We sat down with Vlad Holiday the day after his first show in Mexico City, still buzzing from the night before. We talked about nostalgia, his love for old gear, and the passion that has kept him making music all these years.
Last night was your first show in Mexico. How did it feel? Did anything about the crowd or the whole experience surprise you?
It felt really, really good, I’m still a bit in shock from it. The crowd was crazy, and I guess I wasn’t expecting it to be quite like that. Meeting everybody after the show was very emotional too. I’ve never experienced anything like this.
Going back to the beginning, do you remember the first time music really moved you?
The first thing that comes to mind is a record player we used to have when I was really young, back in Romania where I grew up. I remember listening to Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, and something about that just moved me.
What made you pick up the guitar in the first place?
I think it was something that intrigued me, and it seemed like a fun thing to do, but I became completely obsessed with it right away. My brother and I bought a bass and a guitar, and I was going to play bass because I thought it would be easier, but then we swapped for some reason. I was 12 years old when I caught the bug, and I’m still obsessed with it, which is kind of crazy. It was a long time ago and I’m still so obsessed with the instrument itself and everything around it. It’s a beautiful thing.
After playing guitar for so many years, what finally made you step up to sing?
I was in some bands in high school where other people were singing and I was just playing guitar, and eventually, as people do, they stopped playing music, because you have to be a little crazy to keep doing it for as long as I have. When everybody around me quit, I thought, well, I should probably learn how to sing.
It took me a few years to find my voice, both my actual voice and my writing, and even my guitar playing. But it was out of necessity, and that’s what made me step up to the mic, because I knew I wasn’t going to stop doing this. It turned out to be one of the best things that happened to me. Singing is so much fun and so expressive, it’s really an instrument in itself, and I’m just very lucky that I get to do it.
Your songs have that vintage sound. Where do you think it comes from? When did you realize you wanted your music to sound like that?
For some reason I’m just drawn to certain antiques and energies from the past. I realized later that my grandma is like that too, and she told me, “Yeah, you get that from me.”
Ultimately, when I write music, I just try to follow my gut wherever it tells me to go. I don’t have a plan to do a certain thing; it just kind of happened, because I go with whatever feels good.
How did you fall into vintage equipment? Was there one piece that started it all?
At first it was vintage guitars, amps and pedals. Then a friend of mine, whose band I played in for a little while, gave me a tape delay for my birthday, a newer model of the Echoplex. I had been producing for years at that point, but I could never really afford gear like that, so I was mostly working in the box with plug-ins and whatnot. Hearing that tape delay and being able to physically just fuck it up changed a lot for me, and I became obsessed.
Then came microphones, tape machines, all of it. At the end of the day, I think I’m drawn to a lot of this stuff because it reminds me of things I’ve heard in my past.
I’m a sucker for nostalgia. It’s a very powerful emotion to invoke in anyone.
If you could sit in on any recording session from that era, which one would it be?
Damn, that’s a tough one. It would probably be pretty cool to be in the Beatles sessions, but I’ve also always wondered what it was like with Sinatra and that gigantic orchestra. I would love to be a fly on the wall there.
An artist’s creative process says a lot about their art. How does a song usually begin for you?
It’s different a lot of the time, and I try to keep it that way, because when it becomes too much of a formula it starts to feel weird. The goal is to channel inspiration when it comes. It feels like it’s coming from somewhere else, and you’re just trying to channel it the best way you can.
Sometimes that means I get in my studio, start noodling on the guitar, and begin recording, layering and making a drum beat. A lot of the time it starts with lyrics I jot down every now and then, sometimes even when I’m half asleep, in the morning or at night, because things become a little more vivid in that state and I like writing from there.
And when I’m out drunk with my friends, I keep a note on my phone with a lot of funny stuff in it. Sometimes when I’m working on a song, I’ll pull it up, see something, and it takes me somewhere.
We live in a world that expects artists to release constantly, and that takes away the slow, natural flow of creativity. How do you take your time and protect yourself from that rush?
I just take my time. I don’t really try to, I’m just pretty slow, and I’m very careful about making things exactly the way I want. When you work hard on something with tunnel vision, you lose perspective, so I need to step back and come back to it half a year later. Then, in a second, I’m like, oh yeah, I know what this needs.
In that sense it’s a pretty long process for me, especially because I do almost everything myself. I’m trying to step away from that a little and have an engineer in the room, so I can lie on the floor instead of being the IT guy behind a computer.
At the end of the day, the music industry is built for people who just pump shit out all the time, and there’s a place for that too, but that’s not me. Maybe because of that I have a certain ceiling, but it doesn’t matter, because it just feels icky to me not to put everything I have into the music.
Your story involves a lot of moving. Where does nostalgia come from for you?
There are so many versions of that for me. I moved to America when I was 10, so my life in Romania feels like a weird dream, like it isn’t real and it was almost somebody else. When I see videos of myself as a kid speaking a language I can barely understand now, well, I can understand it, but whenever I catch a glimpse of that… Family life back home wasn’t always great either, so sometimes there are negative versions of it too.
And sometimes a scent or something literally brings you right back somewhere. It’s a crazy thing, the way the mind connects everything is pretty wild.
History and context shape so much. Growing up in Romania during that period, how has it shaped your understanding of censorship and creative freedom?
It has definitely shaped me, and I write the way I do and act the way I do because of all of that. Everybody’s path is different and everybody’s perspective is a little different, and I don’t know anybody else who grew up in Romania and is now a musician living in Nashville, Tennessee.
I was a little too young to really comprehend it. When I was born, they killed our communist leader on live television, which is kind of wild, but it was more something I learned about when I was older.
Moving to America shaped me too. We had a dream of what that would be like, and we arrived in September 1999, and then September 11th happened while I was living right by there. It was a weird time to be a foreigner in general, there was a lot of “go back to your country” everywhere, and that shaped me a lot.
What’s something music has taught you that nothing else could?
How important it is to connect with other people, and last night was a perfect example of that. I’m not necessarily the most social person, especially when I was younger, but there’s something about connecting with people on a certain level, and the way music can do that.
It makes me feel like that’s the purpose of life. It just makes things make sense in a weird way.
I can’t even really describe it, but it’s a beautiful thing. It’s wild and very visceral, because you can actually feel it. Certain frequencies literally change something in you, the sound floats through you, and it’s very physical. And when the lyrics speak to you as well, nothing else really does that.
What do you hope people feel when they’re alone with your songs late at night?
Whatever they need to feel. Everything that they need to feel.
What’s next for you, and what are you most excited about?
I’m working on a new album. I just put out a song and I’m going to try to release another one soon, which I’m really excited about. I also have a big headline tour next year, all over the US and some of Canada, and then Europe and the UK, and hopefully I’ll be coming back here too. I just love playing, that’s my favorite part of music.
To close, I always like my last question to be: what does music mean to you?
It kind of means everything. It’s like a language that everybody speaks, and even if you don’t speak the same actual language, it’s one of those things that can connect people in a way that’s really hard to describe. That’s my favorite thing about it.
Credits
Photography: @gael.diaz19 @christ.stovsky
