Interviews By Dan and Uma: Major Moment, P2
Uma Jumps In To Grill The Boston Band On Their Favorite Animals
Today, we present Part Two of our in depth interview with nu-metal band Major Moment
In yesterday’s interview with the Boston-based indie band, Major Moment, the four members discussed their background and history, how they came together as a band and what its like being an indie band. You can read Part One here: Major Moment at Day By Day, Part One
The band consists of Andrey Borzykin - vocals / synths; Sasha Razumova - vocals; John Williams - guitar; Steve Matin - drums
Today, Uma steps in and we conclude with a candid discussion about some of their favorite animals and what’s it’s like for Sasha to be the only girl in a band. The band dropped their first full length album yesterday. There’s also some gear talk about performing live. And as always, please visit the band’s website and social media. Here’s their website: Major Moment
Have a listen to one of their most recent releases, “Married” and then enjoy Part 2 of the interview.
Interviews By Dan & Uma: Major Moment
Uma Szczesny: What does the band’s name, Major Moment, mean to you? How did it come about?
Andrey Borzykin: We wanted to have a relatable and almost universal name. When Linkin Park came up with their name, the idea was that there’s Lincoln Park anywhere you go in the US, so everyone thought they’re from the area. Similarly, we wanted everyone to think of the same moments we’ve all shared (the pandemic, for example), yet also think of something that’s personal and unique to them.
Sasha Razumova: Right, we are sharing our own stories and experiences through music, but the way you interpret them is up to you, so we feel like the name reflects that. Also, in a grand scheme of things, the goal is to inspire you to have and look for more major moments in your life. 😉
Uma: Can you all think of a Major Moment in each of your lives?
Andrey: Positive - meeting Sasha. Negative - learning of Chester Bennington’s (of Linkin Park) death.
Sasha: Both of those apply to me as well. That moment I met Andrey changed my life and I’m so grateful! Omg, I have so many good ones… from winning the tournament in Italy to seeing the sunset at Haleakala with Andrey to seeing people sing back to us at our shows. I live for moments like that!
Steve Matin: I actually have one from less than a year ago. I was working as a drum tech for Sonic Symphony Orchestra at the time. They were playing a sold out show at Boston Symphony Hall. I was in the back room with band members right before they did the walkout - then all I heard was 3,000 people roar in excitement; I mean completely lose their shit. Many people have been a part of a huge crowd, but to be on the receiving end of that was a surreal experience.
John Williams: It's too hard to just choose one moment that’s more major than any another, but certainly getting married to my very best friend, buying a house, and joining an amazing band are just some of the best experiences I have felt. Simply just being on stage playing for people that enjoy your music is truly a feeling I just can't get over each time.
Uma: How did you decide on the green and purple colors of so much of your merch?
Andrey: Great question! The green color was introduced in this album cycle by our artwork designer Kevin Moore, green goes well with the growth theme of the album. Sasha is fully responsible for the purple theme going on. I’ll let her answer how it happened.
Sasha: Haha, that is so true! For the longest time I was obsessed with an idea to color my hair and when I finally decided, purple seemed to be the perfect choice to start from! I absolutely fell in love with it! So when we were getting ready for the show (I think it was that show in Hampton with Kingdom Collapse), we had a photo shoot scheduled right before that and I thought, why don’t we all have a purple accent in our outfit? Everyone embraced it and here we are! 😊
Uma: Do any band members have any pets? What are their names?
Andrey: Me & Sasha can’t really afford to have any pets, it’s just time-prohibitive.
Sasha: John has like 9 pets though, which is insane!
John: Indeed I do have 9 pets! I have two amazing cats named Muppet (her real name is Zoey but Muppet has stuck) and Ellie (Ellie is a little cuddle demon). I have a very happy dog named Spencer who just endlessly sees joy in everything. I have four birds: two budgies (parakeets) named Biscuit and Pickle, who are madly in love, and two cockatiels named Rosey and Beatrice, who squabble like an old married couple but panic if they're more than five feet away from each other. Last but not least, I have two snakes: a milk snake named Milky (I know so creative) and a ball python named Rasputin (well really Raz, based off the name of the player character in the game Psychonauts). Raz is my oldest at 9 years old, Ellie and Spencer are both 7, Muppet is 6, Rosey is 4, Beatrice and Milky are 3, Biscuit and Pickle are around 2-3.
Uma: What are your favorite animals?
Andrey: I like all sorts of fluffy unusual characters. Raccoons are my serious obsession, but I also like possums, foxes, otters, beavers, groundhogs, etc.
Sasha: I’m a cat person, for sure! Andrey definitely made me like raccoons, they’re so cute and very intelligent. I like sharks, haha. They’re so gracious and ominous, I love it. Would love to swim with one at some point, to add to the collection of my major moments.
John: I love all my animals equally. But I'm also a big fan of opossums, they're awesome.
The interview switches back to Dan now:
Dan Szczesny: The first song I heard from you and the one that really made me tune into the band was “Toxic.” Still my favorite song of yours. Can you talk a bit about the creation of the song, and how you wrote and recorded it? It has such a catchy chorus hook!
Andrey: The instrumental demo of “Toxic” was actually made back in 2007-2008, shortly after I moved to the States. We have quite a few songs that I developed from those old demos me & my friend created in our tiny shared room in Allston MA. We even incorporated some samples from the MP3 that survived on the hard drive for 17+ years. Working on it in the studio wasn’t the easiest, it just never felt like we were on the right track lyrically, and I felt like the hook is not as strong, so we kept re-working it. Usually we bring at least half-cooked ideas to the studio, but with “Toxic” it was a different story. We were in the studio working on something else, got done early, and decided to try writing lyrics on the spot for the first time with our producer Kevin. Boy, did we get humbled right away hahaha. After a day of writing we couldn’t really come up with much, so we decided to take it home and work on it more. Simplifying it was definitely the key, to the point where Sasha was starting to doubt me, questioning if the lyrics are too simple. But after we laid down rough vocals, it was obvious that we were onto something. It was also one of the first times where I dabbled in extreme vocals on the record, so that paved the way for the new chapter in Major Moment.
Dan: I’m also curious about the filming of the OMV for Victim, another hard driving riff driven song with some great harsh vocals! What was it like filming in NYC?
Andrey: It was stressful, especially filming the storyline, but also fun, and we’re super-happy with what we were able to accomplish. Always wanted to film a music video in NYC, and we’ve compiled quite a list of iconic locations for our video. I think Steve got a parking ticket in Manhattan but it was all worth it.
Sasha: Victim actually has two music videos, both official. One has only the performance part, and the other one is story-based. The funny part is we filmed so much content that when we came back and arranged all scenes in the sequence it was 13 minutes long! 😂 Obviously, nobody’s gonna watch a music video for 13 minutes, so we had to cut down the narrative. Still thinking of releasing the cut scenes at some point, and our fans on Patreon will be the first to find them.
Dan: Can you tell us a little about your writing / producing process? Do one of you do the lyrics and the other the production? How does the creative process work?
Andrey: I feel like the process keeps evolving, but usually I’d start an instrumental demo, arrange it, write lyrics, then Sasha would help me refine it, then we’d take it to the studio for pre-pro with our producer Kevin Billingslea to get it where we all feel happy about it. Writing “The Pain That Makes Us Grow”, I encouraged Sasha to start a few ideas herself and then I would help her develop them. This is how songs like “Married”, “Voices” and “You’ll Never Know” were born. On our second album a few ideas came from me & Sasha again, but also from our ex-guitarist, and Steve also brought one fully fleshed out instrumental demo that became one of the strongest songs on the album.
Steve: To add to the above, I'm a big fan of soundscapes; defining a song with a certain kind of ambiance before anything. The example Andrey is referring to started with a bouncy, arpeggiated synth patch that I really liked; then everything was kind of built on top of it. The vocal melody was actually one of the last things that got introduced into the song. It seems very unusual when you look at how many pop songs are composed, but it works really well for me and certainly for this specific track.
Dan: Can we get nerdy about some gear for a moment? Tell me about the pad that Andrey plays? What is that, some sort of synth keyboard or pad. Looks like something similar to what Joe Hahn from Linkin Park plays, like a programming pad of some sort?
Andrey: It’s both. I use a MIDI keyboard - AKAI MPK 249, that plays synth patches I have programmed in MainStage (Apple’s software, similar to Logic, but designed for live performance). And then there’s AKAI MPC Live Sampler / Workstation that I use for some finger drumming or launching samples that I feel are just awkward to be played on keys. Technically speaking, I could’ve just used the keyboard’s built-in pad with MainStage, and maybe I’ll streamline my setup in the future, but I just don’t have time to re-program everything. Our live set up was built over several years, and we keep improving it every month, currently we can perform 18 songs in pretty much any order we want, so we have the flexibility to create unique set lists and not play the exact same thing every night, which keeps our fans that attend multiple shows in the row excited.
John: I try and keep my setup as easy and less complicated as possible to prevent having issues with setting up or connecting thing. I use a Quad Cortex for my amp sims which connects midi and line out to our mixer. The midi signals tell my Quad Cortex what scenes/patches to use so that I never have to worry about hitting the foot switches myself.
Dan: I can’t talk about Major Moment without talking about your amazing swag and merch. Who is your designer and what’s the story behind your logo and branding. I’ve never seen a relatively new and indie band with such gorgeous merch.
Andrey: We worked closely with Kevin Moore (Soft Surrogate / Mindreader) on our branding, Sasha also leveled up as a designer, and a few shirts are designed by her. Our new shirt collection is designed by James Delvin.
We treat our band as a business, and want our listeners to not only have a piece of merch in their collection of 200 other band shirts, we want them to love it so much that they wear it every day. We want our merch to be comfy, stylish, so that our fans represent us anywhere they go. Everything we make passes our quality control check, we order from different manufacturers that we research and validate ourselves. We love our own merch to the point where we often keep something from the new arrivals for ourselves.
Sasha: Right, very proud of our team so far! Glad to hear our merch stands out, thank you! We’ll try to keep that bar high with any of our new releases!
Dan: Let’s talk about the June 20 (yesterday!) streaming release of your album? The album has been out of course, but now it will be available on all the music streaming services. What’s your hope and expectation for this new availability? Is it harder for an indie band to get their music up on these services?
Andrey: No, actually, it’s easier than ever for unsigned artists to release music nowadays, anyone can just pay $20 to Distrokid and get their music up on every streaming platform, there is pretty much no quality control. That’s a great thing, very liberating and artist-friendly, but also a problem at the same time. When there’s 200 000 songs uploaded to streaming platforms DAILY, how do you stand out from the rest of them? How do you break through the noise? Listeners are overwhelmed and fatigued by the amount of entertainment content (and yes, music is just one of the kinds) that’s thrown at them, often for free or almost for free. It kind of devalues art, if you think about it. 20-25 years ago people used to line up at the record stores, buying each album for $12-15. Now 99% of songs that ever existed are available for just $10-12 a month, or free on YouTube. Make it make sense, add inflation to the equation too.
What’s harder for indie bands is to get their music noticed, to receive any kind of editorial support from streaming services, addition to playlists, extra promo push - those things that bigger labels get on every single release.
It was our choice to release our album in a different way from what is traditionally accepted in the industry - 2-3 singles, then album release (both, physical and digital) & tour. We released a couple singles and made the entire 14-song album available on vinyl & CDs for those dedicated fans who want to support us. We then kept releasing singles every 6-9 weeks apart, and finally the whole album will be released on streaming on June 20th, but our biggest fans have been enjoying it for a couple years on physical media now.
I’m pretty sure this is the most effective way for us to release music currently. We’re also making our music available early on Patreon & Bandcamp. If it sounds like we’re asking people to pay for our music, that’s because we are. We’re a tiny self-funded self-managed and fully independent band, with no sponsors or labels, and the only way for us to grow this thing into a big touring band is by working hard and through our fans backing us.
By the time the album hits Spotify, almost every song on it already has at least 100K streams, with total streams on the album getting close to 5M, because we focused on promoting each song, giving each song a fair chance. Now all our fans get to enjoy the album in the most convenient form - on streaming, and it also gets introduced to new audiences. I hope people will notice the amount of work we put into it, and will understand this was just a proof of concept, there are much bigger things that can be achieved if we all work together. I’m very proud of what we were able to accomplish with this album, this is no joke for a small band.
Dan: Finally, what’s next for Major Moment? Working on new music? Fall touring? Where do you hope to be a year from now?
Andrey: All of the above! We have the second album fully recorded, and are working on applying finishing touches, then it will go to mixing & mastering. Kevin Moore is already finishing the artwork for it, we will announce everything and start pre-orders in the coming weeks. We have plans to play more shows all throughout the year, so stay tuned.
In 2026 we hope to go on an actual national tour, as opposed to doing short weekend runs. We’ll attempt to release singles on streaming more often, maybe once a month, so the second album will probably get fully released next year. While that’s happening, we hope to have another album or at least an EP ready to go. We have more plans than we have time to work on all of those projects, so hopefully our team grows, delegating tasks gets easier, and our capacity expands so that we can accomplish more things.
Interviews By Uma (and sometimes Dan) is a regular question and answer feature developed by ten-year-old Uma Szczesny and formatted and managed by her journalist dad. The column focuses on interviews between Uma and some of her favorite musicians, artists and teachers. Uma has interviewed the Canadian teen band Freeze the Fall, Ashley Suppa of Plush and Kat Leon and Johnny Tuosto of Holy Wars. For more information on Interviews By Uma, to read her archive or to propose or suggest an interview, email interviewsbyuma@gmail.com.
Just listened/watch "Married" video. Very well done, their voices really blend well. Have to see them at some point for sure...maybe in Concord. Wish I'd gone to Wally's.