Sen Morimoto Is Finding More Possibilities in Doing a Little Less.
Sen Morimoto used to twist straightforward songs into something stranger. On their new album, Time Is On Your Side, the Chicago musician is discovering how satisfying it can be to let a melody run its course.
– WORDS BY CJ • PHOTOS BY Kaina Castillo + Courtesy of Sooper
For the video for “Chewing Gum,” Sen Morimoto bought chewing gum and Silly Putty and taught themselves stop-motion animation. The suggestion came from their brother. Morimoto had made music videos before, but this was another set of tools to figure out. With their fourth album approaching, they were editing the videos themselves, discovering that a few minutes of footage could demand as much attention as the songs. They sound amused by the rough edges. “I’m animating clay, and I’m like, ‘This is so bad that nobody could possibly think it’s AI,’” they laugh. “This is so shitty that it has to be like a child made this.”
On Time Is On Your Side, Morimoto sounds more comfortable leaving a melody alone than they once did. Across nine songs, the Chicago musician draws on jazz, soul, folk, hip-hop and pop, but the arrangements feel less inclined to demonstrate everything they can do at once. “Overthinker” leans toward folk, “Moves Like A Drunk” has a loose, swinging pulse, and “Chewing Gum” folds complicated rhythms into something unexpectedly playful. The record, released October 23 through Sooper Records, makes room for melodies to settle and thoughts to remain unresolved. After the restless, politically charged Diagnosis in 2023, it also finds them reconsidering what they want from making music, and how much of themselves they need to give it.
Diagnosis grew out of Morimoto confronting their participation in systems they had spent years questioning. They could understand why another musician might play a corporate-owned venue or compromise to get from one city to the next. It was harder to extend that understanding to themselves. “I’m not seeing an artist go on tour and they’re playing some Live Nation venue and I’m like, ‘Oh, fuck that band. They really sold out,’” they say. “I’m just like, you gotta make a living.” But was getting their own music heard worth doing things they did not believe in? After writing an album about those contradictions, they still had to release it into the same business.
They have settled on a practical, if imperfect, answer. Each release is a chance to try something and find out whether they can live with it. If an experience feels wrong, they need not repeat it. They are careful not to make their choices into a judgment of other working musicians, who may have little room to maneuver. They want to enjoy writing and recording without turning every subsequent decision into a test of their principles. On the new album, the urge to confront everything head-on has given way to living with questions that may never be answered.
One question concerns the personal information a musician is expected to provide. Morimoto remembers being puzzled, early in their career, by how some artists seemed to need an extraordinary family history or personal struggle to explain why their music deserved attention, while others could simply put out a record. They still wonder who decides when the music is enough. “Am I convincing people to care about this?” they ask. “Can they just go find the music if they want it, and can we call it a day at that?” They love discovering a musician with almost nothing written about them, although they admit they are poorly suited to such mystique. They would rather get to know somebody than perform the elusive artist.
That reluctance to impose a persona informs their production work. Morimoto has contributed to records across Chicago’s independent scene and beyond, but they describe their role as helping musicians articulate something they already hear. They are not interested in arriving with a predetermined sound and asking someone to fit inside it. “Let’s start from nothing. What do you hear next?” is how they describe the conversation. On Time Is On Your Side, their close circle includes co-producers Brok Mende and Kaina Castillo, drummer Ryan Person and guitarist Elijah Bradford. Morimoto wrote and arranged the songs, but the record belongs to a working musical community rather than an isolated studio exercise.
Confidence, they suggest, can matter more than technical knowledge. “Chewing Gum” plays with different meters moving alongside one another, but Morimoto does not describe that construction as a display of theory. Some of their favorite players cannot read music or name the chords they play; they simply know what they want to hear. They needed more formal understanding to reach that point. Learning how the parts fit together gave them the assurance to say, “I know this is wrong, but I know I like it, so this will be how the song goes.” Theory eventually allowed them to stop treating rules as instructions.
Their musical education was split between different places. They studied saxophone with Charles Neville, and associate the instrument with teachers, school and the pressure to develop technique. The other instruments came largely from home, where they learned by listening to their father’s CDs. Sitting at a piano still takes them back to playing along with Stevie Wonder records. As we talk, they mention that Castillo, their fiancée, has splurged on tickets for a Wonder show around their birthday. They initially balked at the price. Now they are delighted they are going. Records from different decades continue to turn up inside their own songs, less as references to reproduce than as music they have lived with for years.
Morimoto rarely makes an album from songs written within a single period, and Time Is On Your Side is no exception.
There is usually older material that suddenly belongs, alongside something written just before the deadline when the record reveals what it is missing. “Chewing Gum” was one of those last-minute additions. They decided the album needed a little sourness, “a little funk missing in the corner,” as they put it. Its busy rhythms bring a jolt to a collection otherwise more willing to take its time.
“Overthinker” traveled in the opposite direction, drawing on lyrics from “I Just Spoke to Mama,” on their 2018 debut Cannonball!. They often return to lines they wrote years earlier without quite knowing why they appealed to them. Sometimes they were simply words that sounded good. Later, with a different life behind them, they discover that they mean them. “I actually feel that way now,” they say. “I don’t know that I did then.” That became especially apparent while making a record about time: the same song could mean one thing in the morning and something else at night, or change between the first recording and final mix.
The experience has altered their relationship with the finished album. In the past, Morimoto would become consumed by a record, only to dislike it as soon as it was done. This one is less predictable. Some days they love what they hear; other days they think it is fine. Perhaps they are simply getting older, they laugh. When they were younger, they set out to make things they had never heard before, deliberately twisting straightforward songs into something stranger. They still love an unexpected turn, and suspect they will eventually tire of the new record’s restraint. For now, they take pleasure in hearing a clear idea through to its end. “There’s a lot less left turns,” they say.
Such decisions run against the pressure to optimize music for an increasingly measurable audience. They talk about musicians receiving data on which songs perform best and making more of whatever works.
Their own records have never followed that logic. Listeners often tell them, with varying degrees of astonishment, that they really did whatever they wanted. They take it as a compliment. What concerns them about an industry built around reproducing successful results is not a shortage of talented players, but the possibility that everybody begins with the same goal and arrives at the same kick drum, production choices and narrow idea of what a song ought to do.
The pleasure Morimoto takes in those imperfect videos is unmistakable. They see musicians taking renewed pleasure in making physical things, learning unfamiliar crafts and accepting visibly imperfect results. Morimoto is not forever modifying their saxophone setup; they say they have always played the instrument dry onstage. But they love starting projects they know almost nothing about, from claymation to cartoon animation, even if finishing them is another matter. The videos for Time Is On Your Side, like its hand-drawn sleeve, extend that curiosity. For “Chewing Gum,” it meant sitting down with the materials their brother suggested and figuring out, frame by frame, how to make them move.
