“Bongo”: An Interview with Sally Boy

Photo Credit: Elias Ginsberg

Sally Boy’s new project, Lies I Tell Myself, heavily focuses on light energy and self-acceptance. Erez Potok-Holmes adopted his name Sally Boy from writing his song of the same name, as his first solo work aside from his band. He has a dreamy conversation with his younger self - essentially introducing Sally Boy to the music world. His newly released track, “Bongo”, conveys the feeling of falling to the ground and then getting back on your feet, step by step. The track seamlessly is ever-evolving and holds a contagious, joyful energy that is much needed to escape the world around us. The chaotic, yet realistic visuals of the “Bongo” music video is ultimately genius - making the viewer feel warped and claustrophobic. Luckily, this is what Sally Boy was going for.

[UNPUBLISHED:] How did the name Sally Boy come to be?

[EREZ/SALLY BOY:] I honestly just wrote a song called “Sally Boy” first as the first single. I was then like ‘what should I call myself’? So I said how about Sally Boy, it’s just very simple. It was actually funny because the first time I told my manager, he was like ‘yeah, but do you really want to be 50 years-old and have people call you Sally Boy’ - I said that that was a really good point. We left it for a month or so and came back to it, and I just said let’s fucking do it.

[UNPUBLISHED:] How did you first start getting into music?

[EREZ/SALLY BOY:] My parents both played piano and they put me in piano lessons when I was three, so I started playing at a very young age. It all just came very naturally, there was never this one moment where someone’s like ‘check out this world of music’ - it was more like I was already in that world from birth.

[UNPUBLISHED:] You were a student at USC last year, did you find it difficult to balance your career as an artist while still being a student?

[EREZ/SALLY BOY:] It’s sort of complicated because I started with online classes. I’m really bad at focusing when I’m on a computer screen. I can turn my camera off and not even be held accountable for anything. So that was more so the struggle than trying to balance music and classes. Honestly, I was really just an artist during that period of time and took classes once or twice a week, so it wasn’t too difficult. The main difficulty was the fact that it was online.

[UNPUBLISHED:] Has using Tik Tok helped you connect closer with your listeners and promote your music?

[EREZ/SALLY BOY:] I feel like the main part of Tik Tok is to get a video huge, and then when you do it’s just practice to respond to comments like a fucking robot responding to everything. But before then I was just talking to people on the server and that was what I felt like was a really good connection with the core base of people who follow me. In that respect, I don’t think it connects me to people but it is really important in terms of building a song and we got a lot of really natural growth on “Good At Being Lonely” to start, because of that Tik Tok. It’s a necessary evil at this point.

[UNPUBLISHED:] Can you walk us through the initial meaning behind your newly released song “Bongo”?

[EREZ/SALLY BOY:] It’s sort of like a frenetic song on the whole. There’s a lot going on between the verses and the choruses. There’s not really any person that it’s necessarily about and I don’t think I’ve really ever have taken my problems out on people in general. It’s funny because I feel like the whole song fits this idea of falling to the ground. The way I described it when I was trying to explain how I wanted the visual to look with Eddie, my creative director, I said this song should feel as if you were falling to the ground and are trying to put one foot in front of the other. That’s sort of how I depicted this song. The way it even happened was I was working on another song and TJ, who I produce my stuff with, sent me a sample pack and I was going through the perks. That main beat was one of the perks so I took that and put it in the sampler.

[UNPUBLISHED:] You mentioned that the “Bongo” music video was made in reference to the mundane capitalist working society - can you walk us through how this music video came to be and how you created a sense of claustrophobia and were able to shed light onto this unsettling reality?

[EREZ/SALLY BOY:] Eddie and I talked through 20 different options for the music video. We had this main groundwork but we were having trouble making a cohesive thing because the song itself goes in all these different directions so it was hard to make a cohesive piece of it all. Eddie was just so busy working and so sick of working over and over again and he said ‘this should just be the “Bongo” music video - how horrible it is to work all the time’. I think that the general capitalist working system is super anti-human, in the sense that there’s no personalization and there’s cubicles, papers and fluorescent lights. I thought it would be a fun thing to do and I got into character pretty easily. What has been kind of upsetting about this though is that people have been commenting things like ‘so relatable’ and I’m like oh my god I’m so sorry. I think when we sent it to the label, business affairs was like ‘gosh, so relatable’!

[UNPUBLISHED:] On the cover art for “Bongo”, I noticed you added a small American flag in the left hand corner - was there a specific reason for adding this on to the artwork?

[EREZ/SALLY BOY:] You know those weird storefronts with bizarre images that are sort of translucent and weathered? I took a picture of something weird and sent it to Eddie - there was an American flag in the picture stapled onto this girl’s forehead. He was like ‘what if we just do an American flag’ and I fucking loved that. Then I wanted to have it say “Bongo” out of the stars, so that was what we ended up doing and it worked perfectly.

[UNPUBLISHED:] What did your creative process look like when writing Lies I Tell Myself?

[EREZ/SALLY BOY:] Every time I write a new project, I get the idea in my head that I’m doing as best as I’ve ever been - and that’s true, I’m always getting better. I think throughout that process, it became easier and I’ve produced more of this stuff. The whole creative process was a lot more of myself seeking out these ideas and then perfecting them for people but it happened over this weird period of time before quarantine. It’s very different from the first project, in which I spent a lot of time in-person, TJ and I were all over the place working on Zoom. It’s been fun and sort of been a new way to do music where you don’t need to be in-person with people and we’ve come up with these cool things ourselves. I’m just getting better at production and it was really fun to see how I’ve grown from beginning to end.

[UNPUBLISHED:] What is one thing you hope listeners can take away from your EP, Lies I Tell Myself?

[EREZ/SALLY BOY:] What I hope first of all, for the people that are fans of me already, is I hope they see my growth. One thing I was really sure I wanted to do with this project that I hadn’t done in the previous project that I feel like I rushed was there’s some lines where I listen to the lyrics now and it doesn’t represent me. This project I was way more intentional with my lyrics and I hope that they realize my production has become more unique. I also hope that new listeners will be like ‘man, this is cool music’! Now I feel like I’m making really cool music and I’m really proud.

[UNPUBLISHED:] Is there a song off of Lies I Tell Myself  that took the longest to produce/write?

[EREZ/SALLY BOY:] Definitely “Good At Being Lonely” just because that was supposed to be the final project but then we reproduced it, and it was almost two years in the making.

[UNPUBLISHED:] When did you start your project “The Sally Boy Show” and what was the inspiration behind creating your own variety show?

[EREZ/SALLY BOY:] We first came up with that last summer and I got to give all credit to my friend Sean, he’s the one who came up with the idea to do a variety show. We were trying to think of a cool way to roll out the EP in a unique way, and he literally took a nap and woke up and said let’s do a variety show. This next season has more of a dramatic storyline through it all where it still manages to take skits and interweave them with music videos. All power to Sean on the first one, second one a little bit more me and my friend John.

[UNPUBLISHED:] If you could choose any song that you could take credit for, what song would that be?

[EREZ/SALLY BOY:] One of the songs that always makes me happy to listen to is “Heart of The Country” by Paul McCartney. It’s so nice, I’ll take that one - great baseline too and structure. 

Make sure to stream Sally Boy on Spotify now!