That internal investigation is still an ongoing process for Sumney, whose recorded output is scant thus far. His only official release is 2014’s self-recorded Mid-City Island EP, primarily composed of first-takes and improvisation; the music is stirring but purposefully incomplete. Recent single “Seeds” is the A-side of his forthcoming debut 7” on Terrible Records, the imprint of Grizzly Bear’s Chris Taylor (who also mixed the track). Though both the EP and the 7” were written, performed, and produced by Sumney himself, they benefit from the tangential starpower he seems to accumulate just by existing—Mid-City Island was recorded on a 4-track lent to him by TV on the Radio’s Dave Sitek, and his relationship with Taylor began with an introduction by Solange at Fashion Week.

And yet, this linked-in natural, who started writing songs at age 12, thinks of himself as an awkward late bloomer. “None of my friends knew that I could sing until I was 20,” he says. Creativity wasn’t encouraged during a strict, practical upbringing with his Ghanaian-born parents, who are both pastors. The family lived in San Bernadino, California until Sumney was 10, at which point they returned to Ghana’s capital of Accra, where Sumney morphed into a typical, sullen teenager. He was bullied constantly, and rather than engaging with local music, he had his father buy him CDs by Vampire Weekend and Dirty Projectors—the kind of bands Americans give other Americans grief for over their supposed appropriation of African music.

Moses Sumney: "Man on the Moon" (via SoundCloud)

Though things seem to be going his way now, Sumney’s future as a musician was touch-and-go for a while, and his first paid gig after graduating college was hardly glamorous. He created a PR position responsible for California Pizza Kitchen’s social media accounts, which means that Brands Saying Bae—famed skewerer of companies that employ shameless Internet slang on Twitter—exists because of people like Moses Sumney. “As I was trying to write things on [CPK's] Twitter, on mine I would be like, ‘Does anyone know a good place where I can drown myself?’” he recalls. (He quit when the Swedish folk band Junip asked him to open a few West Coast shows two years ago.)

Despite his growing list of bold-name supporters, Sumney still refers to his career with scare-quotes: His Twitter bio reads “Performer | Poor Person.” And when I ask him how it feels to warm-up a crowd for Sufjan, whose current set features songs almost exclusively about his deceased mother, he is not only undaunted but actually excited by the prospect of such dourness. He says that when he previously opened for effervescent headliners like Dirty Projectors, he felt “pressured to be a little more jokey and upbeat, and win the crowd over with my personality. [Sufjan] makes it easier for me. That's generally the space that I dwell in, where I can just be more somber and downbeat.”