Today, I released what somehow became NEO 10Y’s most anticipated single to date. Stan Yourself came about because I am always thinking about how we can optimise ourselves as a species, and I think it’s part of my process and purpose as an artist to be questioning reality and reconstructing that which doesn’t serve us as a collective anymore.
I gave an interview to Billboard which a more fleshed out version of is available below, but make sure to click through to read the Billboard interview too.
You can stream the song via Apple Music, Spotify and all other major streaming platforms.
So in November 2018 as part of my incessant quest for self realisation and the fact that I do think everyone should be their own biggest super fan, I thought of Stan Yourself as a concept, and then Tweeted it and also searched and no-one had said it so I was like, oh cool, thanks universe. I think the verb “to stan” is more a tongue in cheek internet phrase now, even if it was birthed from Eminem and Dido, but I do love the idea of loving yourself to death, and embracing the entire path that the universe has to offer us. Once we stop fearing death, I think the journey is more enjoyable.
Then I spent December 25th on the piano and the whole song came out. I do believe that if we go inward and reassess our physical world situation, we have the potential collective ability to move forward to utopia and save the world.
I’ve played some pretty awesome shows this Summer in London (mainstage UK Black Pride and the small Hackney Empire where FKA Twigs walked past just when I was outside before the show, which can only be a good sign), LA (Evita – a really cool queer night at The Nightingale Club) and NY (for Billboard Pride), which I am grateful for, so a few thousand of people have already heard Stan Yourself and so I know that people are already connecting with it, which gives me great hope.
Form a personal perspective, Stan Yourself is about going inward to find my inner superhero, finding the God/universe within us of all. Loving every moment until and including death, finding our true and optimised selves, so that we can collectively find world peace.
In terms of genre, I struggle to identify with a specific category. I am releasing it as Pop/RnB. Pop as a construct and ambition, and RnB because the industry still needs to categorise us consciously or unconsciously.
I play both piano and guitar parts on the song which are the instruments I wrote the track on, and it is produced with SBO (Selah Blessed One), my friend and talented producer who is a Buddhist. I chant with him and his mum after studio sessions, that’s how much love has gone into this track. Grateful to have such talented conscious beings around me for this whole process.
So I direct and produce all my own videos, and have done for the last three years since the Trump film. I like working guerrilla and organically with my friends and my brother.
The video for Stan Yourself is a conceptual story of manifesting our future and moving into a higher state of consciousness, from blue to indigo, dystopia to utopia, 3D to 5D, the past to the future.
It was shot in London and Los Angeles. I built a stalker wall (also the single art) in line with the construct of a “stan”, the body bag is a commentary on accepting death and God being within, performance scenes are in front of twenty literal giant “fans” with censored nipples in solidarity with the divine feminine, the LA scenes were filmed at a location I remembered on Wiltshire when the sun set was purple, but it was only when I was editing the footage that we realised it was the corner of Stanley Street – a universal architectural design that I cannot take responsibility for.
The single art has it’s own story and was initially censored because it was perceived that the body bag was a gimp mask. You can see the three versions below now.
Where I am at right now, it works for me to release episodic eras and constructs a couple of times a year. For example, I started back in 2016 with a three part video and four songs all released around the same time, then I released an EP of sorts in 2017, then last year I released Dopamine and Poems To Fuck To as interconnected tracks with two videos, then in February of this year I released Reality Check with a video and a message, and now I am releasing Stan Yourself on 10/10 and then Feedback Loop on 11/11 which are connected emotionally and lyrically, so it all forms part of an ongoing series with cohesive visuals and message, like an episodic album.
I also don’t have major label budgets so I can’t just make an album and hide away in the studio for two years, I don’t have that luxury, hopefully one day in the future that could be super cool, but my whole discography (SY is my 11th track and Feedback Loop will be my 12th) means that I am on parr with album artists in terms of releasing an albums worth of material, but it’s just across three years.
If you watch my music videos in order, they all form a connected hyper reality, so you get long form content and short form concepts at the same time with me, and there’s lots of self referencing cos I am in complete control of my narrative and creative, which I think is working and makes the process feel much more authentic than what we are even taught to expect from artists. I am grateful to be an independent artist in that regard.
I hope my music, and particularly Stan Yourself helps people believe in themselves creatively, and that creating art is the best way to connect with the universe. We can manifest so much and I want people to know that we have so much untapped resource within us and we are so powerful together when we are awake/conscious.
Photos by Ryan Geary.