Stephan Moccio has been reflecting a lot lately. After a quarter-century spent penning iconic melodies, the Grammy- and Oscar-nominated composer and pianist could easily rest on a catalog of chart-breakers like Celine Dion’s “A New Day Has Come,” Miley Cyrus’s “Wrecking Ball,” the Weeknd’s “Earned It,” and “I Believe,” the theme song for the 2010 Winter Olympics. Instead, he’s looking back to the turn of the millennium, when, in a liminal space between his precocious adolescence and his blockbuster songwriting career, he took a gig playing piano six nights a week in the lobby of the Four Seasons Toronto. On his fourth solo LP—Scenes From a Velvet Room, due out June 26 via Decca Records—he tells that story with the detail of a tableau vivant and the clarity of retrospection.
The Four Seasons gig was a coveted one, but Moccio sees it less as a career stepping stone than a series of essential learning experiences: how to read a room and cater to a crowd, how to subconsciously curate a vibe, how to slip into a space seamlessly and slide out gracefully. An artist can control the atmosphere of a space just as effectively from its outskirts as its center, he found. “I was the guy who was always behind the scenes,” he says, smiling at how far he’s come.
Scenes From a Velvet Room begins exactly as Moccio’s sets did: with the sweetly sad strokes of virtuosic fingers first touching keys. In the late fall and early spring, these melancholic meanderings coincided with the sunset, which suffused the atrium with soft, amber light. Conjured immaculately, this image persists for the entirety of Scenes’ opening track, “Beneath the Amber Hour.”
“I couldn’t be brazen to start,” he says. “I had to enter with a very quiet tone. I had to noodle and play these little jazz licks and get under everyone’s skin. And then they’d realize there was a pianist in the room, and all of a sudden I’d have people come up to me and say, ‘Can you play this song? Can you play that song?’”
At the Four Seasons, Moccio was thrust into an alien world of obscene wealth. In the pressure cooker of a one-strike-you’re-out rule and a never-speak-unless-spoken-to policy, most young musicians would’ve cracked or quit in self-righteous rage. Moccio stepped up and put his pride to the side. He came to identify with the tragic hero of Billy Joel’s “Piano Man,” he remembers fondly. He now knows that context is everything, he says, recalling the experiment in which renowned concert violinist Joshua Bell played for 45 minutes in a Washington, D.C. subway station to widespread disinterest from the rush-hour crowd.
The Four Seasons job taught Moccio how to deal with big personalities and bigger egos, a skill he’d need later in life, working alongside some of the biggest pop stars in the world. The hotel threw parties for Tom Hanks, Gene Hackman, Elton John, Janet Jackson, and Sting (to name a few) during Moccio’s run as house pianist. But even on off nights, the lobby was a staging room for the lifestyles of the rich and shameless: high rollers who’d come in with their girlfriends on their arms one night and their wives the next, wealthy divorcées accustomed to getting whatever they wanted with a wave of the hand.
These characters appear in Scenes From a Velvet Room. “Room 3A” and “Melt,” for instance, are sultry odes to the countless older women who tried (and failed) to lure the young Moccio up to their deluxe suites. And “Pink Lady,” an upbeat number whose name is a nod to the classic gin cocktail, recalls the lobby’s always-busy bar La Serre, where million-dollar deals were made on sunken velvet seats.
Three songs on the album feature New Orleans legend Branford Marsalis. Switching between soprano and tenor sax, he plays snatches of a melody that reaches its ultimate form on the album’s final track, “I Break Everything I Love,” when Moccio finally plays it on piano. The song recalls the way Moccio would end his Four Seasons sets with crushing ballads like “My Funny Valentine”—soft enough to avoid intruding on conversations but with the emotional weight to bring the house down for those paying attention. There’s a key difference here, though: In his early 20s, Moccio achieved this atmosphere by translating the work of past masters. The older, wiser Moccio is telling his own story now. It’s effortlessly catchy, of course, but it’s also wistful and tender, a careful but creative reimagining of memories both treasured and painful.
Since the arrival of his debut album Tales of Solace, recorded and released during deep COVID, Moccio has become hugely popular with Gen Z. “Fracture,” the standout hit from that record, has been streamed on Spotify more than 143 million times. And multiple tracks from each of his other major releases—2021’s defiantly personal Lionheart and 2024’s gorgeously introspective Legends, Myths, and Lavender—have racked up tens of millions of plays on the platform, with many millions more impressions on TikTok.
Moccio has no qualms with the fact that his unique blend of jazz, lounge, and neoclassical styles is often used as an ambient mood setter, a soundtrack for studying, for meditating, for catching up with a friend over a glass of wine. Those who listen deeply to Scenes From a Velvet Room will notice the “I Break Everything I Love” motif and the miniscule mistakes Moccio left in some of the many songs he recorded in one take. Those who don’t will still see their worlds enriched, just as the patrons of the Four Seasons Toronto found their conversations sweetened by the piano notes wafting in from the other side of the room. At the center of your attention or in its periphery, these songs feel timeless, achieving a rare resonance between the brilliance of youth and the wisdom of experience.
– Raphael Helfand
