Moriah Bailey

An experimentalist, harpist, & songwriter, Moriah Bailey, formerly known as Sun Riah, was born in Oklahoma to a lesbian, leftist, liberation theology-influenced pastor/activist mother and a rural, conservative, creative and animal-loving father. Her family extended beyond her parents and their biological families; her family included the LGBTQ community that made up her mother’s church, women her mother dated, and people who lived with her family because they needed a place to go. Her first memories of live music were watching local, folk songwriters perform at coffee shops, community events, or protests. Bailey loved that music; it was clever, witty, personal, political, direct. Bailey’s music draws on these early influences but tends to be more indirect and metaphorical. Playing the harp, an instrument strongly associated with notions of purity and femininity, much of her approach - looping, layering, playing with ambiance, dissonance, and noise - has implicitly challenged many of these assumptions about her instrument. Known for her avant-garde, contemplative and genre-defying singer-songwriter style, Bailey released 2017’s Sitting with Sounds and Listening for Ghosts via indie tastemaker label, Keeled Scales, which Gold Flake Paint called, “spellbinding and crushingly personal.” Arriving December 2nd, her sophomore record, i tried words, relies less on experimental sounds, and instead, lyrically focuses on Bailey’s struggles to understand and make sense of definitions and expectations of femininity