Saya Gray
Saya Gray Is Pulling Music From Her Bones
Saya Gray has, for years, worked as a bassist to the stars — Daniel Caesar, Willow, and Liam Payne all among them. But more than 45 minutes pass on her imaginative and immersive debut LP, 19 Masters, before she takes the record’s first and last true bass solo.
It arrives near the end of “Leeches On My Thesis!,” a guarded bit of confessional pop about navigating others’ expectations of her own success and relevance. Just as the breezy acoustic tune seems to dissolve into a comedown of swirling electronics and shivering static, Gray steps forward on electric bass, gliding up and down the neck with the sort of rolling melodic licks Tony Levin might add. It lasts a little more than 30 seconds, teasing what Gray can do and has done but not necessarily what she ever wants to do again.
“I can’t really learn other people’s songs anymore without doing my own thing first,” says Gray from her hometown, Toronto. “They’re like, ‘Can you not just play bass chords over this, just play the part?’ That isn’t for me anymore.”
Gray, now 26, worked as a session and touring bassist for more than a decade, drawn to the teenage novelty of making 100 quick bucks by showing up at a festival, instrument in hand. “Chick on bass? Gets gig immediately,” she says, noting that her Japanese-Canadian heritage only amplified that allure. The shows and tours grew, alongside the paychecks. But those around her, like Payne’s manager Steve Finan O’Connor or her peers in Caesar’s band, recognized that Gray had more to offer than root notes and rhythms. On the road, she began capturing song ideas with her cell phone or in whatever nearby studio she could access.
19 Masters is a captivating and provocative introduction to Gray, a magnetic singer-songwriter with the restless mind of an expert improviser. The sweeping hooks of “Empathy 4 Bethany” slide into a warped jazz duet for piano and trumpet, while “S.H.T.” flits between a fetching folk tune and electroacoustic abstraction while making space for a Hodgy verse. “Little Palm” is an elegiac country beauty, while “Saving Grace” is a minimalist soul manifesto about uncertainty. Though Gray shies from social media herself, 19 Masters feels like New Weird (North) America updated for the TikTok generation. As tuneful and accessible as it is idiosyncratic and experimental, the record reflects Gray’s acceptance that she’s more than a bass player, even if she’s been one most of her life.
“I was self-conforming, turning into the gig because that’s what it takes to be a session musician. You have to turn into what you’re playing,” she says. “It took me a long time to be like, ‘I’m just going to be my weirdo self — whoever likes it can come.”
That sense of autonomy is so strong now that Gray actually doesn’t remember writing many of the tracks on 19 Masters, and not only because some of them are five-year-old voice memos. When Gray writes, she nearly blacks out, she says, slipping into what she calls “a flow state” that often allows her to go from initial idea to recorded track in about an hour.
The process is less about her head and toiling through a song than viscerally feeling it and giving it room and time to appear. Though she’s struggled with depression and anxiety her whole life, her songs actually arrive when she feels good, when she’s already worked through her struggles. They are artifacts of what she’s endured. It’s so personal and intuitive, she says, that writing with other people in the same room is almost impossible.
“As soon as I start thinking, there’s nothing that will come through of any substance,” she offers. “There are months where I won’t create songs at all because they have to move through my body.”
19 Masters is as musically diverse as it is texturally rich, with kotos and singing bowls and bells all suspended inside spans of noisy squelch or bits of Signal chats of Gray’s friends talking about Asian exploitation or general malaise. True to her isolated approach, Gray plays nearly every instrument on it, allowing her to find unexpected sounds.
Her heritage has been key to the process, too. Gray’s father, Charlie, is a Berklee-trained trumpeter, composer, and audio engineer who has written television themes and performed with the likes of Aretha Franklin, Tony Bennett, and Ella Fitzgerald. Meanwhile, her mother, Madoka Murata, founded the Canadian music school Discovery Through the Arts more than 40 years ago.
Gray began playing piano before she could speak, even earning her allowance from her technical progression at one point. She tried every instrument she saw around her before she finally got serious about bass around the age of 10. “My brain barely thinks about music. It’s just in my body,” she says. “It was bred into my subconscious, you know? ‘This is what we do as a family.’”
And though 19 Masters wasn’t made as a family, it was at least made with her family. Just before the album was finished, Gray thrust a phone into her mom’s face and asked her to say “welcome to my world” in Japanese; the sample is the entire first track. After all the paintings Murata had done of Gray over the years, including one where she’s a bass-playing alien, she felt like the favor was the least she could ask. “That’s not something weird for my mom,” she says, laughing.
Gray also recorded several of these tracks in her mother’s basement or father’s closet, using instruments she pilfered from the family music school. Her father plays trumpet on a pair of songs, having diligently written out charts and recorded his parts after the tunes were finished. (“He’s so old-school,” jokes Gray.) These were poignant additions for Gray, as her father retired from performance in the wake of Covid-19 lockdowns.
Her guitar-playing brother, Lucian, appears, too; he’s one of the few people she can stand having in the room while she writes or records. She wants to collaborate more, she admits, but it’s an unsteady learning process. “We have very similar upbringings and influences,” she says of Lucian, “So I know I can trust him if he’s like, ‘That’s sick,’ even if I can’t hear it today.”
Though 19 Masters is Gray’s first full album, it represents an ending as much as a beginning. It closes a period of self-doubt, when she wondered whether or not her ideas were good enough to stand alone. It closes her era of prioritizing other people’s songs. And it collects so many of the tunes she imagined while making money from music that wasn’t her own. “We have these transitions, and we change. We have relationships that end, jobs that end. We just jump timelines and become a different person,” she says. “This is the end of me self-conforming.”
19 Masters is out 6/2 via Dirty Hit.
Up Next: The Artists Who Are Shaping Music’s Future
A big part of being a music fan is keeping up with the music of the moment; There’s a reason popular artists have gotten to where they are, after all. Another equally important aspect of being an informed consumer of music, though, is maintaining an awareness of the up-and-coming artists who are primed to shape the industry in their own ways.
That’s what Uproxx’s new Next Up series is all about.
Over the course of ten feature profiles, you’ll learn about artists currently laying the foundation for some major things to come, things that will both establish themselves as forces and influence those who come after them. Before those features start rolling in, keep reading for a rundown of who we decided needs to be a part of this conversation.
Dove Cameron
The pipeline from Disney Channel star to music icon has been fruitful over the years, as folks like Miley Cyrus, Selena Gomez, and Ariana Grande have started on the network and gone on to tremendous musical success (also Olivia Rodrigo if you count her High School Musical series on Disney+). Now it’s looking like Dove Cameron, whose lengthy acting resume includes the lead role in the Disney Channel series Liv And Maddie, could very well be next. Her debut EP, Bloodshot / Waste, arrived in 2019 and she just recently had her biggest hit yet in February with the dramatic single “Boyfriend,” which was her first, and likely not last, song to grace the Billboard Hot 100 chart.
Saya Gray
With her recent signing to Dirty Hit, Canadian-Japanese singer-songwriter Saya Gray finds herself in great company: The label’s esteemed artists include The 1975, Beabadoobee, Wolf Alice, and Rina Sawayama. Her first album for the label, 19 Masters, is on the way in June and based on songs like the recent single “If There’s No Seat In The Sky (Will You Forgive Me???),” it’s easy to see why Dirty Hit brought the innovative young artist on board, who’s adept at switching genres not just between songs, but sometimes right in the middle of them.
PinkPantheress
TikTok has become a real proving ground for up-and-coming artists as the young generation gets exposed to a lot of new music on the platform. PinkPantheress managed to stand out above all the noise and earn herself a record deal with Parlophone. Her music definitely embraces the fast-paced nature of TikTok: Most of the songs on her 2021 debut mixtape To Hell With It are shorter than two minutes. That didn’t stop the multi-genre project from performing particularly well, as it landed in the top 20 of the charts in PinkPantheress’ native UK.
Kali
Speaking of TikTok, Atlanta rapper Kali also found success on the platform and now she’s breaking new ground beyond it. As Uproxx’s Aaron Williams notes, she’s moving into a space traditionally dominated by male rappers, one that is “marked by passive aggression, avoidant attachment, and audio gaslighting, with rappers and singers delighting in keeping their significant others guessing in the narratives of their songs.” Kali parlayed her breakout single “Mmm Mmm” into a debut EP, Toxic Chocolate. The Yung Bleu-featuring “UonU” is a highlight, on which she turns the tables and asserts dominance, rapping, “It’s a two-way street, we in the same lane / Play you ‘fore you play me, that’s just my mind-frame / But you still mine, babe.”
Tobi Lou
Odds are you’ve already heard Tobi Lou working with one of your favorites, as the Chicago-via-Nigeria rapper has collaborated with some of his biggest hometown peers, like Chance The Rapper, Dreezy, and Saba. He was on the ballot for the 2020 XXL Freshmen list and while he didn’t make the cut, he’s on to bigger and better things, like his recently released new album Non-Perishable, which mostly features Lou shining on his own but also alongside guests like T-Pain and Chika. All the name-drops are to illustrate that Lou has support from folks in high places, co-signs that show Lou is worth consideration.
Omah Lay
A lot of things have been going right for the 24-year-old Nigerian afrobeats star lately. Since landing a record deal a couple years ago, Omah Lay’s ascent has been quick, as he had a social media hit with “Bad Influence,” dropped some EPs that landed on Apple Music’s charts in Nigeria, and caught the attention of Justin Bieber, with whom he recently released the collaborative single “Attention.” Furthermore, Lay’s status as an afrobeats favorite was cemented with the launch of Billboard’s new US Afrobeats Songs chart in March. On the inaugural ranks, he had two songs in the top 30, including “Attention,” which graced the top five. Basically, Lay’s on an upward trend, so if you haven’t been paying attention so far, now’s a good time to start.
Bakar
Like many artists before him, Bakar got his start uploading songs on SoundCloud. That’s really one of the few ways the experimental UK indie rocker is like other artists, though. He gradually worked on his craft, forged a distinct aesthetic identity, and had himself a bit of a hit in 2019 with “Hell N Back,” which popped up on multiple rock and alternative Billboard charts, including a No. 1 placement on Adult Alternative Airplay. Things have only gotten better since then, as he had a feature on one of 2020’s most esteemed indie/pop albums in Benee’s Hey U X and released his debut album, Nobody’s Home, in February. He got some hometown love for that one, as it was a top-40 album in the UK. Now it feels like just a matter of time before the rest of the world catches up.
Horsegirl
Chicago trio Horsegirl formed in 2019, when its members were all teens. While many teenage endeavors are best left forgotten, Horsegirl has built on their start in a major way. They’ve since signed to Matador Records and so far released two singles for the label: 2021’s “Billy” and this year’s “Anti-Glory.” As for the sound, the group falls somewhere between post-punk and shoegaze, a zone that has clearly worked for them given the aforementioned examples of their success. It’s the kind of music that begs to be heard live, so there’s good news there, as one of the year’s buzziest bands has a slew of tour dates set for this summer.
Caracara
The 2019 EP Better was big for Caracara, as the rocking effort landed them on many people’s radars. That includes renowned producer Will Yip, who has worked with everybody from Lauryn Hill to Keane to The Wonder Years. He also linked up with Caracara on their recently released album New Preoccupations (As The Gods Descend), which is highlighted by the single “Colorglut,” which features Circa Survive’s Anthony Green. The company a band keeps can say a lot about them, and so far, a lot of top-tier folks have found their way to Caracara’s corner. Now that the new album is out and music fans have something fresh to sink their teeth into, the Caracara corner is about to get even more crowded.
Zack Fox
As social media has become a primary method of fan interaction for celebrities, a lot of musicians have emerged as legitimately hilarious social media personalities. Then there’s Zack Fox, who’s approaching things from the opposite direction: He was a comedian first, but in recent years, he’s found some solid footing in hip-hop: His debut album, Shut The F*ck Up Talking To Me, came out last year and he’s touring with Freddie Gibbs this year. On top of all that, he’s still acting and has a recurring role in one of the most acclaimed comedies of the moment, Abbott Elementary. He’s even an accomplished visual artist, as he illustrated the album sleeve of Thundercat’s Drunk. Basically, Fox has done something you’d probably enjoy in just about every artistic medium, which is something very few people can say.
Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.