Let the Faucet Run: Sol Moravia

Article and Photos by Sean Alexander

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At first ask Sol Moravia doesn't remember what he's been listening to lately. Not really.

He pauses. 

Then he starts talking about Coltrane. Both John and Alice, about Prince and Stevie Wonder. About returning, as an adult, to the music he grew up on and hearing it differently now that he's lived enough to catch what he missed the first time. Its less about what specific artist he is listening to and what is he currently trying to do with his listening.

"The music hits different," he says.

It's a fitting way to begin a conversation with an artist who has spent the better part of two decades treating his craft less like a career and more like a passion, something to be deepened, never rushed. Despite it being his full time endeavor. 

Moravia, who performs under his first name, Sol, started rapping at 10. Trumpet came first, through school band, but the pull toward rap arrived early and never let go. By 12 he was in a recording studio, not messing around but working, developing, taking a craft seriously. Something that most kids his age hadn't yet even made an effort to think about.

The opening came, as these things often do, sideways. A friend's sister was dating someone who bought weed from the brother of a man running a home studio out of his mother's backyard in Seattle. Word passed along that a couple of young MCs might want to come through. It did. Isaac Meek, 21 at the time, saw something worth mentoring in an 11-year-old, and what began in a backyard shed eventually became a full recording operation.

Sol calls it the universe looking out. He reaches for Malcolm Gladwell's "Outliers," the idea that certain people get a door opened for them at exactly the right moment. For him, that door was a shed in someone's backyard and a 21-year-old willing to take a kid seriously.

He kept walking through doors after that. Talent shows. Community center showcases. Open mics. When he enrolled at the University of Washington, he stayed in Seattle on purpose, convinced the city's music scene was bubbling into something worth being part of. He leaned all the way in, playing every stage he could find, chasing what he calls his 10,000 hours.

The Seattle hip-hop scene of that era, he says, worked because it was small enough to matter and demanding enough to mean something. Nobody handed out opportunities for showing up. You earned rank the hard way, one show at a time. He remembers opening for headliners at Chop Suey and outworking the crowd until promoters had no choice but to move him up the bill. He remembers throwing his own all-ages shows before that. Each step built toward the next, until eventually the opportunities stopped feeling like breaks and started feeling earned.

"If an opportunity wasn't handed to me, I never took that as a deterrent," he says. "I just tried to create my own opportunities.”

That ethic, patient, deliberate, allergic to shortcuts, still defines how he works. Sol released an album last year “It Ain’t Pretty But it’s Beautiful”. That album took him over four years to make. He's not an artist who drops music on a schedule, and he's not interested in becoming one. He's already deep into the next project, this one an entirely self-produced album. The first one in his career, a milestone he mentions with the quiet satisfaction of someone who has spent years learning a skill nobody made him learn.

When asked what he wants people to take from his story, he doesn't talk about hits or metrics. He talks about release.

"If you love the craft and you love the act of making, that's the most important thing and the only thing that we can control," he says.

He returns to an idea he keeps coming back to: that the universe can only respond to what you actually put into it. For an artist, he says, that means sharing the work. Letting go of it. Not holding a song back until it feels perfect or safe, but releasing it so something can come back the other way, whether that's an opportunity, an audience or the next idea waiting on the other side.

"Let the faucet run," he says.

It's a small phrase, but it sits at the center of everything else he's said, the shed in the backyard, the years spent grinding through Seattle stages, the album that took almost half a decade to finish. None of it moved because Sol Moravia waited for certainty. It moved because he kept letting the water out, trusting something would come back to fill it again.