Q&A: With Forthcoming EP holy silence ’fore the spring, CLAY “Taps Into Source”
FORGED IN SPACES OF REFLECTION AND ISOLATION — CLAY’s music pays no mind to capitalist constructions of productivity. Instead of adhering to a strict schedule, CLAY enters the studio when she has something to say, sits down with a single instrument (usually a guitar), and lets something pour out of her. That is the story behind her recent single, “Letting You Go” — rather than releasing something from the archives, CLAY knew there was something they were ready to voice. Now, “Letting You Go” has tilled the soil for the garden of her new EP, holy silence ’fore the spring, released May 5th.
A part of the San Francisco Girls Chorus, CLAY’s upbringing was laced with music. During her tenure, she won three Grammys and later attended Berklee College of Music. While her creative process centers emotion and truth, there is still a high level of technicality. CLAY carefully crafts shimmering, sultry R&B soundscapes that immerse listeners into the world her poetic lyricism constructs.
Breathing into Bloom, CLAY’s last EP, brings us into spring like a flower unfurling. The title track is a soothing and affirming deep breath in. It guides us through a descent with songs such as “WTSG,” with Alessia Cara, and “Undertow,” bringing us into a more meditative, melancholic world. This first EP in the coming trilogy leaves us with “Sunday,” pulling back like the tide, ready to flow into holy silence ’fore the spring.
Keep reading below to find out more about CLAY’s process, politics, and holy silence ’fore the spring.
LUNA: On your TikTok, you’ve done these two videos in which you talk about playlists that have your songs on them. If you had to make a playlist for the current era you’re in, what would you name it, and what’s one song you would put on it?
CLAY: Oh my god. In this era right now? Okay. It would be called “Holding on for dear life,” and my other option is “Saturn returns.” Like “holding on for dear life, Saturn returns.” I think it would have Jhené Aiko on it because I love her and how she’s real as fuck in her lyricism and will just say it how it is. She would be like, “You’re that bitch, get back up” and I’m like, “Okay.” It would have Megan Thee Stallion and Rosalía; a couple quiet moments. I really love … Mereba. It’d be an ebb and flow, maybe like “Butterfly” by Cleo Sol.
LUNA: I love that! One of your songs, “feelings,” was featured in The L Word: Generation Q. I’m curious: Which queer media are you most invested in right now?
CLAY: I think my answer is that I personally think there should be so much more accessible queer media, and I honestly am not invested in any right now. It’s not to shit on any creators or people attempting to make queer content. I think it's still very gatekept and watered down, and I think there needs to be more of it and way more representation diversity-wise so it’s not the same stories over and over again. I'm not the type of person [who will] watch a show for 14 minutes in [of one queer plotline in] the entire season that's, like, a D-plotline — I can’t do that.
I think the last thing I watched was The Wilds, and I really ended up liking the show, but so many people on social media were saying, “It's so queer, it's so queer.” It’s like one plotline that’s not really nourished. It definitely comes to a climax but I think it's still really taboo. Really taboo. I don’t think there’s enough imagery in the media. In all different types of media. In advertisements, shows, films — everything. It should be the people who have the lived experience who should be telling the story, and no one else.
LUNA: I agree. You were in an advertisement recently for a Tinder campaign. What was it like to kind of be some of the representation you’re looking for?
CLAY: It was such a tender, sweet day. I find it hard sometimes as an autistic person to be on set because it’s a lot of the things that are sensory overload for me in one place. First of all, I’m not in control at all because it’s not my set. I’m going somewhere where I’m part of something that’s already a moving machine. So … I can’t control the lights in the room, I can’t control anything. The temperature, the sounds… So when [I] walk into a space I have my sunglasses and my earplugs and my headphones and everything I need sensory-wise, but then you’re expected to let a stranger touch you… That is the nature of being a model … I tried it for a little while but it's not something I really resonated with. [But in] this campaign I’m walking on as myself, because I just am not built for that — to be touched and poked and prodded by everyone.
This particular campaign was amazing because even the head of makeup — who I work with all the time — is queer. The person [who] was my point person, [who] really brought me into the project: queer. So it's like I already have the comfort of other gay women or queer women around me. And it was such an easy day. The person that I worked with, Seb, was so sweet. Even the concept of it, of sitting in comfortable silence, was the most neurodivergent thing — the most neurodivergent one of all, ’cause they had so many different scenarios and we could have gotten so many different things but we were chosen for sitting in silence.
LUNA: Oh, [the prompt] was chosen for you and you were like, “This is perfect”?
CLAY: Yes! They were like, “We want these two in a car, comfortable silence; we don’t even want them looking at each other, we just want them chilling.” I was like, “That is literally my love language…” So I think it was actually a great representation in many ways. A) For us being a queer couple and [B)] very femme-presenting people — which I thought was really sweet [and] that you don’t often see in queer representation — and also the comfortable silence as peace … the most neurodivergent-friendly of all the different things.
LUNA: It’s amazing how all those different intersections of your identity ended up showing up in the project.
CLAY: I know! I had some of the details before I went into the project. I will say “no” to things that make me uncomfortable. Boundaries have been one of the most rewarding journeys of my life.
LUNA: Yes, for sure — boundaries are so important.Pivoting now, you’ve been involved in music for most of your life. You were in the San Francisco Girls Chorus and then you went to Berklee College of Music. The experience you have is obvious in your music. You have a lot of attention to detail and you’re very technically proficient. What’s the process like, after so much technical training, to craft your own sound — something unique that feels true to you?
CLAY: I think that when you go to school for music, when you’re gonna make music after, you have to kind of forget everything you’ve learned and then learn it again in your own way. I think that if I had stayed any longer in music school I would not have been able to find my own voice, because sometimes you get so in your head in the technicality that you forget that music actually resonates with your whole body. It's a visceral experience. So I had to take years of my life to unlearn so much again especially as someone that is.
I learn differently than other people around me. I process sound differently. I process information differently. So I had to learn how to kind of download that information and then transmute it into music. I don’t think you can do that in a classroom. I think it has to be experiential learning, and I was really grateful. I mean, I met a lot of people along the way that I did not resonate with, but I finally met collaborators that pretty much just created that safe space for me to just get quiet so I could hear what was being whispered to me. Does that make sense?
LUNA: Yes, you had to listen to what was truly within you — not just what was impressive technically.
CLAY: Exactly. I think once a song is written you can focus on all the sonic details after the song is written. I’m the type of person … I write my songs with just one instrument. I’m not somebody [who] can have a beat and top-line. Like, I could do it, but it won’t yield the same results as sitting there. I have a guitarist friend with me, and they play something and I'm like, “Next.” They play something. “Next.” We go through, fucking, 12 ideas until something pours out. That’s the song. Then we build the sonic world around the song. And that’s when we can get fun and technical.
LUNA: Yes, it’s vulnerable and raw before it's fine-tuned. You’ve said something to that effect before. You said you’re not one to “choke out a song” — you’d rather let it flow. If there’s a day where it’s not flowing, is there anything you do to get yourself into a creative headspace where music does flow more naturally?
CLAY: Yeah. I’ll lay on the floor. And no. I just try to change my perspective and tell myself that the idea that I have to write a song today is a capitalist bullshit idea. No I fucking don’t. And if I don’t write a song today that doesn’t mean it is a day lost. That’s bullshit. I have to constantly remind myself that my voice is not a commodity. My voice is not something that is only given to me to make money. I think its such a false notion to think that every single time you walk into a studio you have to have something that is fucking perfect at the end of it. No it’s not. It’s not the truth.
So I try to go to the studio when I’m feeling like I have something to say. I don’t like doing sessions every day … I don’t have something to say every day. You know? I like to have days of isolation to myself, just looking around, observing people, looking at nature, being in nature… Even days in my bed. I just try to flow the way my body is asking me to, and then when it's finally like, “Oh shit, I have this idea and I have this concept,” then it happens.
[With] this EP, holy silence ’fore the spring … I had no intention of writing this EP. I was ready for the next one. I actually wrote the songs that are on the next EP before I wrote these songs. [Funny enough,] I wrote “letting you go” … almost [as] a business necessity because my manager was like, “We have to put one more out,” and I was like, “Alright, well, fuck.” She was like, “Why don’t we put one out we’ve already done?” And I was like, “Well, no because that's not what I wanna say right now. That’s not what’s resonating in my body right now. Let me see if I can write something.”
So I had the spark idea for “letting you go” because that’s what was on my mind. I was ready to have this new phase of healing from this past relationship, and I went in with two friends of mine — one is a guitarist and one is drummer/producer — and I went in and this poured out and … all of us just kept going. All of us were like, “This is it.”
We made this song within two weeks from start to finish, and I'm talking from inception to mix and master — it’s, like, unheard of. Or maybe, like, three weeks. I literally recorded and engineered my own vocals when I was in Mexico City. I was sobbing my eyes out. Recording vocals. Sobbing my eyes out. Recording vocals. And you can fucking feel that when you listen to the song… It’s kind of my fastest moving song I've ever put out, so … it was, like, a million streams in six weeks.
LUNA: Congratulations! I love that song — you can definitely feel that pour out. It's just the type to sing out loud in your room.
CLAY: Yes, that song is one of my favorites I’ve put out — even sonically, that I’ve ever made. So when that was happening I was like, “I can’t move on yet.” [There’s] more from the same seed … there’s more plants. The seed has grown and it’s grown into a flower, and then the flower has dropped other seedlings and now other ones are starting to bloom and I need to water them. So, I built holy silence ’fore the spring, the EP, around [the single] “letting you go.”
LUNA: Wow, that’s amazing. My understanding was that I had linked holy silence ’fore the spring with Breathing into Bloom. But holy silence ’fore the spring is really built around “letting you go.”
CLAY: Yeah … It fit like a puzzle piece into the trilogy. It became a trilogy when I was like, “Oh wait, there’s actually an EP between these two,” and that’s when it became, “Okay these all flow into each other.”
LUNA: Can you speak to how Breathing into Bloom serves as a bridge to the trilogy?
CLAY: Actually … the trilogy I have in my head is: Breathing into Bloom, holy silence ’fore the spring, and then this EP that's coming out in the fall called Waiting For God in the Garden.
So Hues was kinda [like] when you go to Trader Joe’s and you buy a bunch of frozen appetizers for your friends that are coming over. You’re like, “Okay, I'm gonna get these veggie samosas and I'm also gonna get these egg rolls, and I'm also gonna get the puff pastry with those little … bomb ones with goat cheese.” They are all so different but all taste yummy and have something for everyone. That's what Hues felt like. That was my first EP ever, and it was kind of sporadic. It was not thought through in the same way [the following EPs were]. I was like, “This song is great, this song’s great, and this song’s great. They'll all have a different color. Let's call it Hues.”
Breathing into Bloom was the first time I was really mindful … I was like, “Here's my intro track, ‘Breathing into Bloom,’ this is gonna feed into something that's really a body of work.” So that's phase one of this trilogy… Breathing into Bloom is like springtime. It's self-discovery … I have to stop [being] self-deprecating and I need to bloom. I need to take a deep breath and just be who I'm meant to be, and that's kind of that journey. Letting go, shedding wounds, opening them, healing them, actually taking the time to heal. That’s springtime, and you’re like, “Oh, wow,” and you get somewhere with Breathing into Bloom.
Then, holy silence ’fore the spring is kind of the moment where you feel like you’ve been healing all year and “Why do I feel like I slipped back under the water?” Like, “Why do I feel like I'm back in winter when I've done so much work to be in spring?” I think it's such a misconception that healing is linear — absolutely not. All of us that have lived through — I mean, who hasn't — trauma and all these things, and … that healing comes in phases and waves. I think holy silence ’fore the spring is that phase of laying under your duvet and not wanting to get up.
LUNA: That’s an important phase of healing to touch into. As a listener, I feel like I kind of tap into the earlier phase of healing in that first track, “Breathing into Bloom.” I guess you kind of touched on this. That first song sounds like a lullaby. It’s very beautiful, it's very soothing — it’s affirming. Then the rest of the album descends into more of the nitty-gritty, like struggling with mental illness. I guess we usually expect the process of healing to be the end goal. So in putting “Breathing into Bloom” as the first song, you’re touching on that roller coaster of healing. How does that reading of the album sit with you? Do you want to speak more on that?
CLAY: Yeah, I think you’ve totally nailed it. I love wordplay and I love when people bring things to me that are like, “Oh yeah, I did think of that.” But, I didn’t really think of that. The way I describe it [is] as taking breaths. In and out — [it’s] an ebb and a flow. You know, breath in, breath out is part of meditation, is part of any mindful practice, and I wanted every song to be like, “Let's breathe in, let’s breathe out.” So it's like, which one are you doing at any given moment? What is the song making you do?
With holy silence ’fore the spring … “’fore” as in “before the spring,” I thought it flowed better to do “’fore” instead of “holy silence before the spring.” It just kind of rolls off the tongue. And yeah, I chose to do the title track as the first song…
[It] has a similar impact as the first track of Breathing into Bloom. It sets the tone. And the lyrics are like, “It started in the winter / That feeling so familiar / It started as the leaves changed / Sky greyed, light faded / That moment when the loneliness creeps in your window pane / It started in the winter the frost in my fade.”
LUNA: There’s a lot of natural imagery in your writing. There’s spring [in Breathing into Bloom] and there's winter [in holy silence ’fore the spring.] In your single “Poison,” there’s the honeybee that returns to a dying flower that brings no pollen. Can you talk about the inspiration you find in nature?
CLAY: Oh yeah, I think it's like the only way I know how to use words. I have such a reverence for nature … it’s a fact. Every fucking thing, everything is nature at the end of the day. How did we get to making anything that you see around us? We’ve observed it in nature and then actually made it with our hands. Right? Every artist, painter… If you're thinking, “Where are these colors coming from? Where's the inspiration?” Even if it's a painting of something that's not explicitly a painting of the sunset, it's still nature. It's influenced by colors you’re observing in nature. Everything is derivative of nature.
I think the more I delve into self, the more reverence for nature I have and more references to nature in my work. Because that's our truest nature. (Laughs)
LUNA: With a lot of your lyrics and writing, you say that once you write a song you let it leave you. [It’s] open for it to become the listener's own. If you could have fans take away one main thing from holy silence ’fore the spring’s original intention, no matter how abstract, what would it be?
CLAY: Oh, I’m not precious about anything. I’m precious about the process. I'm precious about making sure that it sounds exactly how it sounds in my head, and if I’ve accomplished that, that’s the end of my work.
LUNA: That’s amazing. I feel like it can be hard to detach yourself from authorial ownership. What drives you to share it in such a way without possession?
CLAY: I think I've lived a life of being deeply misunderstood. And I can't, you know. I've lived my entire being so misunderstood that if I continued to care about being misunderstood it would be very coercive to my mental health and my daily life, so … when I think about my work, [it’s] completion. As soon as it's done and turned in, it is quite literally no longer mine. And I also think it never was mine. The way I write songs is a very spiritual experience, where I have absolutely no idea how that shit came to me. I really don’t know. And I don't question it…
My goal [is to] create a safe space. Sometimes I come in with a very specific idea and sometimes I come in with nothing at all and it just flows. I tried to make something else the intro to holy silence ’fore the spring, for example, and it wasn't really working … I was like, “Let's scrap this.” Just play something, because I want a title track for this. I already had “holy silence ’fore the spring” but that's all I had. And I knew that was the EP before I wrote the song so I was like,
“Okay, pick this up,” then I was like, “I cant wait for birds to sing,” and I was like, “Okay that’s cool.” Wrote that song in maybe seven minutes.
LUNA: Do you feel that you’re very tapped into yourself and that’s why it flows so naturally?
CLAY: I think maybe I’m tapped into Source. And I think that a lot of my favorite artists — like Mereba, for example — I can actually hear in the music and lyricism when someone is tapped into Source.
LUNA: “Into Source”? What does that mean?
CLAY: I don’t know how to explain it any other way. Whatever that is for you, I call it Source. Some people call it God, some people call it the universe, some people call it … muse or genius. Whatever those things are. Personally, I say “tapped into Source.”
LUNA: I like that way of referencing it — it’s abstract and can shift with what you’re experiencing on a certain day.
CLAY: And it's deeply spiritual [yet] secular. Does that make sense? It's sacred but it's secular. I find organized religion really hard.
LUNA: Being fully in our queerness is something that helped me tap into different parts of myself. How did that step in your personal life help you connect with your truest source?
CLAY: I love that question. I think it's a simple answer for me. First of all, I’m very deeply grateful to be queer because it just feels so expansive. And to answer your question, the more I am myself, the better my music is, the more I'm tapped into source. I just hope I can continue to grow into everything I am and make music from that space.
LUNA: Obviously our identities are not all of us, but they are a part of us that can be political. You have been political before talking openly about politics and being queer. Especially in the US, where there are a lot of attacks on trans people, we definitely see the intersection of politics and identity. I’m curious, from your perspective, what role does music play in the political sphere? Either in your music or more broadly.
CLAY: I think music has always played a role in every social movement throughout history. I think that it's important to speak your mind, always. I also think it's important to find new innovative ways to actually move capital and support people on the ground actually doing the work.
LUNA: What are some ways you like to move capital and support people on the ground?
CLAY: Everytime I do a merch drop, for example, I partner with an organization and donate a portion of the proceeds. The last merch drop I did was for my song with Alessia Cara and it came out during Mental Health Awareness Month, and we donated 20% of the proceeds to Trans Lifeline. I think we are gonna do another reboot of that and donate a much larger percentage, given everything that's happening in the country right now…
Trans Lifeline is an incredible organization. I am so grateful for my community, not only that I grew up with but that I cultivated throughout my life and travels and everything. [I’m grateful that] I have support when reaching out or looking for different organizations because it's really important to me who runs it and who the board is. And the Trans Lifeline is fully run by trans people and it is a 24-hour hotline for trans people. So that’s an incredible organization.
LUNA: That’s amazing. It is so important to invest in organizations that are run by the people that they are serving! Making a pivot, you just dropped your single “Poison,” which touches on giving more in a relationship than you’re getting. You’ve said writing music is an act of healing for you — can you touch on that process with this song?
CLAY: I wrote this about a familial relationship with someone who … struggles with addiction. So I wrote about that. It's kind of changed the meaning in my own life. I sing this to the parts of myself that still continue to give me negative self-talk and deprecation and that part of myself that is really poisonous. It's like a very proverbial saying to be our own worst enemy. So I often look around at the naysayers and the voices that say I can't do it and I'm like, “Wait, bitch, that’s you.”
LUNA: Yeah, have you seen that tweet that says, “when you think ‘I bet that's what that person is thinking of me’ it is actually just what you think about you”?
CLAY: A hundred percent — that’s what that’s about.
LUNA: What inspired you to release poison as the single ahead of [holy silence ’fore the spring]?
CLAY: I thought it would resonate most with people, I think it’s easy listening. Well, not easy. But, I really love the sonics of it. I think it's good [song to] dip your toe into what’s coming next.
LUNA: What’s most exciting to you about what’s coming next?
CLAY: I think the song “Jaime.” I would hold [it to] the same caliber as “Letting You Go,” where it was so vulnerable. Even more so. So yeah, really excited for that.
LUNA: I saw your version on Tiny Desk on YouTube — that version of the song was more acoustic than your usual soundscapes. What was it like to perform it that way?
CLAY: Yup. Hella vulnerable, but that’s how I wrote it so it feels natural too.
LUNA: I know you’re hoping to tour soon. Can you say anymore about that?
CLAY: I can’t say more about that. But hopefully this fall I’ll be doing a headline tour.
LUNA: Congratulations! If we’re manifesting here, what would be a dream city or venue you would hope to perform at?
CLAY: I would love to go back to New York and play — I don’t know what venue, but somewhere in New York City!
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