6. What was your most challenging moment as an artist?
In my second year as a Conservatory student I wanted to quit music for good for about 6 months. All I’d been doing throughout my childhood and teenage years is practicing like an insane person for six to eight hours a day and then go to various competitions. I’d won dozens of prizes by the time I was 20 and I was getting no joy out of it anymore. I loved the music but I had realised that I hated the classical music world. Everything felt so stiff, bleak and pointless. The truth is I’d always felt out of place in that scene but I was so deep in it that just the thought of doing any other kind of music felt like blasphemy. I had no faith in myself to pursue my own music, especially since it was heavily discouraged in our circles. It was always like “Oh yeah, you wanna pursue composition? How ‘bout you learn your Bach movements for the competition and practice some more, your tone is dreadful”. So I was just fed up with it all, jaded and too insecure to go after what I really wanted. What eventually saved me was deciding to pursue another passion of mine, acting. I ended up auditioning for a student theatre group that just so happened to have a world music band attached to it. They were all over me to join the band and I was like “no guys, I’m quitting music”. Who was I kidding! In a few months I was touring Hungary and Belgium with them and living a crazy street musician lifestyle, playing to cheering crowds at various festivals and just having so much fun. I’d found the joy in music again and from there I’d slowly build up the courage to pursue my own compositions. But yeah, those 6 months when I really felt I was done with music, those were I’d say my most challenging moment.
7. The highlight moment of your career?
Playing Untold Festival in 2016 with my friend and collaborator Platonic Scale. We’d just released our EP “Out of the Blue” and that was the first time I got to play my own songs on stage. You know, the thing I’d been dreaming about my whole life. We had bigger and better gigs since then but the rush of seeing for the first time those people in the crowd picking up the words and singing along to the songs i’d written, it just doesn’t get any better that that.
8. What's your songwriting process like?
I don’t really have a process. Sometime I’ll write about stuff that has affected me emotionally in some way but sometime I’ll just wake up with a phrase, a melody or a chord progression stuck in my head. So I lay it down and see if I can make something out of it. For example with the song “Silver” it was something as simple as seeing someone’s post about “Silver Linings Playbook” in my Facebook feed and having a lightbulb go on in my head like, “hey, silver is a pretty cool sounding word”. From there I immediately thought of the symbolism of silver in werewolf mythology and just like that, I had a love song done in 15 minutes.
9. What are your 3 desert island albums?
Year Zero by Nine Inch Nails, So by Peter Gabriel and Mezzanine by Massive Attack