Saya Gray played music before she could speak.
Raised in Toronto’s Beaches neighbourhood, the singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, producer, and bandleader was exposed to many genres of music from birth. Her Scottish Canadian father, Charlie Gray, is an acclaimed trumpeter, composer, and producer, who’s performed as a session/touring musician with the likes of Aretha Franklin, Tony Bennett, and Ella Fitzgerald. Her Japanese mother, Madoka Murata, is a classical pianist and founder-director of Discovery Through the Arts, one of Toronto’s largest independent music schools. Gray’s home was a crossroads of genres and influences, with the lines between family life and the professional world of music often blurred.
Gray’s career began at 16 when she played bass in the house band at a Jamaican Pentecostal church. Soon, she was recruited for professional gigs at nightclubs and festivals, before touring internationally as a bassist for Daniel Caesar and as musical director for Willow Smith. In 2022 she released 19 MASTERS, and in 2023 and 2024 she released QWERTY, and QWERTY II, respectively. With these lo-fi recordings, Gray introduced the world to her vivid, vulnerable sound, and earned high praise from The New York Times, Pitchfork, NPR, and Time magazine who named 19 Masters – written mostly through Gray’s iPhone’s Voice Notes app – one of the best albums of 2022. Gray has performed at the Montreal International Jazz Festival, Pitchfork Music Festival Paris, and Primavera Sound in Spain. Recently, she performed an NPR Tiny Desk Concert and was interviewed on CBC’s Q.
Select the image to access the YouTube video of the Saya Gray song “SHELL (OF A MAN)”
Though her 2025 release, SAYA, features various genres of music – often within one song – it’s surprising yet natural to hear a country riff on “SHELL (OF A MAN)”. “It was actually a sample of myself I had played,” she says. “I was sampling it on my MPC. I sped it up and did all these weird things and pitched it, and it was kind of an iconic moment.” Gray built the song around the riff, and ended by speeding it up so much she had to re-learn it on guitar.
Though the 10 tracks on SAYA can be broadly described as “experimental,” Gray’s blending of genres isn’t calculated. “I’m not a cognitive person when I’m writing,” she says. “For me, it’s literally like a transmission from some other being. I fully black out, and the song is done within 10 minutes. There’s no part of me that’s analyzing, or thinking. ‘I can have a jazz moment,’ or that I should put in a country moment. It’s just whatever fits the message and the lyrics and the energy of the song.” This unconscious approach is part of what allows her to move freely between styles.
Much of Saya was written in 2023 in Gray’s maternal homeland of Japan, following the end of a troubled romance. “I was living in an old bathhouse in Kyoto. I was in the rain for days, barely leaving, just going to cafés,” she says. “My life is not very spacious when I’m in the city. I’m constantly training, physically and mentally. It was nice to leave that, to not have any duties – to myself, or anybody else.”
With a guitar in the passenger seat, Gray drove around the country, stopping to write songs on her guitar while imagining the bass – which, at other times, is the instrument that kicks off her songwriting. “Usually if I’m not doing chords, I’m working with one note,” she says. “It means it’s usually more rhythm-focused, more bottom-end. So, I’m picturing the top end, with guitar. It’s visual, almost.”
“I fully black out, and the song is done within 10 minutes”
What is undeniably visual is SAYA’s arresting album cover, in which the artist’s makeup and hair nod to her Japanese heritage. “I was inspired by my great-grandmother, who was in Kabuki Theater and played [traditional Japanese instruments] shamisen and koto,” says Gray. (The koto also appears several times in the music throughout SAYA.) In the photograph, a metallic spiral – hung from the ceiling, not added digitally – covers her left eye. Gray credits her friend and collaborator Jennifer Cheng for both taking the photo and helping shape the concept.
“We had this idea of remnants – of who you are, of a house, a relationship, or a past life,” says Gray. “Jenn had the idea of putting objects in front of my face.” The objects, much like challenges in life, are obstacles to overcome. Just as Gray’s music blends cultures and genres, the cover art reflects this fusion.
When not on the road, she’s something of a recluse, reading as voraciously as she consumes music. “I read constantly,” she says. “I absolutely love Leonard Cohen, Margaret Atwood, Theodore Roethke, Edgar Allan Poe.” Her love for language often influences her songwriting, adding layers to the way she expresses ideas, particularly through double entendres and lighthearted wordplay.
Select the image to access the YouTube video of the Saya Gray song “LIE DOWN..”
In “PUDDLE (OF ME),” she sings, “You know there’s a puddle of me at your feet, isn’t that what you needed of me? / You know how obsessed I can get with your needle and thread pulling in and out of me.” On the surface, the song is about intimacy and repair, but it’s also about manipulation, with unmistakable sexual undertones.
“I’ve always loved the fact that we have these double meanings to words,” says Gray. “These metaphors of how we can use words, or not use words.” In “LIE DOWN,” she sings to her ex, “If I lie down in this life would you mention me / Would you mention me to your family / Or let my name fade to grey / I’ve been this way circa 95’ (nine to five).”
Though Gray’s profession isn’t a typical nine-to-five job, she laments certain aspects of her industry; namely, that so much is about algorithms and celebrity. In “CAT’S CRADLE!,” a one-minute piece, an automated voice says, “Since when has fame replaced great art?” Gray says, “There’s a reason why I use computer text-to-speech, a robot voice, because it’s so prevalent now, you have to be so exposed all the time. You can’t focus on your art.”
She misses the anonymity and freedom that artists once had, before the pressure to constantly over-share, down to details like what you had for breakfast. “I feel I’ve struck the balance now of being on when I have to be, or when I’m out,” she says. “I’ll give people what I feel comfortable giving, and no more.”