For Musician Morgan Saint, Fashion Is Where She's Her Most Playful

Morgan Saint is feeling freer than ever before. In the process of making her forthcoming album, Out Of The Blue, the New York–born singer, songwriter, producer, and multi-instrumentalist has finally come into her own, resulting in her most creatively fulfilling and joyous project to date.

"[Out Of The Blue] is a lot about love," Saint tells me during a recent trip to Los Angeles. The artist is barely out of the deep creative haze of working on the album when we connect. She still hasn't fully processed what she's made yet, but she knows it's something special. The release marks an exciting pair of firsts for the 27-year-old: her first full-length project following a string of EPs and her first collaboration with her wife, Carley Ridersleeve, who is also a musician. A true labor of love, Out Of The Blue is a product of the couple spending the last few years working together on every aspect of its creation, from writing and producing to the creative direction and visuals.

We hear the fruits of that partnership in full effect with the latest single "Kiss." A departure from Saint's moodier fare, the fun and dreamy pop track is about the butterfly-inducing feeling of falling for someone and crossing that threshold between friends and lovers. It's a feel-good dance bop featuring the artist's breathy vocals. If the song itself feels light and airy, its accompanying video, with its angsty and reckless visuals, is a nod to the couple's more complicated beginning. The juxtaposition hits on an overarching theme for the album—the contrast between light and dark and finding the beauty in both.

In a Who What Wear exclusive, Saint breaks down what went into the making of "Kiss," including her vision for her looks in the video, and where she wants to take people with this album.

Your full-length debut, Out Of The Blue, is coming out next year on Valentine's Day. How does this album reflect where you are as an artist and personally?

From a personal point of view, it's been so fulfilling to make this album. It's been a really intimate process. I've always created in an intimate way, but this has literally just been my wife and I, and in the process, we started our own label. [It's] just been a really awesome time getting a little older and honoring my space to be creative. In terms of musically, we've made it just us two, so it's been really gratifying to be creative on our own terms and just really live and breathe the music we're making and to be able to take our time with it and really hone in on the world. It reflects me letting more good and love into my life. I'm really excited about it.

Was a Valentine's Day release intentional?

It was semi-intentional. Originally, we were going to go with a more Valentine's-esque single with the album coming out, but that got switched around, and now, it's the title track that is coming out the same day, so it's highlighted with the album. "Out Of The Blue" ended up being such a love song, and the title represents a few different things to me. It's about falling in love with someone out of the blue, and it hits you really fast, so it's become even more intentional as time has gone on. The album is being finished up, and it's definitely a lot about love, so it definitely lines up. It's fun to lean into that theme.

Where are you wanting to take people with this album?

I feel like my main goal with this album is to make something really honest and something that you can equally dance to and could be in the club with you but is also there when you need to have a really good cry—that "dance while you cry" vibe. I love songs that do that to you. Depending on your mood, you can either do one or the other with it. That was definitely a big goal with this music.

You worked closely with your wife, Carley Ridersleeve, on the creation of this album, from the writing and producing to the creative direction and visuals. How was that process for the two of you?

It's amazing. Everything I am not as good at, she's amazing at, and that goes both ways. We really work well together in that way. I'm so grateful to have her, and we can be each other's mirror. She really helps me get across what I need to get across because she knows me so well. It's less about her giving me too much of an opinion but really just hearing me talk and showing me what I'm already saying. There will be times where I'm so frustrated about a part of a song we're working on or a part of myself that I'm wanting to change, and … when it's yourself, it's hard to see sometimes. It's nice to have her to be like, "You keep saying this, this, and this to me, or you keep trying this. Maybe you're trying to [do] this." It's like, "Yes, you're so right!" It's just nice to have that person there that can really help you pull out the truest parts of yourself.

On the flip side, it's stressful and all-consuming because she's also an artist, and we also have been working on music and visuals for her. It's been a crazy whirlwind the last couple of years, starting a label and everything, so it can be stressful at times and sometimes a little hard to find the line between work and not. But it's honestly amazing. I feel forever grateful that we can do this together. Any stress gets outweighed by being able to do this with her.

You've talked about the theme of the album being this dichotomy between light and dark and how they play together to create something beautiful. Can you expand on that?

I moved back to my hometown toward the second half of making this album, and I was so anxious to move home. I hadn't been home since I left for college, so it was a little nerve-racking coming back, but it really helped me round out the album. I go to therapy, so I'm always thinking I'm through this part of myself that I was struggling with or I'm past this problem that I've worked so hard to get through or this trauma that happened to me when I was younger, and then I'm back in my hometown, and I'm feeling all these things again. I was like, "I thought I was past all of that." It was difficult at first, but it helped me heal even more from things that I thought I was healed from. I'm realizing it's this cycle that you just keep having to readdress and rework through. In that, it made me realize this dichotomy between light and dark. There have been times in my life where I leaned more toward the darker side—the struggling and feeling hopeless and the mental health things a lot of [us] struggle with. And then there are moments where I feel pure joy and happiness and endless gratitude, and I'm able to see things through just a light and beautiful lens. I could never understand why it always had to be one or the other. Now, I have found that there is beauty in both, and how they come together is really what makes me creative and feel it all. It's not a bad thing. It's a beautiful spectrum of emotion. It goes with the "dance while you cry" thing; there's beauty in everything. Without the light and dark, you wouldn't know how to experience either one.

Tell me about your new single "Kiss" and the meaning behind it.

It's really about falling in love with my wife. We have a long history. We were friends first for a really long time, and we always had these really strong feelings. We were with other people at different times, and we were young, so we were trying to understand what these strong feelings were. It's really about that moment before you kiss. It's that tension buildup. You know it's coming, and that in-between moment is when you feel all these feelings and fall for somebody. It's a fun, light song. I guess I lean a little more emotionally deep in a lot of my other music, so it was really fun to depart from that and have fun with this song.

The reason I'm putting it out with the album announcement is that so many people have gravitated toward it. Do you ever have those moments where you are emoting and you don't even know what you're saying or what you're doing? And then you step away, and you're like, "Whoa, what was that?" That's what it feels like to make an album. You are so zoomed in on your emotions and creating, and then you zoom out, and you're getting asked questions about it, and you're like, "Wait, what did I even make? What was I even saying with this?" I'm still trying to zoom out as we speak, so as you're asking me these questions, it's like all of the songs feel so strong. They are my babies, but I don't even know what these babies are. Everyone I played the album for, they all really loved "Kiss," and I love it too. It feels like a really fun song that a lot of people can relate to if they've fallen in love or even if they've had a crush. It's a universal feeling. I'm excited for it to come out, and I think it will be fun to perform.

Let's talk about the "Kiss" video. What is your starting point when creating visuals for a song?

When I'm making songs, a lot of times, I'm seeing things [in my head], and then it's like, "Okay, what's feasible here? How can we actually make something that captures that emotion?" With "Kiss," in particular, I've been back in my hometown, and it's just my wife and I working on these visuals, so we're limited to a certain extent with the tools at our disposal. It definitely required us to be creative. The song is on the lighter side, and it feels very euphoric to me—that moment when you're falling in love and nothing else matters—so I wanted to create a visual that… I don't want to say juxtaposed that feeling, but my experience falling in love was more complicated. She was my best friend at the time. We were both in other relationships, so I was feeling all those euphoric feelings when I was around her, but then we would both leave each other and were left with all these sad, darker feelings. Although [the song] feels euphoric because that's truly what I was feeling, on a personal side, it was paired with all of these confusing emotions. With the video, I wanted to capture a little more of that angst that I was feeling. To me, [the video is] the other half of the story that maybe isn't as obvious in the song. The light and the dark, it exists so strongly inside of me. This is really about me embracing all the emotions—the good, the bad—and finding the beauty in all of that.

What were some of the visuals on your mood board for this video?

That's a tough question because I'm always spending a lot of time in my head. I know this is a really weird thing, and my wife is so confused by me because I do this, but I create and mood-board in my head. I'm a visual thinker. When I go to bed at night, I'm rearranging rooms in my head. I'm putting outfits together. I'm seeing the video unfold, and then I'm trying to communicate to my wife what I'm seeing in my head, and that's hard. Once I have the essence of the video in my head, I'll go on Pinterest and try to find visual references that can help her understand what I'm seeing.

I wanted it to feel like a lot of these moments that I did have with my wife when we were friends and having these strong feelings. We would always be hanging out and really doing nothing but enjoying each other's company. I wanted to capture that young, reckless energy we had. We would just mostly hang out, smoke, and chill and kind of escape from life together, so that's what I wanted the essence of the video to feel like.

You have about five different setups in the video: the spray-painted chair outside, the roof of a building, the retro car, the orange wall with the hole, and through the window with the spray-painted blue heart. Can you talk a little about the meaning behind these choices?

A lot of the time my wife and I spent together [early in our relationship], we lived in the city, and we've since moved out to the countryside. I was just looking to bring in some of those slightly more industrial elements even though we're not in the city anymore. The spray paint just happened. I found that chair on Facebook Marketplace, and I thought it was really cool and could be incorporated into the video somehow. I'm always looking to make things more me, so I was like, "Maybe I can spray-paint this and see how it comes out." My creative process seems to be not spur of the moment because there's a lot of thought and energy in my head that goes into it, but I like to try and give myself a little freedom to play, and there's a lot of that in this video. I wanted for it to feel free, so I wanted to make sure that when I was making it I was letting myself be free in the creative process. The spray paint on the chair was a last-minute decision, but I love how it turned out. There [were] a lot of fun, spur-of-the-moment decisions made, but I'm happy that it felt free like that.

You self-styled the video as well. Do you have a fashion profile or aesthetic for this particular album/song, or is it an extension of your personal style?

I think it's a combo of both. What's fun about making an album is… Even if it's not 100% intentional, you do start … building a world with the music, and that starts to inform the visuals. They inform each other, and then you're in the center of those things as a character. But it really is a pure extension of me. It's a great excuse when you get to do this to be creative with your personal style and continue to evolve. It's just been a natural evolution to this time period, how I'm dressing. I'm constantly evolving, and this is just the current evolution. What's been really cool about this whole body of work is it's a lot of me coming back to myself. I feel I'm closer to my 5-year-old self than I've ever been in my life, and to me, that feels really good. I'm seeing a lot of things that I used to wear when I was younger pop back up, things that I was interested in when I was younger that maybe I've rejected or haven't revisited.

I want to talk about all your statement accessories in the video: the large cross earrings and necklace, the big furry hat, and the oversize studded belt. Are you a big accessory person in your everyday life?

I am. I guess I'm always pretty casual, and in terms of accessorizing, I'm not walking around the house every day in those things necessarily, but I love being creative through accessories. When I do get dressed, I like making a statement, whether I realize it or not. I just love playing with fashion. It's so fun. I am a very sensitive person, and I'm super deep. I can zoom in a lot like I was saying, and fashion is my place to be lighter and play, and that's where the playfulness comes out for me. I guess it just happens naturally when I'm getting dressed for videos. I like wearing things that make people think, like the cross. I've been leaning into that theme. People are like, "Are you really religious or something?" … No, I'm the opposite really. I mean, I'm super spiritual, and I believe there is so much out there that we don't know, but it's a symbolism I'm gravitating to right now for whatever reason. I think this is all just about letting myself be really free and playful and create without worrying about anyone or anything. That comes with me stepping away from the major label system for now and starting my own label and making this music—just my wife and I—without any noise in between. That has really aided in me being able to create in that way, and I'm loving it. I've actually had to train myself to not question things. When there are a lot of people around and opinions, it can get really noisy, and it's hard to even be creative in that way. For me, when I'm most creative, I'm just really in tune with myself.

When you are self-styling, where are you sourcing your looks?

It's a combo. I'm definitely pulling from my own wardrobe sometimes. I can't tell you how much I love eBay. I love the idea of buying something that has life to it, so I buy a lot of vintage and pre-owned. It's incredible what you can find out there. I use Etsy. I also shop for new things online, too, [and will use] things that have been gifted to me by friends of mine that make clothes or designers that I really like and connect with.

Check out the video for Morgan Saint's "Kiss" below.