The lauded and multifaceted pianist, songwriter, and composer Stephan Moccio announces his forthcoming studio album, Scenes From A Velvet Room, releasing on June 26th on Decca Records. To celebrate the announcement, the Canadian-born, Los Angeles-based artist shares the first single, “Positano”, available now. Listen to “Positano” and pre-order the album HERE.
This album was born after a period of introspection and reflection for Moccio. After a quarter-century spent penning iconic melodies, Moccio could easily rest on a catalog of chart-breakers like Celine Dion’s “A New Day Has Come,” Miley Cyrus’s “Wrecking Ball,” the Weeknd’s “Earned It,” and “I Believe,” the theme song for the 2010 Winter Olympics. Instead, he’s looking back to the turn of the millennium, when, in a liminal space between his precocious adolescence and his blockbuster songwriting career, he took a gig playing piano six nights a week in the lobby of the Four Seasons Toronto. On his fourth solo LP—Scenes From a Velvet Room, he tells that story with the detail of a tableau vivant and the clarity of retrospection.
The Four Seasons gig was a coveted one, but Moccio sees it less as a career stepping stone than a series of essential learning experiences: how to read a room and cater to a crowd, how to subconsciously curate a vibe, how to slip into a space seamlessly and slide out gracefully. An artist can control the atmosphere of a space just as effectively from its outskirts as its center, he found. “I was the guy who was always behind the scenes,” he says, smiling at how far he’s come.
Scenes From a Velvet Room begins exactly as Moccio’s sets did: with the sweetly sad strokes of virtuosic fingers first touching keys. In the late fall and early spring, these melancholic meanderings coincided with the sunset, which suffused the atrium with soft, amber light. Conjured immaculately, this image persists for the entirety of Scenes’ opening track, “Beneath the Amber Hour.”
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