#[ he's got hundreds blocked on social media for trying to make a joke abt it fr ]

[ofgreyskies]

Shades of Grey: From Producer to Multi-Hyphenate Music Star

Published by Rolling Stone in April 2023

For Grey, there wasn't ever any option other than music. Since before he had even entered school, he had a love for the keys of a piano. "I think I knew from my first piano lesson that I was going to be making music for the rest of my life," he says. "I didn't grasp it then. A four year-old isn't thinking about what they're going to be doing in a week, much less decades down the line, but I think a part of me knew. That piano was my first love." After a childhood spent traveling, Grey got serious about music and committed to four years in Los Angeles as a music major at the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts, famously known for producing talent such as Phoebe Bridgers and Josh Groban, and for being the subject of the 2012 documentary Fame High. Grey immersed himself entirely in the Los Angeles music scene, attending open mics and uploading his original music to websites like YouTube and Soundcloud. "Throwing yourself so into it, it can be the make or break point. I saw people burn out and decide music or performance were better left as hobbies. That never happened to me. That's when I really knew, oh, yeah, I have to do this for the rest of my life."

When the offer came to join the music publishing company Blossom Music Group shortly after he turned eighteen, Grey decided against furthering his studies at Berklee or USC to jump straight into the workforce. During his time with Blossom, Grey contributed toplines and production to several tracks for American and Korean artists, including Korean pop powerhouse Eternal. "I grew up more in my first year working with Blossom than I did any other year before. It was getting all these crazy opportunities as a songwriter and having to continuously better my art."

Later that same year, Blossom's label arm Blossom Records released Grey's debut track "Put My Hands On You" featuring Anderson .Paak. "It wasn't the plan, right away, to jump into a solo music career, but when the chance came, I wasn't going to deny it." A few months later, Grey made his debut in South Korea with his first EP 130 Mood: TRBL, a reference to the racing number on James Dean's Porsche Spyder. "James Dean was one of the guys, along with Kurt Cobain, that I thought was the coolest growing up. I still do. That spirit of rebelliousness, of experimentality, that's what I wanted to bring to music, and to my life, so that's where the title came from. The EP itself, it was a love story, a story of heartbreak — isn't every love story a heartbreak story, really? I was eighteen, nineteen, and I wanted to cut my heart out of my chest and package it into something bigger than myself to make it easier to deal with. I think everyone feels that way after their first big heartbreak."

Grey continued his promotions as a steadily rising soloist, releasing music aimed toward the Korean market as well as music aimed toward the U.S. He continued to work as a producer under Blossom Music Group until they parted ways in 2017. Not long after, Grey reappeared as the main vocalist of pop-rock four-piece Deep Blue. "When I started working with the guys, something just clicked. I realized there was more music I could be making as a part of a band. My former label, they understood I'd grown in a direction away from them, so our parting of ways was amicable. I remember working on "Sorry", our debut track as Deep Blue, and it felt like magic. I'd always been a bit of a lone wolf in my work, so that support system and the creative pinball effect of a group... it's what I really needed. It's still what I need to this day."

"I loved bands growing up. Nirvana, Green Day, Queen... I mean, "Heart-Shaped Box", "Last Night on Earth", "Killer Queen", those were the songs I loved in middle school and high school. I should have thought of being in a band earlier." As Deep Blue continued to grow as a band, Grey's artistic interests also grew. He reignited his solo career alongside his role in the band in 2019 and has recently released his first studio album Moodswings In To Order. "Sometimes, I get asked why it's something I even have to do when I have Deep Blue. 'Why release a song solo when it could be given to the band?', which is crazy to me. There are some things I just want to explore on my own. Like MITO, it's something that makes more sense for me to do on my own." Grey has been open about the content of his recent Moodswings In This Order EP and Moodswings In To Order album tying into his own experiences with mental illness. "For a while, I thought it wasn't really relatable to write about my experiences with bipolar disorder or anxiety. I thought, 'what if people don't connect with that? Then I'll feel more alone in it than I already do'. It felt like a risk to bring this whole world I'd created to life because of that, but it's become something really personal and cathartic for me."

In addition to his ventures in music, Grey has been noted as a promising director for his work on his own music videos and those of idol groups True North ("Can't You See Me?") and Myworld ("Girls"). "I've been into filmmaking a long time, but it never seemed as in-reach as music did. I used to experiment with making my own little music videos to my favorite songs as a kid and I self-studied it as I got older. Getting to help out with the visuals of my first EP really planted the seed. It was the videos for "Instagram" and "Howlin' 404" that really sprouted everything, though. That's how I got the True North video offer. I'd worked on the song, so I had a vision in mind, but wasn't sure I was the right fit. When when we ended up getting into ideas, it actually matched me really well. I'm really inspired by darker imagery — horror, thriller kind of stuff, anything unsettling or raw, and how that reflects the realities of the human experience. That's what a lot of my MITO work is based around visually, too, obviously."

Grey is performing at Coachella as his major American festival debut this weekend and is set to embark on his first solo tour following that. "It's awesome. Live performance, to me, has always been the essence of all of this, the lifeblood, so to get to perform my music live for the next few months... that's sick. And we've got a lot of great stuff cooked up. I've been really involved in the staging and the creative directing. It's going to be more than just a concert."

#thefourprompt1 #[ ash started hating his stage name 2 seconds in when people started making fifty shades of grey jokes btw ] #[ he's got hundreds blocked on social media for trying to make a joke abt it fr ]