Q&A: SCayos Delves Into The Lasting Effects of Nostalgia on ‘felt like forever’
INTERVIEW
INTERVIEW
☆ BY IVONA HOMICIANU ☆
Photo by Miriam Marlene
‘FELT LIKE FOREVER’ IS THE DEFINITION OF BASKING ON THE PRECIOUS MOMENTS OF YOUTH. SCayos returns with a thoughtful indie-folk project reflecting on the nostalgia and regretfulness of looking back at the past. Throughout their detailed yet unadorned nature, the lyrics achieve the effect of relatability. felt like forever doesn’t just explore the memories of the musician; it makes you reflect on your own. The nostalgic atmosphere gives way to thinking back on a moment you already knew you’d miss while living it.
SCayos is a project created by Shaan Chhadva, whose artistry extends on five different projects. Chhadva moved from Mumbai to Michigan at 14 years old to study music at a prestigious boarding school. The intensity and high expectations of the program confirmed that he only desired to be a musician. Chhadva is a piano-proficient and produces the grand majority of his music. He has a passion for jazz and soul, but doesn’t limit his creations to a genre.
SCayos captures the intricate emotions of reminiscing on past years. In the track that gives the title to the project, “michigan,” SCayos explores the passage of time. By selecting specific elements of summer and winter, he recreates the picture of seeing the world through childhood wonder. The guitar strings are a prominent instrument throughout the project, but comparing only “michigan” and “weight of the moon,” the artist shows his proficiency in translating feelings to music; they both have different energies, with “weight of the moon” bringing a more carefree vibe on the surface. The lyrics paint the past against the present, with the happiness of back then echoing now.
On “funny life,” he reflects on the tendency of being conflicted about a person due to the good and bad moments spent together. One can interpret the question “Why am I still here?” that rings throughout the track as referring to being stuck in this time loop of your mind, thinking back on moments that only exist in time now. The closing track “anyways” adds onto the sentiment, with simply being composed of a couple of lyrics about wasting time, it mimics watching time pass by. The saxophone solo, performed by Roger Rosenberg, fits like a puzzle piece with the entirety of the project.
We spoke about felt like forever with SCayos—Check out the interview below.
LUNA: Could you tell us more about yourself?
SCAYOS: My name is Shaan. I'm 23 years old. I release music under like five different names. [SCayos] was my first one. I started making beats first when I was 12, and started playing piano when I was five, but I started releasing them when I was around 15 or 16, and that kind of led me to explore the lo-fi world a little bit. Since then, I've made a lot of jazz and ambient music. Songwriting has been something that I've been really interested in lately. That's the culmination of the last EP that I put out on SCayos, felt like forever. I'm based in LA, I was born in Mumbai.
LUNA: You moved from Mumbai to Michigan to study music. How was the experience in music school for you?
SCAYOS: It was a lot of mixed emotions. Music school was amazing and terrible at the same time. It was perfect, and there were so many things going on. It was the first time where I found people who did what I was doing. I felt like I found a community for the first time. In Mumbai, I was probably one of the only kids who wanted to do music. I didn't really have much of a community of people, especially my age, who wanted to do what I wanted to do. In music school… It was this big change where I was like, “Wow, you get this part of me that nobody else kind of does.” The people were wonderful, and the place was so beautiful; it was by a lake.
I learned so much. I must have played piano for anywhere from six to eight hours a day when I was out there. In that environment, it's usually really high pressure. Everybody's doing the same thing. The teachers are very strict about some of the things. Some of the teachers were really nice as well. We were all minors, so we couldn't leave the campus by ourselves. We could go to the city on a bus on the weekends, but we had so much work to do. At times, it felt really trapping. When I was there, I was like, “I can't wait to get out of here, I can't wait to live my life,” and all these things. Looking back at it now, that place was really magical. I don't think I'll ever have an environment like that ever in my life again; a place where I have to do nothing except for music, so it was cool in that way.
LUNA: That sounds like a really good experience. Art school in general is so competitive, but if you find people that you connect with, it can be very nice.
SCAYOS: It’s where I put actual time behind my music for the first time. I used to produce a lot and I used to play a lot of piano, and that was the first time where I was like, “This is something I know I want to do.” It's so much of [music], some people came out of it being like, “I don't think I can ever do music again,” because they just got so burned out, but it was almost a test for me. Now I know for sure that this is the one thing that I want most in my life.
LUNA: Congratulations on your new release felt like forever! There's a very nostalgic atmosphere to the songs. How was your writing process?
SCAYOS: I come from a production background, songwriting is still fairly new to me. This was the first project where the songwriting took focus. This was also the first project where I had another producer… It was always me making the instrumentals first and then singing over that, or me writing the song and then making the instrumental while doing that. I was very involved in what that end product would look like, but for this entire writing process, I didn't even touch my computer. It was just my phone, voice memos, and me sitting with a guitar, writing a song on a piece of pen and paper.
It was completely different from all my other processes. I knew I had to make the words and the melodies and stuff sound good before I could record it. Most of the work was done in my house with friends, writing the songs. Then in January of this year, I went out to Seattle to work with Phil Ek. I got two friends along with me, took my guitar, and in 10 days we recorded all these songs that I had worked on for the last eight months. It was completely different from all my other stuff, and it felt really good. It felt like I had a chance to really revise and work on the songs that I wanted to bring to Phil, and had a chance to sit down and make it happen, which is pretty cool.
Photo by Jordan Giordano
LUNA: You have five different projects that each represent different parts of your artistry. I was wondering, how did you decide to keep them separate instead of sharing it all under one name?
SCAYOS: Great question. I just think I made too much music to be completely honest. I think music making, to me, is like writing in a journal sometimes. You just need to get it out of your system. If it just stays inside you or in your head, or even on my computer, it's as real as it not existing to me, and I just wanted a place to share all the music. I make a lot of different types of music. If I'm already working on an album or trying to release that, I wouldn't want to release an ambient piano tune, or a hip-hop beat, etc. I was like, I have these different lanes of my artistry, let me just expand them into these mini universes, and let me try to create a whole new unique experience when you hit play on a certain profile.
I have this project called picture frames, where it's the closest thing to a diary entry that I have. Every year since I was 21, I went in the studio and recorded an entire album in one single day, and each song is done with one take. It's just a way to get the creativity out of my system. It's like a detox, almost. One day you go in and you make everything. Some songs are cool and some songs are bad, and I release all of them anyway. I want to do that project every day till the day I die. I want my entire life's work to live in that project as an honest way of reflecting on what my music has been like over the years.
I think the documentation side of things really interests me with music. It makes so much sense to have these different universes, and they're all me at the end of the day. They all kind of link to each other, but I wanted them to be these little mini universes of music. As I started developing these different parts of my artistry, I knew that they had a chance to live in these different worlds. It was a cool journey of self exploration to see these different parts of myself come into play.
LUNA: I think it's so interesting because there's a lot of artists that do several art forms, like music, writing, all of that stuff, and they separate it; which makes sense because it's a different art form, but I've never seen someone choose one art form and be like, “Okay, but there's so many layers to this.” I'm thinking of artists who are scared when they release a new project, because it isn’t their usual sound, so they’re that people won't like it. I think it's so nice that you have this separation because people can just vibe with this project more, so I’ll keep up with this project, and maybe I'll go listen to that project too.
SCAYOS: I think it's just fun. My very first song I ever made when I opened my computer, I worked on for over a year, and I stopped working on it because my computer crashed. I was 14 or 15, I thought I had to be perfect with the first thing that I released. I over-thought it so much and I realized that after my computer crashed, it was like a blessing because I could move on from it. Releasing music is an important step of moving on from it and yourself as an artist.
There's this artist that I really follow, Kiefer, he made this really funny analogy. He was like, “Let's say tomorrow aliens come in and they suck you up from the world, and they leave tomorrow… that music doesn't exist anymore.” Something happens, let’s say a computer crashes, that music does not exist anymore. Maybe it existed to you, but to the universe, it did not exist. I'm a big advocate of sharing your ideas and because that is the ultimate step for finishing the music in my opinion, it's sharing it and not having it be yours anymore. You let go of the control.
It's almost this illusion of control sometimes. It's not honoring the version of yourself that you were when you made that music, and letting it go is a chance to solidify that version of yourself and allow space to grow from there and move on to the next idea, or the next phase of your artistry or even your life. I think part of the reason the picture frames project also is so cool to me is because the music that I'm going to make right now versus the music that I'm going to make when I'm 60 years old - I hope it's completely different from what I do right now. I hope I get to see how much I grow over that time.
LUNA: I think that it really shows that you're passionate about it. The title of the EP echoes the lyrics in “michigan,” what inspired you to write this song specifically?
SCAYOS: When I moved from India to the US, I lived in Michigan for so long. That place always has a very special place in my heart. I fell in love for the first time over there. I had my first kiss when I was in that school. I found myself for the first time. I kind of started figuring out the person that I wanted to be in there, and I left quite abruptly, because COVID happened.
I didn't get a proper chance to say goodbye to that place. The version of myself that was there was like, Man, I can't wait to get out of here, because I was in this tiny town with five hundred people. Then I got disconnected from it so fast, and I haven't been back since. The version of that place that exists in my memories is such a different thing from what it actually is now, or what it actually was that I always keep coming back to. It's this place of comfort for me and the world was just so still, and it felt like forever in Michigan. In that moment of time when I used to wake up every day, it just felt like I was going to be there the rest of my life.
I wrote the song with my friend who also went to school with me. It's a funny thing with people that I went to school with, because they know this part of my life that nobody else knows of. We were just talking about that and we thought about making this song. We were reminiscing and having this nostalgic feeling of what it felt like to be in Michigan, and that's where that song came from.
LUNA: You can tell there's a lot of heart and soul in it. In “weight of the moon,” you talk about having a photographic memory. How does it impact you as an artist?
SCAYOS: I was actually writing that from the perspective of my ex. I wrote that song in December of last year, and it was right when we had broken up. I was just in this phase of my life where I was trying to figure stuff out and I knew it was the right move, but I still felt sad about it. My ex had a photographic memory, so I was like, I don't know if we're ever gonna forget each other, but this is not meant to be and that's okay. I wrote it late one night while my parents were visiting. They were sleeping in the other room, and I had to be really quiet. It started off as this really slow song, and then when I took it to my friends who were playing drums and playing guitar with me, they were just like, This isn't a sad song, this is a happy song; this is a song to enter this new world and there are some sad parts about it, but that doesn't change the true emotions of where you are right now. So we made it pretty upbeat and energetic and it was almost like the end of a chapter type of song, which is special.
LUNA: Could you talk about the last track “anyways”?
SCAYOS: That was the most different one from the EP. It was also the oldest. It was a song that I made with one of my best friends Aric (PKA. Aso) and jazz saxophonist Roger Rosenberg. The song probably started in 2022. We made the hook and the vocal part of it in and we had no idea what to do from there. We tried for two years, and we kind of gave up on it. I used to listen to Aric’s music in high school before knowing him and he used to be a huge influence on my beats. He's been kind of a mentor, but also a best friend and just somebody who I've enjoyed making music with so much. So it's me and Aric singing the hook, and then we were like, If we can't think about the verse, what if we just have a giant saxophone solo in there?
Roger Rosenberg was the original saxophonist who played with Chet Baker in 1978 and I got a chance to do a set of remixes for Chet Baker. It was really cool to get Roger to be a part of those remixes as well. After we did the remixes… We started becoming friends and talking on the phone. I went out to New York and I did a session with him, where I just had him record the saxophone on the song. He probably recorded for a solid eight minutes or something. Everybody in the studio was silent, like nobody was saying a single word. We were just looking at him, like seeing him be this master of his craft. It was such a beautiful moment to have him be part of this record. Then I edited it together, I put a vocoder behind it, and we put it out. It was a beautiful, beautiful song. It felt like this cool moment of these different worlds, bringing my jazz stuff from Ornithology into SCayos, having one of my best friends make that song with me and go through all these different moments. It just felt very full circle.
LUNA: The saxophone really fits in with the project. Is there a track on the EP that you connect with more?
SCAYOS: I think “michigan” is my favorite song I've ever made. I listen to a lot of soft folk music. It's one of my favorite genres of music to listen to. My most played artist for the last four years consecutively has been this artist called Florist. They're a band from upstate New York, the lead singer is Emily Sprague, and she just makes such beautiful, soft music about life, hope and beauty in this world. Her music just feels like a hug and it's so comforting. That music is something that I've always wanted to make, but never really knew how to make, or felt like I was connected to that part of my artistry. “michigan” was the first song where I felt like, wow, that is the exact type of music that I would listen to, over and over and over again. It’s like a warm hug.
It takes me back to this part of my life that I think about so often, and takes me back to being young. It brings out that child-like innocence that I try to capture in my music a lot. That track is a really special one. Aric helped co-write it. I wrote it also with my friends Andy and Juliana, who are one of the sweetest and most gentlest humans alive. It's like the people that I trust the most out here. It was just very, very beautiful. And I think it's one of the best songs I've ever written. I named the EP from the lyrics of that song.
LUNA: It really is special and it's also very comforting. Congratulations on being able to do that!
SCAYOS: It took a while, but it felt really good to put that song out. Just because there's so many different aspects of that artistry, that was always one that I didn't really explore for whatever reason. That one was that little check in my mind, where I was like, I did the thing that I always wanted to do.
