Zay Lewis suited the zen of our surroundings, a warm conference room nestled next to an overflowing green garden.
A buzzing mind crowned with locks contained within a graceful grounded man, Zay is releasing American Idol on January 19th, a debut EP that is a culmination of years of experimentation, reflecting on escapism, piety, and his American experience. “I’m inspired by everything… everything is defined by contrast,” his hands gesture about, painting me pictures in the air. Our conversation spans the gamut from Star Wars to the democratization of violence to a shared love of the Irish, all centered on this exploratory EP.
Featuring ad libs inspired by funkadelic sounds and introductions inspired by James Brown style proto-rap, from the grungy guitars on “THINKING AHEAD” to a country twang on the “2021 Italian Cordano”, American Idol is rooted in the 1970s. Zay pointed to his first iPod, a hand-me-down from his father, when I asked about these varied influences. “It was all the music he listened to,” he smiled as he reminisced on the R&B and reggae tracks sprinkled with the occasional Led Zeppelin that dominated his younger years. “A lot of these sensibilities carry through to the music I make now.”
Now Zay is finding musical inspiration in the strangest of places. Horror movies like Rabbit Trap and Sinners (“I didn’t grow up watching horror movies at all, but I find the genre super interesting now”). Long days spent exploring Philadelphia through Halloween decorations, roaches climbing up a doorway and body outlines sprayed in the streets. I smiled when Zay shared the story of an older Black man on the train who first inspired him to learn the harmonica for this album. “It was just so beautiful… I went out and bought a harmonica the same day.”
Zay’s reverence for the harmonica reminded me of his recent TikTok characterizing Kid Cudi’s Pursuit of Happiness as an Irish folk song. Zay lit up as we rattled off our favorite Irish artists like The Cranberries. “The voice cracks… the wailing banshee kind of feeling, there’s a rawness to it that I love.” The Irish have had an influence on Zay’s music as well. The beginning of “THINKING AHEAD”, the opening track to American Idol, was recorded at an open mic after Zay heard the lilt of an original Irish song. “I recorded her right in the middle of the party, and it was such a cool experience.”
From freestyling on the back of a band school bus in Illinois, to jam sessions live in New York, Zay has a way of extracting quintessential community-oriented music moments to create a new sound. American Idol reflects all of these contrasting influences, and a more fundamental contrast between artistic continuation and exploration. “The first song I ever liked in life was You Gotta Be by Des’ree”. I see a younger version of Zay unfold in front of my eyes, lost in the warmth of light string and dulcet low vocals. Other pieces like “Exit Strategy” feature harsher, metallic mixes, something that Lewis says he has grown to appreciate more as he develops artistically. “I wanna make buttery soft stuff again, but it’s just not reflective of what’s being put into my system.”
What’s being put in his system is the unprecedented violence. Zay lived in New York during the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, themes of which come through throughout American Idol. “The violence was so insane,” Zay looked off into the distance, reliving the moment when a police officer hefted Zay’s bike overhead and threw it at a parked car. “It’s hard to go back to the consumer bullshit… I see it every time I see these places.” For Zay, the corner of DeKalb will always be overlaid with a man slumped over, face painted red, vultures crowded around him, snapping flashes of cameras and doing absolutely nothing to help.
As an activist, music is just one of Zay’s outlets for political processing. “I’m super inspired right now by Zohran,” referencing the new mayor of New York City who had a music career of his own before stepping into politics. “It’s a really refreshing reminder that music can be a stepping stone into so many different things… young people just refuse to be boxed in.” After witnessing the violence in the city during 2020, a younger Zay wrote a petition to the United Nations to provide asylum for African Americans. If the diaspora and a rise in political violence left African Americans “a body without a soul,” Zay wanted to find a new form. “I didn’t know what I was doing,” Zay is always more humble than he needs to be; “it warranted a sense of urgency.”
Social media has become a tool for Zay to amplify a message. Featuring clips of new music, city exploration vlogs, new hairstyles, and reflections on day-to-day life, Zay’s feeds are a raw look into the mind of an artist. Yet, social media can become a double-edged sword; a space to amplify and uplift black voices, and a space with exposure to unprecedented violence. When I asked him how he manages these complex dichotomies as a creator, Zay laughed, “It’s something I’m actively working on.” American Idol is an “aspirational” project for Zay, who walks a fine line balancing reality and media. “I do Tai Chi, I have conversations,” as Zay’s hands dance through the air explaining his life and work to me, I can see how this artist would be drawn to activities at the overlap of physical and mental stretch.
American Idol is a journey contextualizing our culture, continuously redefining and uncovering sordid new details about our current situation and coping in increasingly convoluted ways.
American Idol is a journey contextualizing our culture, continuously redefining and uncovering sordid new details about our current situation and coping in increasingly convoluted ways. With a driving, almost psychotic loop, “THINKING AHEAD” introduces us to a character feeling confident, but driven by ego-based consumption. The reality of the information age overwhelms the listener during “Body Slam”, with its droning and gritty backing that sounds “like a TV that you can’t turn your eyes away from”.
With a sandblasting repeat of “punk rock pistols/anybody could have done it”, our main character dreams of escape during “Exit Strategy”. “The irony is one of the few things I feel like has been successfully democratized, as democracy crumbles, is violence,” Zay’s eyes were reflective as we discussed the early days of do-it-yourself punk rock and how it parallels the current respect we have seen towards do-it-yourself violent acts, like the case of Luigi Mangioni. “Outside of morally right or wrong, just the fact that this violence was accessible to him…” Zay trailed off before connecting it one level deeper, “but it wasn’t just accessible to him… one of us could have picked up a gun and done it, and nobody did.”
Now paranoid from these eye opening realizations, the listener peers over the shoulder of an active arrest in “Secret Police”. Samples of radio static overlay a strumming guitar and a quantized beat. “It’s a black ass song,” Zay tapped the table for emphasis. A track about vigilance, perception and surveillance culture, “Secret Police” gives you the goosebumps feeling when you know you’re being watched. By now anyone on social media is no stranger to surveillance culture, and Zay takes highlights how our own actions perpetuate this surveillance culture. “It’s this gotcha approach to everything,” he gave an example of posting unsolicited photographs of someone on the Internet to prove some sort of problematic behavior. “The surveillance is coming from this Puritan perspective.”Religious idolatry and reflections on American Puritanism are at the heart of American Idol.
“We did ourselves a disservice by going through the Enlightenment and all these other periods and being like, all right, we’re gonna be more human-centered, and God is not a thing we’re putting in the center anymore. But… I don’t know. I feel like God has a social function, and people have found other ways to make gods and to be religious. That piety and the things that come with religious piety, which are mostly very scary, still show up even in secular places. People treat their ideologies, be they political or more superficial, like religions, and they act like religious zealots. And that prompts them to… look for someone to burn at the stake.”
“And now we’re at why the project is called American Idol,” he smiled, pieces of the puzzle coming together. “The new American dream is to leave. To what degree is what you’re trying to leave not a place, but a mentality? Are you carrying those totems and idols with you? What does it mean to actually let go of those things?”
At the extremity of escapism, the listener now follows a character who has achieved the new American dream. A soulful country lilt tinged with a scratchy metallic sound, “2021 Italian Cordano” takes us on a sorrowful and nostalgic view of an America that our main character left. The inevitable irony is that surveillance is no longer a strictly American concern.
“We’ve exported so much of what it means to be in America to the entire planet.”
The title track is the most vulnerable we see Zay, beginning with a voice softly and gentle, almost on the brink of tears, before breaking into a mournful plead: Please Don’t Run. “What you’re running from is not a place but a mindset,” a mindset that Zay points out bleeds into existing with black masculinity, especially amongst strangers. This space to reflect on what exactly they are running from culminates in “no time like tomorrow”, a track Zay thinks will be a fan favorite: “Sonically, it has a certain optimism to it… it’s hopeful,” Zay looks off with a glimmer in his eye.