Name: Moriah Bailey fka Sun Riah
Nationality: American
Occupation: Singer, songwriter, harpist
Recent release: Moriah Bailey's i tried words is out digitally via Keeled Scales. The physical edition will arrive February 10, 2023 and can already be pre-ordered.
Recommendations: A little more than two, a few things I’ve appreciated in recent years:
some kind of peace by Ólafur Arnalds
Winter Moons by Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate
Margaret Bonds: The Ballad of the Brown King & Selected Songs by The Dessoff Choirs & Orchestra, Malcolm J. Merriweather (conductor), and Ashley Jackson (harp)
They're Calling Me Home (With Francesco Turrisi) by Rhiannon Giddens

[Read our Ólafur Arnalds interview]

If you enjoyed this interview with Moriah Bailey and would like to find out more about her music, visit her official homepage. She is also on Instagram, Facebook, and twitter.



When did you start writing/producing/playing music and what or who were your early passions and influences? What was it about music and/or sound that drew you to it?

I’ve made up little songs and things for as long as I can remember. I started writing them down when I was probably 12 or so, but I didn’t start really sharing my songs with other people until I was in my late teens / early twenties.

I think my first connection to music was actually through dance. I’ve read that in some languages separate words don’t exist to distinguish music and dance, and some societies don’t view dance and music as separate practices or forms. That resonates with me a lot.

As a child, I think I was drawn to music and explored music through movement, and I think it helped me to grapple with and feel emotions that I struggled to articulate or process.

When I listen to music, I see shapes, objects and colours. What happens in your body when you're listening and how does it influence your approach to creativity?

What a fabulous question to follow my last response. Ha.

Music is intensely emotionally moving for me; it's both intellectual and physical. I feel it very viscerally. If there is music in the background, I sometimes struggle to focus on anything else. I become kind of fixated on it, and my entire mood might shift based on a song. In a way, the world goes quiet and I am fully present, in the moment.

Sometimes, I picture landscapes or words, dance. For me, it feels like movement. I think it encourages me to create music that is hard to just put on in the background. I like music that sucks a person in and allows them to explore through it.

How would you describe your development as an artist in terms of interests and challenges, searching for a personal voice, as well as breakthroughs?

This is a hard question. I think when I was younger I was sort of taught that I needed to choose one interest or focus to devote my life to. I really struggled with that. I think a lot in terms of relationships and patterns, how things are similar or parallel to one another. So I have lots of interests that many people seem to view as disparate, but for me, I see them as speaking to one another.

So, I hesitated a lot to embrace a musical path because I was taught that choosing one thing meant abandoning another. So, I was just kind of stuck in this liminal place. Increasingly, I’ve found ways to combine my interests through music and writing, and I find more pride in the ways that I find connections.

Not sure if that all makes sense.

Tell me a bit about your sense of identity and how it influences both your preferences as a listener and your creativity as an artist, please.

Identity is a really complicated concept, and it is one that I personally struggle with a lot. I spent the last few years as a graduate student studying sociocultural anthropology and history, so I have spent so much time discussing, theorizing, and thinking about identity that it’s hard for me to separate this question from all of that reading and reflection.

I guess … my sense of identity is shaped by growing up in Oklahoma, being brought up in a non-traditional family setting, being a person with white privilege of settler descent, a United States citizen, being labeled woman, alcoholic, survivor of abuse, neglected child, and by being a lover of orcas and beavers and opossums and paddlefish. A deep listener. Lots of other things. I’m sure all of that shapes my interests in ways I comprehend and don’t.

I love music that sucks me in and allows me to escape into thoughts. I love music that forces me to feel and deal with uncomfortable feelings. And almost all of my music is shaped by those aspects of my personal experience.

What, would you say, are the key ideas behind your approach to music and art?

I think of music and art as being about connection. I think of music and art as always collaborative; whether consciously being created and shared with or interpreted by others, or the unconscious ways that music is created in relationship to all of the music / sounds that came before us or surround us. I think those are some of my key ideas about my approach to music and art.

How would you describe your views on topics like originality and innovation versus perfection and timelessness in music? Are you interested in a “music of the future” or “continuing a tradition”?

This is an interesting question. Even many of the musicians that people think of as timeless or traditional, many of them were at some point viewed as avant-garde or challenging tradition. And I think, music of the future or innovative, original music is always created in relationship to legacy and tradition, often borrowing (and/or appropriating) musical ideas. So, I’m not sure if it's an either/or.

I’m definitely interested in acknowledging music as collaborative, valuing music of all kinds, and appreciating innovation and originality, and I’m very turned off by people or attitudes that hold tradition on a pedestal.

Over the course of your development, what have been your most important instruments and tools - and what are the most promising strategies for working with them?

I use guitar, piano, and harp most when I write music. I typically go between instruments when I write. It really varies with each song, but I’ll always play my songs with just the simplest chords and vocals on guitar because I want them to sound moving to me without all the layers and orchestration.

I use harp to mostly orchestrate, arrange, and add those layers and textures. Sometimes I write at the harp too. It just really varies.

Take us through a day in your life, from a possible morning routine through to your work, please.

My life is pretty chaotic right now, honestly. I work multiple jobs and have a lot of projects going on. I have been trying to get better at doing one thing at a time, but it’s still a transition and learning process.

So, a day in my life … I guess the consistent things: I drink coffee everyday.I play harp everyday. I walk my dog everyday. I eat peanut butter in some form everyday.

Eventually, I’d love to have a more stable life and steady routine, but for now, I often feel like I’m just holding on.

Could you describe your creative process on the basis of a piece, live performance or album that's particularly dear to you, please?

My most recent album, i tried words, was crafted over many months. It started mostly with words, some of the words were written with a melody in mind but others weren’t. I wrote out lyrics and edited them and revised them repeatedly, and then the lyrics continued to change in relation to the music that I wrote around those words.

I then recorded all of the tracks with harp and voice and sent the tracks to a group of musicians whose work and musical intuition I really value: Ricky Tutaan (guitar), Ryan Robinson (percussion), and Sarah Reid (violin). I sent them lyrics, chords, and a kind of emotive map outlining the feelings or images I was trying to capture in particular moments.

They all added their own parts, and I then edited the tracks very slightly and sent them to Chris Harris of Harrilon Media to be mixed and mastered.

Listening can be both a solitary and a communal activity. Likewise, creating music can be private or collaborative. Can you talk about your preferences in this regard and how these constellations influence creative results?

I kind of already touched on this, but I think even when music is created privately, it's collaborative. It’s always collectively influenced by all of the works that came before it, connected to the sounds we hear and the music that shaped our formation, the pieces we’ve previously learned, or the teachers / friends / internet materials that helped us develop our musical skills.

I actually create almost all of my music privately, it’s very personal, very solitary, but I still acknowledge that I’m deeply influenced and shaped by everything I hear and am exposed to.

How do your work and your creativity relate to the world and what is the role of music in society?

I think my work seeks to create a space that celebrates vulnerability and draws on really difficult and honest self-reflection. It also aspires to illuminate the connections between the personal and the political, and the individual and broader social contexts.

I don’t think I can fully answer the question about the role of music in society. It plays different roles and can hold a myriad of meanings. I’d probably need to write a graduate thesis to answer that question. Ha.

Art can be a way of dealing with the big topics in life: Life, loss, death, love, pain, and many more. In which way and on which occasions has music – both your own or that of others - contributed to your understanding of these questions?

My last album, Sitting with Sounds and Listening for Ghosts, is an album that is very much about life, loss, death, love, and pain. Memories.



It was inspired by the house where my grandmother was born and each song is devoted to a room or place near the house. I think music helps me to process and grapple with some of these big topics in life and provides a place for reflection.

How do you see the connection between music and science and what can these two fields reveal about each other?  

Again, I feel like I probably could write a graduate thesis on this question.

Generally, I think all fields have ways of speaking to each other or parallels. Music and science specifically have a long history of connection as various scholars or thinkers have attempted to determine how or why (even if) particular intervals or musical sounds correlate to specific emotions or feelings. Music has been used to heal, to harm, and there are broader parallels between the ways that we view science and music through social lenses.

There are lots of people thinking about this in a variety of ways: music therapy, noise pollution, music as science, science and technology as music, science of music, music of nature, music / sounds of everyday life … There is basically too much to be said in this space. Ha.

Creativity can reach many different corners of our lives. Do you feel as though writing or performing a piece of music is inherently different from something like making a great cup of coffee? What do you express through music that you couldn't or wouldn't in more 'mundane' tasks?

Hmm. I actually don’t view it as inherently different. Ha. I have worked in food service a lot in my life, specifically as a line or prep cook. And I often compare musical performances to working in a kitchen. It’s all about rhythm, timing, being in sync with others, listening and also feeling other people’s presences to create an experience.

I think the mundane can be musical and artistic. And I really appreciate art and music that celebrate the mundane, that draw attention to the artistry and creativity of everyday life. I also … people sometimes act really impressed by me writing music, and I just see it as a thing I do, like making a cup of coffee or walking my dog.

I just relate to the world through music, and I always have. It doesn’t feel that extraordinary to me; it’s just the way I communicate and process my emotions.

Music is vibration in the air, captured by our ear drums. From your perspective as a creator and listener, do you have an explanation how it able to transmit such diverse and potentially deep messages?

I don’t have an explanation. I guess some random thoughts …

I think about whale sounds and deep vibrations, vibrations of communication, vibrations humans can’t hear but we might feel, that might still affect us. Or throughout history, the increased industrial noise, the buzz of cars, in Oklahoma - the lull of an oil pumpjack, earthquakes caused by hydraulic fracturing, sounds we become accustomed to and they become background noise, a kind of soundtrack to our lives. And even if we don’t notice them, they likely still affect us; we feel them even if we don’t hear them.

And (returning to music and science) this increase in industrial sounds has been studied to significantly affect non-human animals in harmful ways. So … maybe music isn’t just vibration in the air captured by our eardrums that we hear but a vibration that we feel with our whole bodies in unconscious ways, and in that case, music and sound are really powerful modes of communication that physically move through us.

And then it really isn’t surprising at all that music is able to transmit such diverse and deep messages.