“Sadness is like an old friend. We all go way back,” confides Rilan. The glam-pop artist speaks candidly, offering up a unique perspective on sadness and his relationship to it. “Everyone’s been visited by it, and that’s not a bad thing. I find beauty in darkness, because it’s honest. That’s what I want to share with the world—the beauty of the breakdown. We’ve all been there.”
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With his new song “Sad,” co-written with Myah Marie, Zac Poor, and producers The Audibles (Jimmy Giannos and Dominic Jordan), Rilan invites the listener right into a hypnotic, shadowy underworld. I’m happy when I feel so sad, sad, sad, he sings, fully accepting how he’s feeling in the moment.
“It’s so much easier to stay sad than it is to make yourself happy,” Rilan tells American Songwriter. “The comfort of being said” throbs at the song’s core, he says. “It is comfortable, but no one really talks about that sense of comfort ─ and we should. I think after the year we’ve all had, everyone understands what that feels like. And we should celebrate the fact that no matter how bad we may be feeling, we’re still up and at it, performing like the sad clowns that we are.”
Penned during a two-day writing camp, resulting in a batch of five songs, “Sad” immediately “became our favorite record of the bunch,” Rilan continues. “I recorded lead vocals right after we wrote it” with Giannos and engineer Josh Connolly. “They’re both excellent vocal producers.”
Rilan soon returned to Los Angeles and filled out the background vocals (a spooky chant of various runs and adlibs) in his home studio. “I prefer to do backgrounds after the leads are complete, and I sit with the song for a minute. It’s nice to approach it with a clear mind. It becomes a fun puzzle for me to put back together on my own. It brings me back to my high school choir a capella days.”
Originally from New Orleans, resulting in Rilan’s spookier approach to songwriting, the rising pop singer-songwriter draws upon the power of David Bowie for much of his own work. “He’s always been my style and conceptual inspiration,” says Rilan, also calling upon such influences as Prince, Freddie Mercury, Madonna, and Lady Gaga. “They think outside of the box in what they say and how it’s represented in the production of each record. Combine that with a little musical theatre, and you have this weirdo right here.”
With “Sad,” it’s quite clear Rilan has a proclivity for piano-based arrangements. His voice flutters while also floating quite closely to the piano keys. “I think the best songs start bare bones,” he says. “We wrote ‘Sad’ to a chord progression before any other production was added, and I think that’s why it turned into something we all really loved.”
“Sad” comes on the heels of “Bitter,” another standout track released earlier this year.
Photo by Luiza Comsa
