In song: How Charlie got his girl

Brighton-based singer-songwriter Charlie Moss tells the tale of how he managed to persuade his girlfriend to go out with him on his new single I’m Not Leaving.
Brighton-based singer-songwriter Charlie MossBrighton-based singer-songwriter Charlie Moss
Brighton-based singer-songwriter Charlie Moss

Charlie admits it’s a title which might seem to have other significance in the current coronavirus lockdown, but it’s a song which predates the crisis.

“It’s a song about nostalgia and relationships and about all the emotions of falling in love for the first time.

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“It is about a young guy meeting this girl and she is playing hard to get and it is about him trying to get her to agree to go on a date with him.”

And yes, that guy is Charlie, and the girl, who Charlie has now been going out with for three years, is Kizzie.

“I just wanted to write a more upbeat song, a song that makes you feel good and makes you feel happy.

“We met working in a pub about four years ago, and we just clicked. We got on really well and we have both got a good sense of humour. I am quite a jokey person and I think you need someone who is quite similar to you in that respect.

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“It took me about two or three months to persuade her to go out with me.

“I kept trying! I think she is quite happy with the song. She finds it quite funny. She is a very, very tough woman. She only wants the best, and she finds it quite funny that I have immortalised the struggles that I had!”

Musically, this is Charlie’s fifth year in the business.

“I started off acoustically but it is only within the last year or so that I have discovered what I want to sound like. I would call it indie pop or dream pop.

“I feel like I spent the first three or four years of my music career trying to be someone that I am not, just trying to be the artists that I admired, people like The 1975 and Ed Sheeran. The more you go into music, the more you realise you are just not getting it right if you are trying to be someone else.

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“You have got to try to be yourself, and that’s what I have been doing for the past year, and I am much happier now that I am wanting to be me!

“I think you have to go through that stage where you have the initial inspirations and your initial idols, and going through that is important.

“But I would like to think that my sound has now changed, especially with the stuff that I am now putting out which feels definitely much more me.”

Inevitably the coronavirus shutdown is now having a massive impact.

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“I have had about a month’s worth of gigs cancelled already, and I had a show in Brighton which isn’t likely to happen.

“But I was incredibly lucky in that I went into the studio about a week before the lockdown, and I was lucky enough to get this single recorded.

“And now I can use this time to push out new music and hopefully give people a form of escapism and hopefully find something that people can connect with. I can record at home, but not in studio quality, but I can certainly write at home and make some demos.”

It is all about keeping the connection with people: “And that is what a lot of established artists are having to do now that they can’t gig and get out there.

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“They are having to try to stay connected with their fans through the internet now that they can’t liaise with their labels and with the promoters.”

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