Focusing on the music of words
Words Jessi Devenyns | Photos Baptiste Despois
Experimental, psychedelic beats drive the soul of Los Coast’s melodies, but it is words that form the heart of their music. With frontman Trey Privott’s soulful voice arranged amid funky, energetic grooves, this genre-crossing music is built on little moments that call on listeners to pay closer attention.
Trey’s fascination with words began in childhood when he would scribble down enigmatic shapes approximating letters. “I used to just write and make up languages,” Trey remembers. These constructed languages eventually acquired their own encoded meaning and rhythm. “And then, I think I just started thinking of words as the music. Lyrics are the music,” he explains.
A thick black journal entitled “Sketches” holds scores of notes in graphical handwriting. Many of the notations are variations on a single idea that has been shaped through alternative sentence structures, literary devices, or syllables. But while his words are often simplified to match a melody hummed into his phone, they strive to offer complex insights into what it means to be human: to love and to connect spiritually.
“I play music to help people who are lost and trying to find themselves, [people] who are suffering or depressed,” he explains, emphasizing that acknowledging someone through connection is the motivation behind much of his work. “I think ultimately…in sharing a collective experience of love or joy or enlightenment, sometimes sadness…there’s connection.”
“How did we get here?” Trey asks of himself in the song Monsters from his debut album, Samsara. If the album title is any indication of Los Coast’s musical evolution, it’s been a meandering, uphill journey. According to Trey, “samsara” is a Sanskrit word that connotes the challenges inherent to living life. But facing these challenges can also be healing. Sometimes, that takes physically changing an environment such as when Trey found his way to Austin via Georgia nine years ago, bringing with him a lifetime of stories. “Even some of the songs that I’m working on for this [upcoming] record, I wrote in college,” notes Trey, who is now 34 and whose mature lyricism has established him as a respected psychedelic-soul vocalist.Although seasoned now, some of his ideas predate maturity. When he was 13, Trey received his first bass guitar, which was around the same era that he published his first poem. Listening to him describe these formative years, his tone conveys the power that words hold in his world and his work.
“I’m very emotional,” he shares. As a result, “when I hear people talk, I pay more attention to their emotion behind what they’re saying than what they’re saying.”
This approach radiates throughout Los Coast’s discography. From reflecting with hope on the oft-difficult odyssey that is life to imbuing images of toxic relationships with flippant humor, Los Coast’s music is just as much about how a song feels as what is being said. Those who listen will not miss the optimism in Trey’s approach to life and music.
“If there’s an agenda and if the agenda’s not peace and love and trying to bring people together, it’s like, what am I doing?” he questions with a smile.
Contact
loscoast.com
@loscoastofficial
What’s Next?
Los Coast intends to release its next album, Dharma Dreams, in 2024.
Power in Numbers
Los Coast’s jazzy, soulful rock ‘n roll is performed by a rotating five-piece set of instrumentalists.
