"This is the first time in my life that I'm not chaotic," Saya Gray tells me without ceasing movement. She's pacing back and forth on Zoom from a sun-drenched location in California that will soon have to be evacuated — but at the moment, it's where she's tending to six cats that have been displaced by the wildfires, and trying to convince her dog not to eat a chair.
"I'm always seen with a cat right now," she adds from behind bug-eyed sunglasses, having made her home in the mountains something of an animal sanctuary. It's the first time in years that she's actually had a lease. "I was just everywhere, you know? Living like a total nomad," the artist says of making her two most recent releases prior to forthcoming debut album SAYA (out February 21 on Marion Murata / Dirty Hit) — a pair of QWERTY EPs released in 2023 and 2024, when she was staying somewhere new every month between London, New York and Los Angeles.
"I had to chill out," Gray explains. "I have a schedule now. I actually live somewhat of a normal life, as much as I possibly can."
Gray has never really had a normal life, though. Born in Toronto, her mom, Madoka Murata, founded Discovery Through the Arts, one of the city's largest independent music schools, while dad Charlie Gray is a storied trumpet player who has performed with jazz icons like Ella Fitzgerald, Aretha Franklin and Tony Bennett.
"I was gigging around the Toronto scene when I was 16, subbing for 40-year-old men, doing jazz festivals; I was playing in a lot of Jamaican Pentecostal churches," the singer-songwriter remembers of growing up in the local arts scene, citing Rich Brown as a major influence on her as a bassist. She would go on to play one of the most memorable R&B low-end grooves of the last decade with Daniel Caesar's "Get You," touring as part of her fellow Torontonian's band, as well as with WILLOW as musical director.
With all of these years on the road under her belt despite only one (sold-out) world tour to her own name so far, Gray says she feels like an old woman. "Nothing can surprise me," the artist says of her lived knowledge of how unhealthy life on the road can get. However, the road is something of a comfort zone for her. It's also where the album was born, with Gray taking an Eat Pray Love-style road trip through rural Japan after a breakup, with a miniature guitar riding shotgun in the passenger seat. "It was the first time I've ever done something like that," she explains, having made all of her music before SAYA alone on an MPC.
"I can do crazy, quirky, insane production that nobody understands, but can I make something like this?" the songwriter recalls wondering, as she left behind her fragmented piles of self-sampling bits in favour of composing linear songs. Despite her career's big-name landmarks, Gray's music is remarkably non-referential, where her compositions make up the expanse of the entire universe, cycling through electronic, jazz, rock, pop and country shapes as if they were formed in her own image.
The plucky twang of lead single "SHELL ( OF A MAN )" sees Gray's most committed take on the country trend — even if her synchronicity with the genre's popularity is inadvertent. "I literally live in the mountains and don't go on my phone unless my managers are like, 'You have a thing,'" she insists, "I didn't even know there was a fire until I started seeing smoke and someone was literally like, 'Yo, are you safe?!'"
The countrified tones return with a grittier, anthemic alt-rock edge on "EXHAUST THE TOPIC." "H.B.W" is more of a return to drum machine-laden, swirling art pop, but the artist restrains herself to keep below the five-minute mark, finding a startling equilibrium between her earlier work and a more fully fleshed-out venture into new territory.
"It was just kind of a challenge for me," Gray said of making SAYA. "'Can I do it? Can I fully produce and exec produce this full, almost nu-pop record?'" she recalls wondering, with few DIY models of solo artists working in the comprehensive way she was about to. "There's not many female producers. I was looking at working with other producers, and it wasn't until the fates only aligned to me doing it that I was like, 'You know what? Why not just do this and see how far I can take [it]?'"
But, as the songwriter puts it on the shimmering "HOW LONG CAN YOU KEEP UP A LIE?": "I create, I don't maintain." After getting the songs close to complete, Gray and her touring band (which includes her brother, Lucian) recorded them at Revolution Studios with engineer L. Stu Young, the renowned Prince collaborator whom she says she recruited two days beforehand.
Similarly, Gray admits that she hasn't really thought about how these new, fully-formed songs will translate to live performance compared to the frenzied flip-turn through the setlist of her tour last year. "I tend to make these things last-minute," she laughs. "It's always like, 'Think about this next thing!' — and then something changes in your life the next day."
She adds, "I feel like I have an album to bring to life rather than just an energy. If you're coming, you're going to be like, 'I listen to the album in full,' rather than, 'I have connections to these moments.'"
One such moment when she performed at Toronto's Longboat Hall last spring was the raucousness that wiry riffage of "PRAYING MANTIS !" and some call-and-response vocals incited from the crowd. Lyrics from that QWERTY track return on SAYA's immaculate, slow-burn closer, "LIE DOWN," as Gray repeats, "I could make your dust turn to sparkles."
"'Saya' means 'clarity,' and that's kind of how I felt about this album," she says of giving the record her name, and any dust-covered questions transfigure into a clear, sparkling bell. It's the same prophetic feeling that the crisp, Granny Smith apple-production on the album feels like biting into.
"I feel like this is just the actual start — which is weird, because it's been a while," Gray continues. "I know everyone's like, 'You've released so much music! How is this your first album?' And I'm like, 'But it is. When you listen to it, you'll be like, "Oh."'"