Moon Age are an up-and-coming band from the Bryan/College Station area, gearing up to release their first single on April 24th, ‘Blue Seraphim’. This interview was conducted by KANM member Javier Jimenez in the context of this release.

Hi. I’m Javier Jimenez with KANM, doing an interview with the band Moon Age from Bryan

Maya: And College Station

And College Station. Our current setup: we just have people on a couch and I’m gonna let them introduce themselves in order of the couch with their name, their role in the band, and a song they’ve been listening to lately.

Ram: I am Ram Farhy, the drummer of the band, and a song I was listening to in the car was Cygnus X-I Book One [sic] by Rush

(lots of “oh this guy”s)

Sage: My name is Sage, I am the singer, and a song I’ve been listening to-I don’t know!-a lot is Act Like Your Title by Rocket

Maya: My name is Maya Dew, I am the bassist of Moon Age, and a song I’ve been listening to lately is Paint by First Day Back…niche

It’s not niche, I know what it is.

Joel: It’s not niche, Maya. (laughter from the band). My name is Joel Guadarrama, I am the guitarist and I also do vocals, and I’ve been listening to ‘Spit Fountain’ by Algernon Cadwallader 

Maya: (quietly) Get a load of this guy… (laughter from the band)

Harper: I’m Harper, I am the guitar player, I’ve been listening to a lot of ‘Body’ by Don Toliver (snickers from the band)

Okay! Main reason for this interview is that this band Moon Age is going to be releasing their first single on CD and streaming on the 24th of April…I saw the Instagram post, and I saw the real cool cover art.

Maya: Oh yeah, really good cover art.

Who did the cover art?

Maya: That would be me!

You? All you?

Maya: All me, yeah! Why are you saying that with an air of judgment?

Ram: I stumbled upon the background.

Sage: Really?

Harper: Pretty sure I have the background for the picture hanging on my wall (laughter)

Maya: No because I used to use the Great Wave by Hokusai or whatever. Big Kanegawa fan.

Would you say that influenced the cover art a lil’ bit?

Maya: Yeah for sure, I really liked that painting, always have. Been uh…reading a lot of Picture of Dorian Gray lately

Joel: (Sarcastically) Alright.

Okay, okay, so! From what I’m aware of, this song, called ‘Blue Seraphim’, has been in the making for at least a year. From what I’ve noticed, the first demo that was made publicly available on your band’s story, when I was sent it in preparation for this interview, was published…67 weeks ago?

Sage: WOAH!

Maya: Are you serious?

I’m being so serious. Now that you’re a year into the process of, y’know, developing this song, how do you feel about it, compared to how you felt about it when you first made it?

Maya: I mean, it’s a song.

Harper: Fuckin’ hate that song!

Ram: Well, from my perspective it hasn’t changed as much as I think it did for everyone else. I’m still just a drummer, still just performing it, but it’s definitely found its place in our set, y’know.

I’ve seen some of your shows, I like it live, absolutely

Sage: I mean, for me, I think it’s kind of changed a lot especially from the first demo that I made of it, like when I first wrote it. I don’t think it’s bad, but I think it’s a big change, and I think it’s a lot different than what I originally envisioned it to be in my head, but now I think it’s a lot more Moon Age than I guess I was thinking.

Ram: We should also say that this song is based off of your (Sage) experience

Sage: Yeah, yeahyeahyeah. I don’t know, I guess I wrote it from a place of being kind of more angry than upset, and it just kinda turned into…more of a feeling in general than just feeling mad. 

Save your deeper thoughts about that for later, we’ll get to it. Maya?

Maya: I wasn’t in the band when the song was first written. I was also dating Sage when I first heard the song around February-ish 2025, a few months after they conceived it (childish snickers). But, um, oh yeah! I ended up joining the band in June and I had my part already written for me. I just did a little improv over it and it turned out better than whatever bullshit Joel had come up with (laughter). 

Okay now for Joel’s opinion, which matters slightly more.

Joel: Um, yeah, it was quite a while ago when I first heard it from Sage, and when you present a song to me I put my influence on it, on the guitar part and stuff. 

Ram: The two things that always come up in our songs are Joel and Sage, the two things you will always hear assuming Sage is singing. The two things you can always make out, that you don’t need a good mix for to hear, are Joel and Sage.

Joel: After a while, the song structurally hasn’t changed for a while, as long as we play it correctly, because we mess it up sometimes. At least through the process of recording and mixing it, which was, it was fun but it was also unbearable at times, spending countless hours mixing a song, over and over again.

Harper: It definitely, structure wise, we mess it up sometimes, but the song really never stuck with me until a few months ago, when we were doing a practice without Sage and I sang it for the first time, and it really changed my perspective on what I felt the song was really about. I was taking into consideration, y’know, some of my past relationships and stuff…but, yeah, I feel like I’ve felt a lot more passionate about it since then.

Ram: I found my appreciation for it pretty objectively, without any emotional moments. It was written from an experience I’ve never had, so…

Going to the production of the song…the song, like I said, took about a year to come into fruition; do your songs usually take this long or is this like a special thing?

Sage: I think at least from the perspective of Joel writing songs, it kinda depends on how finished he already feels like it is, at least for me, when we’re developing songs and stuff it’s kind of up to him. I feel like with ‘Blue Seraphim’, it was kind of done the first time we ever did it, but it just kind of getting more character, I guess. I feel like the stuff Joel writes is a lot more thought out and takes more time

Ram: From my experience with writing with Joel, with the exception of Good Morning and Refuse, he would put out like 97 demos on BandLab and does one microscopic change in each little thing and one week before practice he’s like…“I fuckin’ hate this song” (laughter). But in terms of ‘Blue Seraphim’, I would say that yeah, I agree, that this song had a pretty solid foundation compared to the usual back-and-forth we have with Joel

Joel: For recording parts for it, I listened through it and I just wanted more, you know? It’s a song that builds up from start to finish, on a constant rise, and I just, like, added stuff and I asked Sage if that was okay. So I added a lot of things, I’ve removed quite a few things until I’ve felt that it was at least near-perfect

Ram: We should say that the main proponent of the mixing and the production has almost been exclusively Joel. We all showed up to a “studio”, School of Rock, with Professor Brandon Kempf, just to do a pretty shitty live recording, in just one take, that’s it, and it was fine. But the real beauty that came, y’know, with the song came from Joel diddling about. 

And to be specific, songwriting-wise, this song was written mainly by Sage?

Sage: I have a weird opinion about that with this song. I feel like most of the song, as seen now, at least musically is mostly Joel, and most of what I’ve contributed is the little main guitar part and the lyrics and the melody, but I feel like it’s mostly Joel and pretty much everyone else. Sometimes it feels more like Joel’s song than my song.

Ram: There is [sic] two components in any written song, at least in this group: there’s the person that introduces the theme or the idea or the lyrics or whatever, and then everything else that goes around it, like the forks and the knives on the plate…let me use this analogy, you cook a beautiful steak with some mashed potatoes or whatever, and you got a slice of Gefilte fish, and you make your matzo balls, but you don’t no bowl or spoon anyways!

Harper: I feel like what makes part of our songwriting style so successful is that it’s definitely one person will come up with the idea but everyone else will contribute, obviously consensually (laughter)

Joel: I have the opposite of Sage: I think that, my personal opinion for it, is that a written song is chords, lyrics and a melody, which was all Sage. All I did was add mostly garnish on the top…a little parmesan cheese.

Yeah, I listened to the mix, almost the final mix, and I gotta say I really liked it, and I really liked the sound of it, I really liked the production. Y’know, from my perspective, looking at the demo you had 67 weeks ago, and the lusher, quieter arrangement that you have here, what made yall think this song deserved a more, like gentle feel to it than rougher vibe that the demo had.

Sage: If it’s the one that’s on our story, it’s just the heavier section we have there, and most of the song is not like that. 

Ram: I remember the song starting with only Sage and an acoustic guitar and from there…you said that it got less angry, but it sounds more angry, especially since Harper began screaming in the song. I think that’s collectively everyone’s favorite part of the song

Sage: Yeah yeah yeah, he complains about it all the time though. I used to have to do it because he wouldn’t do it live

Harper: It fucks my throat up dude

Maya: I feel like it used to be a lot more chorus pedal heavy, whenever I first heard it, but I think narrowing it down to the sound it has now, I have always interpreted it as like a very beautiful song, and the way it is now captures that essence of it better than before

Ram: I think you have to think about it thematically, right? The whole thing is the seraphim, right? And it’s like a beautiful image, and it’s not necessarily the point is to portray what a seraphim might look like but I don’t think it detracts from it.

In terms of the way that it sounds, and some people hate this question some people love this question, but other music. What other music helped you form what ended up becoming ‘Blue Seraphim’?

Ram: I’m gonna start, because I have the least relevant answer, from anyone in Moon Age I will have the least relatable music taste, like Avant-Garde Jazz, like

Maya: (mockingly) “Have you ever heard of Eberhard Weber?” (laughter)

Dude I like Eberhard Weber!

Ram: For real?

(irrelevant mini-geek out section about Eberhard Weber)

Ram: So, considering I didn’t write any part of the song except for the drum part, which I wrote in one day and tweaked only a little bit. I stole the drums from another local band, Bran the Mystic. Every single one of us has been a student of Bran the Mystic, and we all have a very profound appreciation for him, and we try to take inspiration, not necessarily from his music, but as, like, a person, a musician.

Sage: Can’t really say much for what it is now, but when I wrote it I was listening to a lot of Girl in Red and a lot of sad, gay music. A lot of just acoustic guitar, really plain, and mostly just the emotion of the song that’s the heft and weight of it, and that is still mostly what it is now.

(at this point Ram leaves because of time constraints)

Harper: Evangelion is huge influence on the band, by the way

Maya: As a bassist, I’m probably most influenced, at the time of writing, by the bassist of Geese, Dominic Digesu, but yeah Joel hates Geese

Joel: I don’t hate Geese

(after a brief poll, Maya, Sage, and Joel approve of Geese, Harper actively disapproves)

Maya: Dude from Descendents as well, whose name is on the tip of my tongue. Dude from Geese, the girl in the B-52’s and the Waitresses, who did the bassline on ‘Christmas Wrapping’...specifically for ‘Blue Seraphim’, a little bit of Jaco [Pastorious] and Dominic Digesu

Joel: For my part…

Maya: Just say Jonny Greenwood…

Joel: I kind of made it up, my part at least, I…there is one part, in the middle of the song, a little vocal solo, doing a little coin thing, and that was, that was Radiohead…

Can’t escape them, can’t escape them

Joel: I think for the main melody of the weird sounding guitar during the verses, there’s this one song called ‘Song of the Century’ by Dinosaur 94, I took heavy inspiration from that. There’s a similar melody going from high to low and low to high that I thought fit the song there.

Harper: Considering my guitar part was already written for me, the parts I did contribute, obviously screamo, and I added a few little licks, Pierce the Veil, Dance Gavin Dance

Did you propose the scream part?

Harper: I don’t think I would ever bring that up myself

Sage: I think it just kind of happened, like we talked about it during the first jam, and Joel brought up having a heavier section, and I said we could do this and this, then maybe I suggested “oh what if we had a screaming part while someone was singing”

I really like the bridge, specifically, when the guitars get crunchy and stuff. I like when Sage comes back in, because the guitars sound heavier than they already did, like they got exponentially bigger, and I thought it was cool

Sage: He (Joel) ate! He ate!

Harper: Give Dave Grohl some credit

Joel: I did change that part, I rerecorded it, but originally, the first draft of the song used the first chords of ‘Everlong’ and another Deftones song, and I couldn’t just rip that, so it’s changed now, more original

Okay, now lyrics, the lyrics to the song. 

(at this point Maya leaves because of time constraints)

Name of the song, ‘Blue Seraphim’, what exactly is a blue seraphim? Is it just an angel that is blue, or is there some sort of reference people should get?

Sage: It’s not really a reference to anything, just straight off the dome. A seraphim, from my understanding, is an angel that sings in the choir of angels, who spread the word of God and Jesus and the gospel and everything. I was also like, blue ‘cause sad, so that’s tea, so we gotta do that, ‘Blue Seraphim’. I wrote it from a point of “I feel like a Seraphim”, lying about good things and whatever, and making sure everyone knows you’re a good person and I’m sad so, Blue Seraphim.

I think that’s cool. I wrote down personally that it was an interesting juxtaposition of a color commonly associated with moodiness, sadness, depression, et cetera and a Biblical image commonly associated with light, wonder, supernatural miracle occurrences and stuff like that.

Sage: Tea! I think, yeah, that a little bit too

Did it mostly just sound cool?

Sage: Yeah, mostly that. I thought it was really cool to say, to hear, and I really like the way it sounds to sing, honestly.

Maya said it was okay for me to ask this, who is this song about? Don’t name them specifically, but who does that represent in this song, who are you singing to, abstractly?

Sage: The person I’m singing to and about is a guy who I dated. I really kind of lost a lot of myself in the relationship, and it just, I don’t know man. It was a really weird time in my life and it was really a strange place to be because I was, like, pulling away from a lot my friends, but also whenever my friends would complain about it or talk about it I’d be like “no, you guys just don’t understand, this guy’s going through so much, and I have to be there for him” and stuff like that. When I complain about, like one time he yelled “FUCK YOU!” in my face. I told my friends about it and they said “that’s literally not okay”, and I was like “but we literally just got in a huge fight, like I understand when I get stressed I lash out” and stuff like that. That’s where I pulled the seraphim aspect from.

Jumping off of that a bit, do you have a certain philosophy when it comes to interpretation of your lyrics? When people listen to your lyrics do you want them to be “This is YOUR experience and this is how I should think about them”-

Sage: No!

Or is it more like “oh I relate to these things I’m going to apply them to my own experience”

Sage: I don’t want anyone to think about me, I don't want to be perceived, I hate that so much. I wrote it from a place that is so real and so connected to myself that, like, no matter what when people listen they’re gonna be like “damn that shit really happened”. I wanted it to be more of, when you listen to this song, you can be like “I know exactly how that feeling felt and how much it sucked” and I feel like this song has a really nice buildup and dropoff and resolution that I guess, to me, feels like getting through and over the breakup and the relationship to me that I feel like people can really connect to, and that’s more of what I really want. People connecting themselves to it and feeling and seeing themselves in the song because that’s what I look for and I love when I listen to music, is being able to be like “I have a shared experience with these people” and it sounds so beautiful, and I get to listen to a shared experience as well. Feeling in general is my goal.

Other members, do you have any specific connection with these lyrics?

Harper: Uh…maybe to some degree, but, no

Joel: I don’t know. I’ve never dated anyone that was lowkey evil, and they’re beautiful, heartwrenching lyrics. Can’t relate.

In terms of these lyrics, were they all penned by Sage?

Sage: I’m pretty sure, yeah. I will say there’s a part in it that’s newer than the rest of the song, it’s the third verse, I think. For a really long time, I didn’t have actual lyrics for this song, I would just kind of say the same thing every time and I think the first time I actually wrote it down was the first time Harper sang it because I wasn’t at rehearsal.

You mention this person turning out just like their mom. Are you a follower of Sigmund Freud, Sage?

Sage: (feverent head shaking) I feel like it was simply a bar!

Can the connection be made?

Sage: Yes, I guess. When I was thinking about it, when I was writing down the lyrics for the first time, I remember that this person had a bad home situation and their mom was, like, a really nice person a lot of the time but sometimes–I guess either when she thought people weren’t there or they wouldn’t see anything–she would yell a lot and be really mean he’d tell me all the time “I hate her, thank God I’m nothing like her” and stuff like that

And that’s the ultimate blow

Sage: Yeah, yeah! Lowkey, everytime I sing it I go “OOOUGH” because I feel really bad, but FUCK YOU!

Not getting too personal here, but I know people who have that exact same fear of turning into a parent who is like, y’know. They’re your parent, so you have to have some sort of connection to them but they’re also assholes for one reason or another. It’s pretty common with people our age, and I assume generally the song is targeted towards, people our age, because it does remind me of a lot of stuff that people like us would listen to

Sage: Now that you said that, I’m also a little worried about that too, like the reference about them. I think I’m also maybe singing that to myself I guess, that line specifically

I think the lyrics are pretty cool

Sage: Thanks!

They’re like simple, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing, I think it’s a cool thing in this case

Sage: I will say I definitely have a lot of apprehension and nervousness about my lyrics specifically. I compare myself to Joel because his writing is more profound and…I don’t know what the word I’m trying to say is, like, not specifically saying what it’s saying…

Harper: Metaphorical

Sage: That, metaphorical, yeah, like that a little bit. I feel kind of like, not lame, I guess, for lack of a better word, a little lame for just being like “I’m sad, you kinda suck, ugh”. But then when I kinda think about it it’s just the way I write and the way I feel

Different styles of writing, yeah. I will say I like both of your lyrics, at least from what I can hear from a live setting, I do really like what both of you guys are saying. I love both of your vocals, and Harper’s as well. And, y’know, we already got into this a little bit: there’s a very obvious Christian influence here, Biblical imagery, right? I assume this isn’t intentional, but it’s cool: there’s this line, “I cried for you / I lied for you”, reminiscent to me of the Vaselines’ song ‘Jesus Don’t Want Me For a Sunbeam’, which has the chorus’s first two lines of “Don’t expect me to lie / Don’t expect me to cry” and that’s, like, addressed to Jesus Christ himself. I say that because there’s certainly a Christian atmosphere to this song’s lyrics, what is the relationship, do you think, of the Christian imagery that you use in this song, the Blue Seraphim, and the meaning of what you want to get across?

Sage: For me, I think the connection is just the religious imagery, I think that it’s something that can be an image so beautiful but it has hurt me on a very personal level. I think iconography is beautiful, and most of the artwork surrounding the Bible and Christianity is beautiful, but I also think is very misrepresentative, I think as well. I think it was more that I felt like it was something that was supposed to be a place of community for me for a really long time and supposed to be a safe space, but ended up not being the more I actually paid attention and the more I actually started to have my own thoughts and feelings about it. I realized “this is lowkey fucked up, you can’t treat people like this, or me specifically  like this,” and I guess that translates a lot of the relationship of, like, it was very nice and welcoming at first and it felt very amazing, and then the more I thought about it it was like, lowkey fucked up. I think for me, at least this is the connection I make with it. 

I wanna get back into the production a bit…how did that work? The song’s been almost a year in the making, when it was in its final stages I was talking with Maya for a bit while you (Joel) were doing that. I’m still not completely aware of what you were doing, what and who was involved, the mixing…what was that whole thing about?

Joel: Well, we had some stems we got from recording a live session, which consisted of me and Harper’s guitar, drums, bass, vocals. Basically, I took those stems–we were originally gonna do it as just like, releasing the live thing, and I wasn’t too fond of that idea, I wanted the songs to be big, to be THE ‘Blue Seraphim’

Something more, dynamic, and, y’know, bigger than what a live session could conjure up?

Joel: There were just a lot of mistakes

Harper: I do want to add, we weren’t originally going to produce the song on our own, we were initially going to have it sent out. I think we do all have a particular style that we want to stick to and we didn’t think that any of the mixes we were getting back really stuck to that, so I think that’s where we really decided we were just going to do it by ourselves and make something that is actually representing what we want

So this is a self produced effort?

Sage: He (Joel) really stepped up and dove in and took it by the helm and everything. We were just going to do the live EP thing of just all the songs we did in the little live session and Joel was like “nah, nah, nah, nah, guys, listen, listen”. Then it just, kind of happened

Joel: For like actual mixing, I used Ableton. Good Lord, I think there’s 63 tracks on that, there’s some glockenspiel if you heard that, right in the little solo part before the final thing.

Sage: A treasured member of Moon Age is the glockenspiel in ‘Blue Seraphim’

Joel: You gotta have the glockenspiel. I mean, most of the process was just done on my own. I spent a lot of time, weeks doing it for hours, that’s what I mean when I say it was kind of miserable doing the whole thing, because after listening to a song a thousand times over and over again, you would think you would start to hate it, but it’s still, like, when I listened to the final mix, it still feels as beautiful as when I first heard it. It’s a big testament to the writing, I’d say. Near the end of the song, there’s a lot of instruments, there’s acoustic guitars, there’s this arpeggiator that I used, which is my favorite part of the song. Sage wanted there to be a wall of sound

Sage: I remember specifically saying I wanted it to HIT because, like Joel said, the whole song was this continuous rise and continuous build, and right after the bridge it gets really soft and then it goes back up again and it kicks into the last section, and I really like that, and I wanted it to hit really hard, and it really does, he did that really well and I really liked it. 

Joel: There’s one thing, I follow this alot for when I’m writing songs, it’s sort of like a Hero’s Journey. Y’know, the start of the song, an introduction, things change throughout the song, you go “Fightin’ evil! Fightin’ bad guys!”. Then, y’know, the character messes up, is forever changed, they go back home as a changed person; the final part of the song is the first part of the song, but different

I assume you’re a literary person, then. You like books, Joel?

Joel: I like one book mainly that Maya referenced earlier, The Picture of Dorian Gray, I love that book, that book is beautiful. A lot of the time, I would, I think there’s like maybe 30 versions of the song on my BandLab, and a lot of the time I would complete a version of a mix, send it to everybody, they’d give me their thoughts, I’d make a bunch of changes, something else was different so I had to change that, it was…I don’t know how to mix. I’ll be honest, the mix is not that good, but I tried really hard on it, there were a lot of problems that I either couldn’t fix or kept recurring whenever I changed something else, so it was a long process of doing it over and over again. It’s like…you know those, like, what do you call those, like hedgehogs? Beavers? Those games at carnivals

Sage: Whack-a-mole?

Joel: Yeah, whack-a-mole! It’s like that

I do get that, and from what you said, you did send the mixes out to the band and they would give you their thoughts on that, so this wasn’t a completely solitary effort, like a mad-genius Brian Wilson type thing?

Joel: No it wasn’t

Wrapping up here, a little bit, do you guys have a specific favorite part of the song you wanna point out for the readers at home at KANM Frequency? 

Harper: Um…we have a part, where, it’s kind of not a part of the song, but it’s a transition point, like when we’re introduced as a band, and we’re still playing. It’s very authentic, I think, it shows who we are, obviously it’s introducing our band, but also musically as we kind of go into our kind of “biggest” song that we’ve made

Thus far!

Sage: You gotta catch it live!

You really do, I agree, and I was gonna mention that I think you go into the backstory of the song live a little bit

Sage: We do this song called ‘Fullest Empty Cup’ that Harper wrote before we do it, and he was talking about the end of the song until the beginning of ‘Blue Seraphim’, while they’re tuning and everything, which doesn’t take very long. There’s a lot of pretty stuff that Joel’s doing, it’s awesome. We’ll introduce the band, then the song, and we’ll go into it. I think my favorite part is after the bridge, me and Addi Crowell–shoutout, Addi filled in for a couple of shows–during one of the rehearsals, I added cymbals hits going into it, and the guitar does a little thing into the chord switches in the section, and there’s crashes on all of those parts. When it changes to getting closer together in the second half after I stop singing before the outro, that’s my favorite part.

Joel: There’s two parts I really like. I really like what we have as the intro for the thing. Originally I had a little piano intro which was just a placeholder and I did not like it at all, but Sage had told me that they wanted an intro that I did during live shows where I sit on a looper pedal and play arpeggios, and I tried that in the mix and it didn’t sound good. I decided to use the very end of the song to be a sort of intro in the song, kind of like ‘Nude’ by Radiohead, so I just took the end of the song and I reversed it. There’s also Trailer Park Boys, the sample at the beginning, which is from Season 2…Mrs. something’s dog gets drunk or whatever, dog’s acting up, haven’t watched the episode

Sage: I would’ve picked something from Avatar: The Last Airbender

Joel: Maya was talking to me about doing Regular Show

Sage: For a little bit, for our song ‘Dahlia’, for the break in the song, we had this bit, before Maya was in the band. I always complained about playing bass on this song because it was really hard and I would mess it up every time we did it, and the bit was Ram would get up from his kit and yell at me something like “Hey man, what the hell are you doing?! That’s not how you play the song!” then we made up and we’d go back to the song. Before that, it was a clip from Regular Show

Harper: It was when Benson was crashing out when they came out of the arcade!

Sage: It was just that little seed and it was just so we could time how long we could make the break in the song

Joel: I spent some time figuring out what sample would sound good but also didn’t sound kind of lame and corny…well I felt like Trailer Park Boys was hidden enough, not known enough so that people would like to find out, but also not so known that–

It’s like a cliche?

Joel: Yeah, like it’s a cliche. For actual favorite part of the song, when the acoustic guitars come in during the little solo area, I think that’s my favorite part. It’s such a…[sigh of relief]...relief.

Sage: I think my favorite part of the lyrics is the way the “I feel like a Blue Seraphim” changes. The first time I say it is “I felt like a Blue Seraphim”, the second time “I feel like a Blue Seraphim”, then it’s “I am your Blue Seraphim”, and the last time is “I don’t want to be your Blue Seraphim.” I think that’s my favorite part

It’s like a literary progression, like what Joel was talking about. I was going to ask you guys if you had a favorite lyrical moment, and it’s okay to say no.

Harper: I’d say my own part

Sage: “Take my heart and I’ll try” that’s what he says, that’s his favorite lyric

Joel: I like that part where you’re (Sage) doing those vocal flips…I remember you saying you did NOT like Adrianne Lenker, but you sing exactly like her in that part!

Sage: SHUT! UP! What part are you talking about? When I say “Your fucking mom?”

Joel: Yes that one!

Sage: Fuck you!

Is that such an insult though? She’s got a beautiful voice.

Sage: No, I love her singing, she’s a good singer, she’s a good singer

It’s okay to be dramatic, that’s what makes the song pretty good…it’s a very dramatic song

Sage: (in a British accent) Well, yes, well of course!

Real quick, before we wrap this up, any quick things you want to say about the single release, or the house show you’re gonna play?

Harper: Greens Prairie is performing, ten times better–

Harper + Sage: Ten times over, tenfold!

Joel: There’s gonna be YouthInAsia, All-In-All, Greens Prairie, I love those bands.

Sage: We actually played our first real show ever with All-In-All, it was the first time we played ‘Blue Seraphim’, so it’s very very cool we get to play our release show with them. I think we were very different the first time we played it. 

Joel: They also released a new single, ‘Texas’, sounds really good!

Sage: It’s so good, they’re so good! I’m mostly excited to finally have art that I made and that everyone else made that is so deeply personal to me in the world and other people can listen to it and connect with it…or say it fucking sucks but at least they listened to it

Joel: At least at the house show, we’re playing new songs at the show, the more math-y ones, the song dedicated to Punch the monkey

Any closing dedications or fuck yous or I love yous?

Joel: Thank you Brandon Kempf from Bran the Mystic. I think they’re the best band in Bryan, good Lord! Brandon especially has had an immense influence on me, especially also in my guitar playing, since I took inspiration from bossa nova and classical, in the way I play and stuff. He taught me that, so…no Moon Age without Brandon Kempf. Not a lot of bands without Brandon Kempf, that guy is like the Godfather of the BCS music scene.

Sage: Also big thank you to Brandon. For me, specifically, thank you to Brandon, because when I first showed it to him I thought it was really BUNS, like so bad because it was too boring and plain. I was like “I don’t know if I should show this to Moon Age, I’m kind of embarrassed, it doesn’t sound like anything Joel writes or anyone else writes” and he was like “I think that’s the beauty of it, and you just gotta bring it to everyone and let them put whatever they have into it without letting it take away from your vision and it’ll be perfect“ and that’s exactly what happened…so no Moon Age no Brandon no Brandon no ‘Blue Seraphim’

Harper: Shoutout all my bandmates, love y’all, even Greens Prairie.

Sage: Thank you so much! Come to the house show, listen to the single!

House show and single are on the 24th of April, doors at 6:30. This was Moon Age, I’m Javier Jimenez with KANM Frequency!