zayALLCAPS has a complicated relationship with the piano. He understands the utility of the instrument, and can play well enough to get compositions for his production chops, but has struggled with the disciplined, continuous practice needed to master it. On art Pop * pop Art—out today via his own label AutotuneKaraoke—the LA-via-Sacramento artist puts his heart on the line for the black and white keys in his crib, detailing his on-again-off-again relationship over a piano-backed plugg beat on “Ode 2 Ivory.” The track moves between a crooning chorus in falsetto and verses promising that this time Zay’s commitment won’t just be talk. “I love having it,” he says about his Wurlitzer piano. “I gotta just do better.”
The third zayALLCAPS album in three years, art Pop * pop Art blends Zay’s love of R&B and his penchant for making weird-ass, Auto-Tune-filled music into a pop record that “explores a theme of, ‘What the fuck is selling out in this era? Is that a real thing?’” The album bursts through sounds from Jodeci-era R&B to DāM FunK electro-revival to Veeze-inspired freestyling, losing its sonic mind but never its quality. It’s a damn fun record, and, as Zay puts it, “very representative of what I do. If you play my whole discography on shuffle, you’ll hear a lot of different shit.”
Ahead of today’s release, zayALLCAPS spoke with us about the evolution of his music-making and some of the inspirations and themes running through art Pop * pop Art. Come for the self-taught music theory and stay for his dad’s take on the relationship between gospel and R&B.
Do you feel like since you’ve started getting into music theory that it shows in your music?
Oh, absolutely. That was the best thing I could’ve done for my production, because I think you start to run out of ideas. Intuitively, I’ve probably got to a point where I’ve done most of the things I could think of without knowing shortcuts or having the music vocabulary. Just knowing that I don’t gotta think so hard, or try to randomly come up with shit. It’s magic. I think it’s just elevated my capacity to create—I don’t gotta come up with everything from scratch. It helps with sampling, too. I developed my sense of telling what key things are in, and that’s really helpful for everything. That was probably the development that helped me the most, musically.
Do you find it helpful that you grew up in the more non-traditional hip-hop world, and then added in the tools from the traditional stuff later?
Yeah, for sure. It’s also nice when someone who is a traditional musician can praise my shit, can really think what I’m doing is cool. It’s nice to remember that I do bring something to the table. I definitely have gotten insecure about not knowing how to play an instrument, when all the shows I’m doing have technically proficient people. It’s cool to remember that the hip-hop tradition is cool as fuck, and it’s its own discipline. It’s cool to be so steeped in that from a young age to where I don’t even gotta think about it too hard. And it’s nice to blend them together. I think I’ve been able to appreciate it more now that I can do the other stuff. I’ve been able to appreciate just how different and boundary-defying hip-hop can be.
On “Saturn” you took your Auto-Tune usage up another notch, which I didn’t think was possible. What’s your relationship with Auto-Tune, and how do you create with it?
I have a really personal relationship with Auto-Tune, because I was really captivated when I first heard T-Pain as a kid. Obviously, liking hip-hop, you’re gonna hear a lot of Auto-Tune post-2010s, growing up listening to hella Kanye and stuff. I think to a lot of people that aren’t making music it’s pretty mystical. I remember it was a big deal when we started seeing those videos of Travis Scott performing with the live Auto-Tune. That was kind of a game-changer for people. I try to view it as an extension of what I do, especially now that I’ve become a pretty good singer. Now, it feels more like a choice, which makes me like it even more.
This is my first project where I’m singing with Auto-Tune—but I could really sing, though. My older work is more like, “OK, this is the only way this melody’s gonna sound good, so I’m gonna jump into this aesthetic.” Now I don’t have to. That makes me sing the shit differently when I’m recording it. I could hit certain pockets knowing I could make my voice do certain things to where I know it’s gonna catch the Auto-Tune a certain way. And I know I could just sing this straight up regularly and it would sound pretty good and we could Melodyne it a little bit, but it was cool using that. I think that speaks to the thing we were just talking about: traditional music-making versus the hip-hop shit, and music technology. I think because I have an appreciation for both, I can enjoy each of the things even more.
For art Pop * pop Art specifically, who do you think has been your biggest influence?
Definitely Static Major. Me and [Caleb Catlin] will nerd out over R&B, and he got me hip to just how advanced Static Major’s music really was. His ear for harmonies and the timbre of his voice just works really well for this pocket of R&B. I think he was the biggest inspiration for something like “MTV’s Pimp My Ride” or “rWm.” Obviously there’s some Amarion and Lloyd stuff in there, some Jodeci stuff. Just my appreciation of R&B and soul music in general definitely was a big factor in this album. For “Work It Out,” definitely DāM FunK. I think just that whole pocket of 2010’s electro-revival, ’80s-type stuff. There’s this song called “Last Chance to Dance” by this artist Ekkah, and that’s a cool-ass song. I feel like it inspired “Work It Out.”
There’s a lot of songs I made where I want to be a weird artist. I know I can make these poppy songs, and this album, to me, coexists in both those lanes. I don’t wanna get complacent or get boring. I don’t want to just rest in the fact that I can make a really good pop song. I wanna get weird. I wanna make an Auto-Tune plugg song about my piano. “Love in U” is like a fucking wonky beat-head song, and I’m using weird voices on it. “Process,” I was tryna do Moodymann’s “Lyk U Use 2” but with my own twist to it—I added the cumbia loop.
This album is a bit more relationship-theme heavy, and it comes hand-in-hand with the R&B. What’s driven you to go into that vein?
When I started doing the zayALLCAPS shit, I made a conscious effort to ease up on the love songs, because when I was younger all I really was writing about was, like, a crush or shit like that. Those are cool, but I think it’s kind of limited. I wanted to push myself. I think I found a way to bring it back, but I’ve found a way to be more creative about it. They all have concepts—none of them are just like, ”You don’t like me back,” or whatever. There’s a theme to each song, whether I’m personifying a piano or I’m making a metaphor out of “Pimp My Ride.” “Friendz U Can Kiss”—that’s a very specific type of relationship. People could just listen on a surface level and be like, “Cool, relationship music”—and that’s cool, too. But if you want more, you could read the lyrics or just listen deeper.
My dad brought up a good point a while ago. He’s a music head, and he also likes gospel, so he told me that if he was an R&B singer, he would just write gospel songs but replace God with “you” or “baby” or whatever. I’ve listened to more and more R&B, especially as I get older, and it’s closer to gospel music. That’s all they’re doing. Jodeci is literally just raunchy gospel music. If I work in reverse—if I make allusions to a car, or a piano, or myself—what would that look like? That’s kind of the approach I was taking for a lot of these songs.
