Moses Sumney – “Me In 20 Years”
Moses Sumney is a pioneer in the art of stretching out the album rollout. This year, Sumney will release his new album græ. He’s putting it out in two parts, like it’s a serialized novel or something. He’ll release the first part of the album in February and the second in May. And right now, it seems like it’ll be worth the extended, drawn-out wait.
We’ve already posted two songs that will eventually appear on græ: “Virile” (which has a pretty amazing music video) and “Polly.” Today, Sumney has shared a third. “Me In 20 Years,” which comes from the second part of græ, is another dizzy piece of music that walks the line between astral soul and art-rock. Sumney sings the entire song in a wild, ecstatic falsetto while the music underneath him twists and wriggles. (Sumney co-produced the song with Daniel Lopatin, better known to most of us as Oneohtrix Point Never, and Matt Otto.)
Lyrically, the song finds Sumney grappling with the end of a relationship and asking difficult-to-answer questions of his own future self: “Hey, me in 20 years / Does your milk still turn to rot too soon? / Do you still hoard souvenirs and make the mirrors of sentimental veneers?” Check the song out below, along with its creepy low-tech lyric video.
UPDATE: Here’s what Sumney told Zane Lowe about the song on Beats 1:
When I first played [Lopatin] the demo, which was wordless and me singing at the top of my lungs and range, he said that it sounded like an old lady screaming to herself in the middle of a Whole Foods. And that I realized then and there that that is my brand. So that’s what the song is, it’s just me and screaming in the middle of Whole Foods. It’s just such an exaggeration. I think that we’re really melodramatic generation and I also think that, us, millennials have a very complicated relationship with aging.
græ part one is out in February, and the full album is coming 5/15 via Jagjaguwar.