Seeking the Sun through the Clouds: Interview with Musical Duo SUM SUN
Nick Benton and Ilan Pomerance are the dynamic duo that make up the band SUM SUN. As the name suggests, their music inspires listeners to feel the magic of the moments when the sun finally peaks through the clouds. I discovered them through the serendipity that is the Spotify algorithm and became captivated by their sound.
I was curious - What is it really like to pursue the dream of being an artist? Benton and Ilan were kind enough to indulge me in an incredibly fun conversation where they spoke honestly about their journeys and what they’re learning along the way. We covered:
How they met (the instagram dm that started it all)
Their honest perspective on pursuing the dream of being an artist
How they handle uncertainty and doubt
What they’ve learned about releasing new songs and evolving their sound
How they’re unlocking their identity as a band
Their words of wisdom for future artists
Before you do anything else (including reading this interview), go give them a listen!
Note: The following interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length. While every effort has been made to preserve the integrity of the conversation, please be aware that the quotes may not be verbatim but reflect the essence of the dialogue.
How did you two meet? What led to the collaboration that would become SUM SUN?
Benton: Ilan and I met on Instagram about a year and a half ago. I found him when he commented on the post of an artist we both like, and I started listening to his music. I thought, “Damn, this is really good. I want to hit this kid up.” So I slid into his dms and we hit it off and started making a bunch of music on zoom. He was in Connecticut and I was in New Jersey so everything we did was on zoom. I come from a very pop/reggae background, whereas Ilan comes from a very dance music/pop background. We were just free flow making music. At the time, we were both doing a lot for other artists. After making a bunch of songs on Zoom, we decided to go to Joshua Tree and we just made a bunch of songs. We were intending to write things for other artists, but we just fell in love with what we made and the sound that we both brought to the table. That trip was essentially the birth of SUM SUN. We came out of it with 6 or 7 completely done songs, with probably another 20 that were on their way. We started just rolling them out and ended up writing a song called “Stereo” that was our first big release. That became the moment of, “Whoa, this is real. This music is being heard more than our past projects.”
Ilan, what did you think when Benton dm’d you?
Ilan: I checked out his music and I was super impressed. I think we were both interested because we each wrote and produced music for other artists. I think that was the initial lane where we both felt most comfortable. We realized pretty quickly, especially in Joshua Tree, that the sound had its own identity. We felt attached to it in a special way. Normally, when you're writing for other artists, you feel less attached and you're okay giving songs up. Some of the next releases that we're thinking about are some of the releases that we almost gave up. We're so happy we didn't because we were able to develop them into something we both love.
I'd love to get both of your perspectives on this. What's the most honest way you would describe the life of the artists? What is it like to be pursuing this dream?
Benton: It's definitely a sacrifice in a million different ways. A sacrifice to your bank account for sure. Everybody has their own way of doing it, but I had to learn the art of the side hustle to be able to have creative time. You definitely sacrifice time in your social life. At the end of the day, it's just all about sacrifice. The other side of that is the love you have for doing it that makes all the sacrifice worth it.
Ilan: Benton and I still work 9 to 5 jobs. Time management is everything. There are sacrifices in your social life, money, mental well being, sleep. It's very challenging to navigate in every way, but I think that you have to commit a hundred percent to it. You have to be psychopathically obsessed with the art and with creating and collaborating in order to be an artist. We're still learning what that looks like. We're definitely not pros. We learn every day how to create as much balance as we can.
Your new single, “Invincible,” just came out in December. The song talks about tackling challenges and coming out stronger. It made me curious to ask both of you - how do you deal with doubt and uncertainty?
Ilan: Being an artist is very vulnerable, whether that’s releasing music or performing live. We don't have an existing fan base. We're actively looking for fans and looking for people that can connect with the music. There’s a lot of uncertainty in that. I think committing a hundred percent to this is the only way we know how to feel some level of comfort. We're also in this together and that informs the creative writing process of the music. The whole point of writing songs as SUM SUN is to make music that people can connect to and that can lift them up.
Benton: We’re definitely making music to lift people up. But it's also about just being in a room and playing these songs and having the people in the crowd feel the same exact thing that we're feeling on stage. In terms of dealing with doubt, something Ilan and I do all the time is take a step back and think about where we were exactly one year ago. 9 times out of 10 the thought of that will be the extra boost we need to keep going.
Ilan: We make the music to be played live so that everyone in the audience can have an escape from all of the things that they're worried about, the things that are weighing them down. Hopefully, we'll all come out as friends after that one night. Hopefully, people will form their own personal connection to the songs. We don't want to tell you how to interpret any of the music.
I watched your live performance of “Memory” at The Monarch in Brooklyn before this interview. What have you two learned about yourselves from performing live?
Ilan: When we're writing the songs we're thinking about performing them to tens of thousands of people in a giant stadium. The reality is that we show up at the Brooklyn Monarch for 300 people and 150 of them are our friends and family. You would think that we’d get up on stage, not see thousands of people, and feel let down. But the actual fulfillment is not in the space that it's being played. It’s about being able to enjoy it with the people who can connect with it. It's not necessarily so much about how many people are there. Playing live is vulnerable. We might mess up, someone might say they don’t like a song and start talking to their friend. Regardless we’re up there having the time of our lives, learning about each other, experiencing the moment. It’s like we forget about everything and that ties right back into how we make music. Right after the show, we go into the studio, which is just in my bedroom or Benton's bedroom or zoom, and we say things like, “Remember that one moment and that one feeling we both shared when I looked at you? Let’s write a song about that. Let's have a conversation and see where it leads.”
Benton: I’ll piggyback off of what Ilan said. A lot of our songs are not insanely deep lyrically. They’re not gonna make you cry. They are interpretations of feelings. They are not too deep but they have a motion to them. In the live setting, you can just feel in the room that what we're performing to the crowd is being sponged up in a way. You can see it in the way people are singing along, the way they're moving, and the looks on their faces. It’s an affirmation that what we were going for sonically is resonating. We’re just scratching the surface on that and definitely excited to see what happens in the years to come.
Ilan: It's not necessarily that the music isn’t deep, but more that we're going for the feeling like Benton said. The goal is that anyone in the world, even if they don’t speak English, will be able to feel something from the songs. We're not trying to save the world in any way with our music, but we're trying to make somebody feel something just for a moment.
Benton: It goes back to the meaning of our name. We chose our name because sometimes all you need to feel better in life is the feeling of sunlight hitting your skin. That’s what our music sounds like to us and makes us feel like. We hope that other people get some sun from our music.
Given that you both started primarily creating work for other artists, what have you learned about releasing your own music? What would you say to someone that is scared to release their own stuff for the first time?
Ilan: When you’re about to release a song that you’ve heard 1,000 times, you’ll think, “I don't even know if I love this song anymore. I’ve heard it so many times.” You start thinking about writing new stuff that you’re more excited about. I think initially we were struggling with that feeling of not being satisfied when the song comes out. We’d be thinking, “Well, I don't really love it anymore. Do other people love it?” As our sound started to evolve, and continues to evolve, I think we're getting less and less of that, even though we're still listening thousands of times. We're falling in love with this sound and this process, and it's timeless. It’s not something we can get sick of as easily, and it feels really fulfilling to go in that direction and even write songs for other artists. Sometimes there are songs that you don't love that others can love, internalize, and make their own. Now that we have our own project there is something so beautiful about having our voice and our own decisions. Some of our songs have been played on the radio and it’s such a magical moment because it’s not someone else’s song. There is no else to credit other than ourselves and anyone else who's helped out. That’s the best feeling.
Benton: If I could go 2 years ahead of where I was at the time and would be able to talk to myself during every phase I’ve gone through of making music, I would have a long lecture for my younger self. The main thing I would say is that the all the songs you make and the bad songs you write will help pull the good ones out of you as you keep doing it. As you make more and more songs for a project like ours, you start to notice that there are less and less things that you want to critique about the song. Obviously, we could critique a million things, but there are fewer things, and the process becomes more of a regurgitation of what we love. You start to fall into the pattern with each song where you're almost creating your favorite song every single time. It comes from constantly recreating and refining.
Ilan: You fall in love with these songs, and you have to stay inspired and feel creative. Honestly, it's hard to do that all the time. When we're consistently trying to do something, we go in and we say, “It's okay if we don't have a hit song in 4 hours from now.” Or we say, “What if we had a good conversation? What if we just ditch everything and go for a coffee, or go on a run, or go to restaurant?” You find inspiration in the places you least expect to find it. You can't try so hard and take it so seriously, it should feel natural. There should be an organic development or evolution of an idea. There shouldn't be so much pressure. I think a lot of artists feel the pressure to be the biggest thing. We have a lot of artist friends that are doing really great and we're proud of them. We're trying to build a community of positivity. It's not a competition. I think a good message for artists who are struggling with feeling inspired is to stop putting pressure on yourself and stop thinking about what everyone else is doing. Go back to who you were when you were more naive with less life experience. What did that person love? What did that person want to be when they were older?
It sounds like you both have arrived at the place of just being who you are and saying what you want to stay, which is both simple and really difficult at the same time. You’re also zeroing in on your identity as artists with your message and sound. What do you think have been the biggest unlocks for each of you in getting to that point?
Benton: Before I met Ilan, I would do everything by myself. I rarely collaborated with other people. I had a mentality of feeling like I needed to do everything myself. When I met Ilan and we started making music together, I felt like my brain expanded ten times. To someone just starting out I would say: collaborate as much as you can with people that have the same vision as you because you will automatically grow ten times faster.
Ilan: Benton and I are different people who have different opinions, different tastes, and different ears. Sharing ideas and disagreeing and learning together is inspiring in itself. When you collaborate with as many people as you can, you see how people think, what their process is, and how they work. In doing that, you learn a lot about yourself. I think what Benton was saying was that before all he had was the ideas in his own head and there was no way for those ideas to bounce off something. There was no ability for the ideas to reflect off of something. And sometimes that reflection is what's so important in looking inside to see what you really want. I’ve seen Benton evolve like crazy. I think it was always right there in front of him. Sometimes I don’t even have an answer to a question he asks. It’s the process of him asking it out loud that naturally unlocks all of his answers. That’s what is special about collaborating.
Benton: It’s so much more exciting for me to work on something every step of the way as a team. I’ve come from previous artist projects where it was a one-man show and you don't have anybody to keep that fire under you.
Your answers to that question made me super curious. What are the biggest things each of you learned about giving and receiving feedback?
Ilan: I think my skin is so thick after being told you're not good enough. As an artist, you know that something like less than 0.001% of artists really make it. I'm no longer sensitive in certain ways and I’ve become more sensitive in other ways that have allowed me to grow. I’ve learned that every experience is just a learning experience. I’ve learned that not letting the devil on my shoulder have as strong of a voice in times where it doesn’t need to be is really amazing. That’s not to say any of it is easy.
Benton: Sometimes the answer is in feedback, and if you go into taking feedback with a closed mind, you might be pushing something away that could have a hundred percent changed everything.
For any person out there who wants to be an artist, what’s the biggest piece of wisdom you want to impart to them?
Ilan: Do it if you want to do it! If there’s anything out there that you want to do, you have to commit to it. There are a lot of times when you're doing something that you love, and you're not necessarily loving it in that moment, and you have to keep reminding yourself that there are going to be obstacles, but you have to stay true to the vision. Don't turn away from rejection.
Benton: Keep going. Be your true authentic self. At the end of the day, as long as you love what you're making, that's all that matters because there will come a time when other people will love it too.
