Stephan Moccio Revisits His Early Years on ‘Goodbye My Youth’

Stephan Moccio has released a new single, “Goodbye My Youth,” a thematic continuation of his latest album, Scenes From A Velvet Room. Released September 4 through Decca Records, the piece returns to the period explored on the album, when Moccio was playing piano six nights a week in the lobby of Toronto’s Four Seasons hotel before establishing his career as a songwriter and composer.

“Goodbye My Youth” considers the relationship between youth, memory, and the passage of time. Moccio described the piece as a farewell to that earlier period of his life rather than to the person he was at the time. “It feels as though yesterday is still within reach,” he said. “I play this as a quiet farewell, not to who I was, but to how quickly it all became a memory.”

Moccio worked as a lounge pianist at the Four Seasons around the turn of the millennium, before writing songs recorded by artists including Celine Dion, Miley Cyrus, and The Weeknd. He has said the hotel job taught him how to read an audience and adapt his playing to a room. Those experiences became the basis for Scenes From A Velvet Room, a 12-track album that includes three collaborations with saxophonist Branford Marsalis: “Like An Old Photograph,” “The Beautiful Undoing,” and “Opaline.” “I was the guy who was always behind the scenes,” Moccio said of that stage of his career.

Moccio released “Positano,” which appears on Scenes From A Velvet Room, in April 2026 before the full album arrived on Decca Records on June 26. In July 2026, he followed the record with Scenes From A Velvet Room: Track by Track with Stephan Moccio, pairing the album’s music with spoken commentary about each composition. The album follows Moccio’s 2024 release Legends, Myths, and Lavender and 2021’s Lionheart. His solo catalog also includes Tales of Solace, whose track “Fracture” has accumulated more than 143 million streams on Spotify.

Listen to “Goodbye My Youth” now.