Moments™
Moments™ - CMG
We're Moments™, a 5-piece band that plays a mix of Neo-Soul/R&B/Pop/Jazz originals. We’ve got Josephine (Lead Vocals), Brad (Bass/Drums), Nick (Keys), Victor (Guitar) and Remi (Drums/Bass), though we’re all multi-instrumentalists who like to trade instruments in all our jams.
For a bit of background, we all come from different parts of the globe: all the way from Indonesia, Paris, and New York. We got together last year and met at Spotify (where we all work), and although we're all doing very different things during the day (a brand designer, two software engineers, a data scientist, and a marketing manager walk into a bar…), we have an unstoppable chemistry when it comes to music and thanks to that we’ve built a bond inside and outside of the rehearsal room.
When Spotify opened up the jam room, it brought in a lot of musicians together. Josephine, our lead singer, has made friends with all of us individually and invited everyone to do a random jam one day and we all ended up having really good chemistry playing with each other and had a lot of fun. Initially we would play a lot of covers, and then we started to really evolve together and started making our own tunes and melodies, and now we write and play originals.
We were really just a group of friends who liked to jam—until Josephine brought us stickers and shirts with “Moments™” on them one day (which she had designed), which really kind of tied a ribbon on the whole thing and forged us into a proper band (in addition to our Instagram account, @momentstm_).
Because everyone has a pretty eclectic and different playing style, our music has become a melting pot of all our music tastes. There is always a push and pull between “Let’s make a song that sounds like a music theory nerd wrote it” and “Let’s write something simple and catchy”, so we hopefully end up somewhere nice in the middle. We’ve written music that feels closer to jazz/bossa (“Good for Me”), or music that feels more R&B/Pop (“CMG” and “Fool for You”). We try not to confine ourselves to a single genre, but just keep things interesting and organic through the jams that we have and seeing where they take us.
We wouldn’t have even met each other without the easy access to the rehearsal room at work. There is a very strong musician community at Spotify and everyone’s always supporting each other and attending internal shows and open mics, which are great venues to perform in an environment that isn’t too nerve-wracking. Also, being in the same building as the rest of the band for 8 hours a day makes it really easy to grab food, book a spontaneous jam during lunch, or get drinks after work just to hang out.
We have been pretty consistent with keeping in touch with each other, and now that things are opening up a little bit we’ve even been able to have social distanced jams in the park. But even through these quarantine limitations, we’ve managed to celebrate Josephine’s birthday, Remi’s birthday, Brad’s Birthday, and soon Nick’s birthday together either virtually or through social distanced hang. Unfortunately Victor is currently stuck in France so the only way we can communicate with him is through Slack or FaceTime. At the end of the day we’re all friends so we’re always chatting, sending each other stupid memes or new releases from artists who inspire us, or even videos of short riffs that we might have come up with on our own time (which could be inspiration for future songs!)
We’ve also gotten a chance to do a virtual performance for Spotify and got featured on the @spotifyjobs instagram, and since then we’ve recorded a couple videos remotely, where we each play a part in isolation and then mix them together in the end. This is actually a big effort, we all stayed up together conquering time zones which has really brought the band together for a common goal, in addition to helping us stay creative and connected!
Moments™ - Fool For You
Text, Music Videos, & Photography by Moments™