Watch as the cinematic world unfolds more like a film, in front of your eyes, with the current live show from Said The Sky. Across the dual worlds of Icarus and I, Trevor Christensen has crafted an experience that moves between vulnerability and release, intimacy and chaos, asking fans not just to hear the music, but to sit inside it. The first half of the night invites the crowd into something deeply reflective and cinematic before giving way to the cathartic release of energy that follows, a balance he says mirrors real life itself.
Ahead of his hometown headline performance at Mission Ballroom on May 29th, we caught up with Said The Sky to talk about the emotional architecture behind the tour, rediscovering inspiration through concept albums, and why bringing these two records to life in Denver feels more personal than ever.
In Conversation with Said The Sky
seradopa: You’re nearing the end of this tour, and now you’re about to bring it home to Denver. Looking back on the run so far, how has this experience felt for you personally?
Said the Sky: It feels great and gratifying. To see the albums connect with people, and to hear from people at these shows that they connected in the way I hoped.
Doing the two sets, I have never done that before, so starting it with just Salt and Silence, people could hate this. I have no idea. It’s really chill. People normally go to shows to dance and have fun, and this is not that kind of a set. It’s more of a sit-and-listen and experience this for a little bit – but it’s been awesome.
I’ve had some really cool conversations with people so far that have really enjoyed it, which makes me feel great. Yeah, so far so great!
seradopa: You’ve mentioned that this has been your favorite tour set you’ve ever built. What makes this tour feel different from your previous ones — both internally for you as an artist, and in the way audiences are connecting with it live?
Said The Sky: I think a big part of it was there’s some, there’s a flow in the second set that goes between the lighter, fun, pretty melodic stuff and some heavier stuff, and I’ve played sets where I’ve thrown in a little bit of the heavy stuff before, but it’s always felt in some way a little bit forced, where I’m like, I feel like I just need to, because the crowd’s gonna want this, so like I’ll try and squeeze it in there in some way, just so I can give that to them.
This is the first time where I was like, “No, I genuinely want to add this in,” because conceptually it feels like it makes sense with the story of Icarus, and the story that I wanted to tell, it made sense. Then going in and building the set out, it luckily came together in a way where I felt like no, this is like a cohesive story that’s happening between both things, and not just like here’s a little bit of heavy stuff. Okay, back to your regularly scheduled program of pretty melodic stuff, it’s nice that it came together really luckily, I think this flows easily to the next thing.
seradopa: Can you talk about more of the process of how you approach creating the journey of the set, from like the track selection to the pacing to the visuals, the motion flow, even before the tour began? And have you made any adjustments since the tour?
Said The Sky: Great question!
It’s tough. It’s really hard to do that, especially when you want it for a tour set. You’re probably touring an album, so you know what songs need to go, and you know the album’s got to be in the set. So, from there, it’s a bit of thinking. You just have to figure it out, and be like, “Okay, where do I want to start this?” Luckily for the set, the way the album opens with the song “Welcome Home” just feels so good and such a solid intro.
I had to ask myself a few times whether or not I was being lazy, because I can do that sometimes. The easiest thing to do is just to throw this in here. I don’t need to make a new intro now. This is great, but it felt right. There was no other idea that I could think of that would be the appropriate introduction for the set, so that was an easy starting point. And then I had the rest of the songs from the album that I knew to play. From there, what helps guide a lot is tempo is a big thing, you know. I don’t want to play a house song here, then go to future bass, and then drum and bass, and then back to house.
I’ll try to fit a bunch of house stuff together so this section feels appropriate, and then go to the next thing from there. You start at the beginning, just feel your way through it, and hope you don’t get lost and that it all flows. Then, if you get to a point where it feels like it doesn’t, that’s when you get a little stuck. You’re like, “Okay, cool, maybe I need to throw in either a new song, make an edit of something, maybe I need to jump to some other section, maybe this is an okay part for things to just like quiet down for a second,”
It’s really tricky!
seradopa: What would fans who may have probably seen the first show notice you have changed from the first show to these closing shows of your tour?
Said The Sky: Musically, absolutely nothing!
Luckily, it was one of the cases where, when you’re building a set, you don’t really know if it sounds good. You can get it to where it sounds good in the studio, and it’s like, “okay, this makes sense, and this works sonically,” I don’t know how this is going to translate to a live audience. Luckily, it worked out; I didn’t have to change too much musically, but they would notice a lot of difference, both in the lighting and the visuals.
That’s something we weren’t able to fully finish for the first few shows, so the visuals and lighting have kept evolving throughout the tour. Now everything feels way more fleshed out and deliberate. My buddy Fed has been helping with a lot of the visuals, and Mike records every set from front of house so we can watch everything back afterward and figure out what moments need a little more TLC or where we can make things feel even bigger and more explosive. Being able to constantly refine the experience between shows has been really nice.
seradopa: With such a thoughtfully designed concept behind this tour, what have you learned about yourself through performing it night after night?
Said The Sky: I learned that I very much enjoy concept albums! Which my team hates to hear, because albums are such a long process, and they don’t, unfortunately, it feels like in today’s landscape, there are very few people who have the patience to sit down and listen to an album. Let alone just a full song! It’s hard to put out an album and hope people are gonna listen to this whole thing and get the idea, but it’s so fun. It’s so much more rewarding to be like, no, this is a whole story, this is like a world that we built, you know, and you can exist in that whole thing.
Honestly, doing the two albums, if I could do that for the rest of my life, I would do that. I have really bad ADD with music and the music that I’m writing. I want to jump around all the time, so having the two albums that were so different sonically. If I got burnt out writing in one area, I could jump over to the other and build that. The two albums were built at the same time, side by side. It was nice.
seradopa: Being from Colorado as well, there’s this ongoing conversation about how much the state has changed over the years. When you reflect on your own life and journey, what do you think have been some of the biggest shifts or moments of growth that shaped the person and artist you are today?
Said The Sky: That’s a really good question. That’s one that I need to think about for a second.
I don’t know if there’s any specific moments, you know? It’s more of a collection of moments that all come together and help you realize something towards the end. A big shift between COVID/Quarantine and now having a lot of time off.
I was very grateful for that because it did suck to see so many smaller artists that were gaining traction, people were starting to notice, then quarantine hit. It just ruined everybody’s momentum. I was lucky enough to have built up enough of a project to weather that, which was nice, but then coming out on the other side of that and getting back into shows, touring, and everything. Then I noticed it’s tough to sell the number of tickets I used to sell back in the day. That’s a tough pill for anybody to swallow, for sure, but it’s just made me think a little bit more about everything.
Of course, there are also external factors that could be causing that. It’s not always your first instinct, at least for me; it’s my fault, you know, I’m fucking something up. My music is not good enough, I’m not doing enough, and my team always does a good job of trying to reassure me that while that’s always the case, there’s always more that I can be doing. That’s not the only reason for a lot of these things, you know.
There are other shows happening, there are festivals, there are things other people want to spend their money on. There’s the wrong weekend to be playing something. There are a million reasons why a show might not sell the way it did in the past, but that got my brain going a lot. It really made me sit back and be like, “Okay, cool. What, how much do I want to give to this, and how much can I give to this to help try and push it back to where it was,” and past that, and what is out of my control. Just a full reset that I got to figure out where I’m at right now, and what I’m doing, is it enough, and if not, what can I do that’s more, and if it’s not in my control, just learn to let that be chill.
seradopa: As we go towards Mission Ballroom, what does a hometown show at Mission Ballroom feel like now compared to the earlier shows you played here in Colorado?
Said The Sky: This is a good follow-up question, because it ties into what I was just saying.
It’s one of the reasons why I feel, you know, tickets might not be selling. As an artist, there were two to three years when I was just playing the same set, or a very small variation of it, you know what I mean. I wasn’t feeling as inspired. I didn’t have a bunch of new music to play, so I just played the songs that I have been playing for a while. And I’m sure people could tell, it shows that I just wasn’t in it the same way that I’ve been in some of my previous sets. Especially when I just come off an album, have some releases out, and have made a new set, that’s what gets me excited. I have a new experience to show people, that’s what makes me pumped!
Not having that for a few years, I could understand in sympathy, I get that somebody coming to those shows and who’s seen the same set three to four times in a row would just be like, you’ve seen a Said The Sky set, you’ve seen all Said The Sky sets, I get it. I get why they would feel that way, and so with the new albums and the new tour set, it’s really just me trying to be like, “hey, I understand, and I’m doing what I can to show you that I have some new stuff, and a new experience,” and then I am still writing music, I still am in this, and I’ll never stop making music and playing shows, and genuinely loving and appreciating music for what it is.
I hope that people who come to this next Mission show will see that and have a new enough experience to be excited about the project again, you know.
seradopa: This is the hometown stop of the tour at Mission Ballroom, what can the Denver and Colorado community expect from this show? Is there anything special you’d want to hint at for the fans coming out?
Said The Sky: There is one cool production thing that I’m excited to do that’s not really.. I guess this isn’t top secret, because I just did it at another show recently, kind of last-minute. We weren’t planning on doing it for the show, but it just worked out that way.
The way that the stage was built, but for all the shows so far, I’ve had the piano for the first set up on stage, just in front of my booth console, and that’s where I play that first set from. I’m pretty sure Denver is one of the shows we’re going to do a thrust for, with a little aisle that comes out to kind of the middle of the crowd, and a little stage in the crowd where the piano will be. That whole first set, I’ll be in the crowd playing that piano the whole time.
And it was Mike’s idea originally. He was like, “We should do something similar to the Electric Forest thing” that I did years ago, where I went out and just played piano in the middle of the forest with a bunch of people around. There was so much fun, and I’d never really considered that we could try to implement that into a show, and he kind of brought that idea up. As soon as he said it, that also helped with the two sets, so that whole first set can be that, just 30 minutes in the crowd with them, it can be as close as they want, so that’ll be fun!
seradopa: Looking back now, what do you think your younger producer self would be most proud of today? And if you could go back and tell that version of yourself something, what would it be?
Said The Sky: Honestly, for as long as I can remember, my goal was always to be able to make a living off of music. Music is the only thing I’ve ever truly loved and had a passion for in life. And I’ll never forget the day when one of my managers, Ha, he runs a lot of the Denver scene, he scheduled the meeting with me, and he was asking me about helping out some of the other artists and DJs in Denver at the time.
And he was like, I will pay you what you’re making at your day job to be able to do this work instead and help other artists out and help all these other people just do, but you got to go that, you know, x amount of times a week, go to them and help them with their stuff, and do music work for them. The drive home after that, I was bawling my eyes out. It was the most fulfilling day, because that’s all I’d ever wanted.
That’s what I try to remind myself constantly is that was always the goal, and it happened. Everything beyond that, whether it’s playing bigger shows or releasing songs with bigger vocalists and artists, all of that is really just a cherry on top. The day I was able to quit my full-time job and focus on music full-time was when I made it.
That’s what I would go and tell my younger self, and what they would be the most proud of – that it happened. The one thing that they want to happen will happen one day. Just keep loving music and keep doing it, you know.
seradopa: For this tour specifically, has there been a fan interaction that has stayed with you?
Said The Sky: I wish I could remember his name. I did this thing where for a few of the shows I’d go in the crowd at the start of the show, like dirt indoors. For a few of the sets, and there was one, I think it was in DC, and this guy came up to me. He said he was 60 years old, and he shook my hand and said, “I just want to let you know how incredible Salt and Silence was as an album,” and he just told me how much it meant to him.
I was so proud of that album, and loved it so much, that for somebody to come up and resonate with the whole album, it wasn’t just a song, it wasn’t just a piece of sight, it was like the album they appreciated so much, and that meant a whole lot to me. It was awesome and a fulfilling moment for me
seradopa: Last question, as the lights go down and these final tour dates come to a close, what do you hope people walk away feeling or understanding after experiencing this tour?
Said The Sky: May this might be the cheesiest fucking answer ever, but that it’s like it’s okay to feel things and have fun, you know, you can do both.
I hope between the two sets, the first set is for the people who do show up and care and are interested in that, and who take that time to listen, I hope they either find ways to connect to that in a way that makes them know that they’re not alone and feel like shit, sad sometimes. Life sucks, and sometimes it’s easy to feel like you have the worst problems ever.
If you put 50 to 100 people in a room, had everybody write down their problems, tossed them all in a bucket, and then said, “Cool, trade for a random one,” most people would probably stick with their own. It’s kind of a cool thought experiment, like, yeah, my problem sucks, but I know it, I’m familiar with it, and I can get through it. If you’d rather keep your own problem, that probably means it’s manageable. The people who’d actually trade, that’s when you know they’re in a tough spot. I hope people take that from the first set, work through some shit, and then let the second set be about letting go, having fun, and being okay with having fun.
I saw another clip where somebody was talking about how people don’t dance anymore, and he was talking about technology. You go to a show, and you’re being filmed. If you’re out with your friends, you’re being recorded. If you see a girl that you want to shoot your shot with, you’re being recorded. You’re not going to do that. If something goes wrong, you’re going to clown them online. You’re going to get posted. There’s so much fear everywhere people go now, because they’re scared of getting recorded.
People aren’t moving the way they used to 10 years ago. People aren’t just going nuts, but I want that so badly again to be able to go play a set and just see everybody dancing and having fun in whatever way that means to them, without fear of judgment or being recorded. I hope there’s a lot that people can take away from the sets.
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