INTERVIEW: PYOG talks music creation and begs you to follow your passion

We sat down with Perth-based artist PYOG to talk about how he got into making music, the cruciality of supportive people and chasing the things you love before anything else.

PYOG is a vibrant 17-year-old R&B artist hailing from Perth who is forthright and open when we sit down to chat. “I never really thought about recording music or anything, but I always loved writing, I love writing poems and writing about my day and my weekend,” he says.

“One day, my brother saw my things and he was like, “You should go into the studio because you like writing and you like music”. I love listening to music, I was always into rap.”

The up-and-comer cites performing at a school assembly as the moment he gained the confidence to perform as an artist.

“People really loved it and I loved the attention and the hype. I was singing ‘Payphone’ by Wiz Khalifa, and everyone was standing up and I was doing the rapping part. It was like a school concert,” he explains.

“I was like, damn, I really like this. That’s when I got to do my first recording at Levels Studio. I had a few mates who had been there, and they were like, “You should totally try this out, it would be fun. Just test it and if you don’t like it, you don’t like it” so I was like, yeah why not? I had no job at the time, so I had to hustle around and get together a couple of bucks and then I went to the studio.”

PYOG recorded his first song ‘Be There 4U’ during this first studio session. “I wrote it basically on how I feel about this person. It was about her, but it was also about love in general…This first release was really good, I didn’t really think I was going to get views, maybe a hundred streams at most on Spotify, I wasn’t really a confident guy. Then I saw a thousand and was like, “Oh, shit” and then I saw people mentioning me [on social media] and I thought, “This is so fun”. I felt so proud of myself and accomplished. The streams just kept going up, past 10 000 and I got called up to be on a radio channel. I thought, “Damn, I can’t stop now”. I fell in love with it and I’m in love with it to this day.”

The young artist acknowledges the frustrations that come with writing music and the importance of overriding thoughts about giving up. “Sometimes when you write, you just can’t get what you want out of it, like the beat or this or that and you’re like, “I hate this, I’m not writing, I’m going to sleep, I don’t want to do this anymore”. But you can’t just not do it anymore, it’s a good thing to practice.”

PYOG says his music would generally fall under the genre of R&B. The tracks released so far are a clever mixture of delicate vocalising and lyrical rapping, which create an engaging dynamic within his work. “It’s like two different voices, there’s the singing me and the normal voiced me just rapping and talking about things, and sometimes I literally just talk into the mic. It’s a good way of recording for me, and its what I’ve fallen in love with.”

PYOG is budding in his music career, with new singles on the way to add to his discography. “I’ve got new music coming. I’ve got a nice song that I’ve worked on myself for a long time, and I believe it should come out soon.”

He adds that he is uncertain of when he will drop an extended project. “I’ve been working on a lot of different stuff, and I’ve definitely got enough recordings to make an EP or an album, but I don’t know if I’m confident enough yet to release that. The ones I’ve recorded that feel EP-worthy, I want to perfect them. I want to make the EP like a work of art, I want it to be something someone can listen to with no skips and just listen to it and enjoy every single bit. Until I learn how to do that, I won’t be releasing an EP.”

PYOG tells us about his favourite artists who have influenced and shaped the music he makes today as an artist himself. “Number one, I really like Shakira. It’s surprising but I’ve loved her since I was a kid, I started walking to Shakira music. My parents, my mum especially, she loves Shakira. I will go Polo G, I love his swag, I love the way he raps, he’s such a calm guy. When shooting music videos, his face is just chill all the time. For number three, I’m going to say three, so Justin Beiber – he’s awesome – Lil Tjay and J.I.”

Being exposed to an array of genres and sub-genres helps PYOG to craft the best music he possibly can. “That’s what music is, to be creative you have to listen to different genres or else you’re going to be stuck on the same one idea, the same flow, the same everything. It’s too limited.”

Upon ending our interview, PYOG left us with some powerful words: “If you have something that you really love doing, I beg you to follow it because, trust me, even if it doesn’t work out, you gain great satisfaction from things you love unlike doing things you don’t love or are forced into. It’s a good feeling at the end.”

Photo 2 by @jerrysfilm_

Words by @livdaangel