. and beyond, working with them on chords and music before retreating to structure the songs himself. The credits include 40 different people, including Daniel Lopatin, Thundercat, and the Nigerian-Ghanaian author Taiye Selasi, whose vocals are sampled to help give the album a narrative spine. “He sought us out because of what we were making and not who we are,” says Harry Burgess of Adult Jazz, the British experimental-pop band that lent “Cut Me” its warm bombast. “He prioritizes these little moments of beauty and doesn’t worry too much about how it fits in with the landscape.”
But Moses alone is responsible for every lyric and primary melody on the album. And Moses alone is allowed to sing. It’s how he retains authorship and, presumably, a sense of control. It’s also how he sets himself apart from a class of unnamed artists with whom he has grown tired of being compared. “The people I am mentioned with, in articles or tweets by regular people, I’m like, ‘We are not the same.’ Maybe there’s something about what I did before that didn’t illustrate to you, the listener, that we are not the same. Well, let me make that clear.” Over a one-and-a-half pound steak for two, served medium-rare, in a brightly lit corner of a rustic restaurant in downtown Asheville, he tells me, “When I was making the first record, the mantra I had in my head was, Just because you can doesn’t mean you should. For this album, the mantra was, If you can, you probably should.”
Back at his house, Moses urgently packs for a 7 a.m. flight to L.A. He drops several piles of clothes and a single pair of boots into a suitcase on the floor. “There! I feel better now,” he exclaims. He turns his attention to more pressing business, like the video for “Cut Me” he’ll direct on his days off from the upcoming residency. As soon as he lands, he’ll immediately start scouting locations. He’s on the phone explaining his priorities for the shoot, going through casting decisions, identifying non-negotiables. One shot he really wants to accomplish requires him standing on top of a moving vehicle. He’s not too concerned about the rig or the harness that would make it a safe proposition. “Honestly, I’m willing to risk my life,” he says. “Just imagine how legendary this would be if I die and we get the shot.”
Styled by Taryn Bensky. Grooming by Barry White for Barrywhitemensgrooming.com. Cinematography by Alberto Mojica. FX makeup by Elizabeth Yoon for Makeup Forever. Post Production by Jerry Chia at Good Company. Jacket and trousers by Jan Jan Van Essche; knit vest by Our Legacy, trousers by Jan Jan Van Essche. Jewelry throughout Sumney’s own. Glitter videos, pants by Uniqlo. Motion and custom type by Drew Litowitz.
