Today we’d like to introduce you to Seth Kaye.
Hi Seth, so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work-life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today?
I feel like I got a late start with music, even though it’s been a long time at this point. I grew up in a super-sheltered home in Wichita, Kansas, so the only music I really had access to was from film scores and movie soundtracks. The two most pivotal records of my life were Howard Shore’s The Fellowship of the Ring and the soundtrack from Remember the Titans. My family isn’t a particularly musical family, and though there are some anomaly-like artistic skills that float around in the family, I was never encouraged to pursue music. I was put in the middle school band from 5-8th grade, playing clarinet and bass clarinet, but I didn’t enjoy that because I was missing so many extra recesses (which felt super lame and unfair at the time). It wasn’t until I went to summer camp for the first time in the summer after my freshman year of high school that I really wanted to dive into music.
At camp, I met a bunch of people who were super gifted, and really fun to be around, and their charisma drew me in so powerfully that I was consumed with the desire to become a good singer and a good musician. When I went home after camp and school started again, I joined every choir I could and auditioned for the musical at my school, and started teaching myself to play piano on my best friend’s D battery-powered Cassio keyboard, and I also started to learn how to play acoustic guitar from another friend. I was always a really good and involved athlete, so I think it was a little bit of a shock to my parents that I wanted to be so involved musically, but I really enjoyed being competitive athletically while I was learning so much musically. I started playing in chapel bands at my high school, which I bet was terrible, and then I think I played my first-ever show the summer before I went to college. I had been writing since I was very little (one of my earliest memories and my first songwriting memory is of me swinging in the backyard, singing made-up lyrics and melodies to myself), and I had begun to write actual songs in high school here and there, but I didn’t know anybody else who did that, so I didn’t have any frame of reference until I went to college and started taking music classes for a Worship Ministry minor, while I studied Spanish and French for a Spanish major (at John Brown University in NW Arkansas).
My freshman year of university was kind of the real ramp into my “music career.” My roommates and best friends were all really gifted and studying music, and I just wanted to keep up with the music majors. If I couldn’t be one (my dad was super against me studying music), I wanted to at least keep up with them. I was in a few bands through college, and then ultimately, after graduating, moved to Orlando, Florida with one of those bands (Anchourage), in the hopes of writing and recording a record, getting our feet under us, and then moving somewhere else eventually, but I ended up being in Orlando for nearly seven years. While in Florida, the band I moved with slimmed down to a trio (EVERS) and we all got super embedded in that community. I started working full-time at a church as a songwriter and music director and was doing full-time ministry while also trying to be in a band and get our footing as a performing and touring band, which was a super slow process. In 2018 I went through a major season of burnout and depression and really hit a rock bottom that kind of opened this door of emotional fluidity that hasn’t been closed since.
That season ended up being the conception of my MASSIVESAD project, in that through that time I discovered that the most powerful (and negative) emotions that I was experiencing were actually just a small seed of sadness at their core. I think that (it can be different for other people maybe, but) most of the strongest and heaviest emotions that we experience in life are purely sadness dressed up in the armor of frustration or anger or fear, etc in order to fend off the root of what grieves us. So, in my desire to create a really cinematic and enveloping and massive soundscape to convey my experience and the songs that were sprouting out of that emotional garden bed, MASSIVESAD was born … and over time our band EVERS sort of crossfaded into a new phase of life and we began working on solo projects. I started recording my first MASSIVESAD songs in November of 2019 and then surprise released my first single on my birthday (Feb 11) in 2020, thinking “this is the year I really do it. I’m going to be in the studio every weekend, and I’m going to start playing LIVE all over, etc …” but then COVID hit, and everything hit the same pit of molasses that everyone else ran into. That really slowed my creative output down, though it didn’t stunt my creative activity. I just released about a third of the content that I expected to be able to release and had to pivot and take a much more patient approach to “beginning” MASSIVESAD just because of the state of the world.
Then, by the end of 2020, like many others, everything had been so shaken up but also oddly clarifying for me that I quit my full-time job to full-time freelance as a songwriter and producer, hoping to move out of Florida as soon as possible. I worked on a cool handful of projects in that time but didn’t have any opportunity to leave Orlando until in January of 2021, I got an opportunity pitched to me to move to Austin, play in a band, live with some friends and dive into the artist community here. It still wasn’t until the very end of May / beginning of June that I was able to move from Orlando to Austin, but the last year has been the best year for my artistry. I’m still freelance producing and songwriting but have been able to pour so much more into MASSIVESAD than ever before. Orlando was a really character-building time for me, just in life, but there wasn’t any artist community that I could connect with other than my two best friends who were in EVERS with me.
Moving to Austin has been an incredibly refreshing breath of fresh air. I realized that I spent so much energy over the years trying to explain myself and what and why I do it in Orlando because they didn’t have the same framework that I was living in … essentially a different world. Now, in Austin, I’m just so much more immediately on the same wavelength as the people around me. Maybe it’s my midwestern roots helping me to fit in. People in general, and other artists especially in Austin just GET IT, and that’s huge for me. I’ve been able to brainstorm and collaborate and encourage and be encouraged by other artists and art in the community at so much more of an immersed level than ever before … and I’m incredibly challenged here too, which is very good for me. I’m so grateful to be here and to be settling in so peacefully. The future is bright!
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
It has not been a smooth road. A huge part of my story is the pit of depression that I fell into in the midst of kind of becoming what I am today. It drastically flavored my life and my art and infused me with additional purpose in the way that I create. But, it has been an exhausting (near)decade. My time in Florida was very, very tough, even though it was beautiful, and the relationships that were built there were truly a gift. But, as an artist, I felt so much resistance. I expended (not quite wasted) so much valuable energy on explaining myself to others rather than just creating. That taught me a lot about energy conservation and how to steward my time and efforts well. I have a much better grasp on that now, but that was a huge part of how I burnt out and reached such a low place emotionally, mentally and spiritually. Finances and feeling supported have also been a significant black hole in my journey as an artist. Making and sharing music can be so expensive, and while you’re the little guy, it takes a really long time for that to all balance out. I’m still not there !
I also initially had a huge fear of failure on my own because I thought that I could only make good art with other people. That’s a huge part of why I had only ever been in bands and had never made any effort to do a solo project until my mid-twenties when I started to realize (and be encouraged by others) that that fear may not be true or accurate. I thought that on my own, nobody would like my art, so it took me a really long time to beat back that imposter syndrome!
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
Because my deepest musical inspirations and influences came from film and film scores and soundtracks, I tend to specialize in a very cinematic and emotionally visceral sound. I have enjoyed the compliment that each of my songs “are a whole movie.” That’s how I know I’m on the right path. I sort of specializing in a balance between really massive and semi-aggressive soundscapes blended with a very melodically sweet and ambient vocal pallet. As a producer, I definitely specialize in vocal production and ambient soundscapes that serve as a sonic bed for my often poetic lyrics.
My songs tend to be little micro windows into very specific feelings or emotional moments and the contemplation of those moments. I don’t write a lot of love songs or anything, so most of my songs are a really pointed look at specific and certain scenarios, conversations, interactions and other things like that. I think that lends to the palpable feel and emotion of my music. I think that is also a very identifiable point for listeners.
The topics that my music touches on are familiar to most people, but in a way that they don’t tend to think about those things in a very specific way. Usually, the things that kind of ambiently rolls around in the back of our minds or our guts are more on the chopping block for me. I pose a lot of questions in my songs that are thought-provoking and vulnerable.
Sonically, I’m a vocalist first, pianist second, and everything else comes after that. So my vocals are distinct and recognizable, especially in the way I often use auto-tune as an instrument, not because I need it, but the purity of tone allows me to say and sing things differently within my melodies. I am most proud of my poetic lyrics and maybe unorthodox use of my voice and vocal effects. But most of all, I’m proud of the cinematic and enveloping world that I try to pull people into with each of my songs.
If we knew you growing up, how would we have described you?
My mom says I was very thoughtful and sweet. I’ve always been very sensitive, and I’ve always been a writer, so my mom tells me that I often wrote and hid notes for people any time I was sorry about something. Seemed to be a habit of mine that exposed my considerate side. I was very athletic and adventurous. I wanted everything to feel like I was inside the movies that I loved. I was always climbing too high in trees, riding motorcycles way too fast, braking too late and walking too close to the edge of cliffs. Always on an adventure, always one foot in make-believe with my favorite soundtracks running in the back of my mind. I essentially wanted to live inside a Tolkien or CS Lewis book. And I love(d) horses, haha.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.massivesad.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/_massivesad/?hl=en
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MASSIVESAD/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCo305PjNDpUvCPaNsPKqauQ
- SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/massivesad
- Other: www.patreon.com/massivesad
Image Credits
Mason “Sasquatch” Mansfield created the color film images, and I created the B/W image.
