Elliot Moss is going through changes. Like his own, procured self-help guide, A Change in Diet (Grand Jury), out Jan. 17 — a follow up to the singer’s 2015 debut Highspeeds — which he recorded and produced himself at home during his senior year in high school and Boomerang EP (2017). Now, everything is more introspective for the New York singer as A Change came out of a tumultuous time for Moss with revelations about how people can sometimes bend over backwards to meet the status quo, even when it’s to their own detriment.
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The singer and multi-instrumentalist has fused together an ambient, trance-synth pop on the upcoming album tapping into shifts in relationships and capturing true happiness.
“I’m learning to treat happiness as something that comes in bursts. You can’t hold onto it,” Moss tells American Songwriter. “You won’t ever eat the best brownie you’ve ever tasted forever, but you can have that memory forever. Shifting my perspective to experience life in a way where I’m poised to run into things that make me happy, rather than protecting whatever makes me happy in the moment, has been freeing.”
New single, “Silver + Gold,” a track about not allowing your happiness to depend so directly on your situation, or internalizing the positive things that can’t be lost and treating the material thing a bit more lightly, says Moss.
Directed by Moss and Kevin Condon, the video depicts someone breaking into what appears to be their childhood home, and a return back to simpler times with lyrics delving deeper into relationships’ impact with lyrics Before us, I took a wrong turn down the wrong road / I was a hallway with all the doors closed … I closed my eyes and I gave up control.
Penning “Silver + Gold” came in pieces for Moss. The lyrics and the chorus were an amalgamation of two songs that were basically about the same thing. In the end, “Silver + Gold” was whole.
“It took a long time to have it feel angry. I’m not good at that,” says Moss. “It is about being sort of upset with yourself. That hung me up for a while. I finished the rest of the LP and that gave me enough of an understanding of the overall shape to help finish ‘Silver + Gold’ and learn where it belonged in the record.”
