Mei Semones: The Best of What's Next

Mei Semones is a master of subtle surprise. You can hear it in the way she composes her music and you can recognize it in the way she talks. The Brooklyn-based musician speaks with poignant humor and no hesitation, connecting fragments of her life into sharp-witted and astute observations. Over Zoom, she asks me “Have you seen the movie Back to the Future?” I give a startled chuckle; it’s the first time anyone has asked me if I’d seen Back to the Future in an interview. She continues, “Yeah, that scene where Marty is playing that Chuck Berry song, ‘Johnny B. Goode.’ I saw that and I was like, ‘Whoa, that’s so cool!” I thought it was really cool. I wanted to play electric rock guitar.”

Semones’ upcoming second EP, titled Kabutomushi, is defined by an ambitious, expansive sound and a distinct blend of genres—both components derived from her extensive background in jazz while she was a student at the Berklee College of Music, as well as her time spent training to become a professional musician. She delicately balances an array of influences in her work, creating tracks that endlessly evolve in unexpected and inventive ways. On the song “Wakare No Kotoba,” she infuses technical elements of jazz into a bonafide pop song. “There’s that guitar lick that’s kind of going throughout [‘Wakare No Kotoba’] that was inspired by something that I learned in a class at Berklee,” Semones explains. “It’s this arpeggio called a wide interval arpeggio. Most arpeggios are built in thirds, like 1-3-5-7. But that arpeggio is built more like fifths and just has wider intervals between each note,” she explains. “I thought that was sick. A lot of the time that’s used in a more like jazz context and improvisational type thing but I was like ‘What if I just made this the basis of a pop song?’”

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Semones was originally introduced to the piano at a young age before picking up the guitar at 11 years old. In high school, she began to gravitate towards jazz. “It was mainly the high school that I went to,” she says. “Ann Arbor, Michigan, which is where I’m from, had a really good jazz program. I feel like a lot of schools have big band [programs], but the high school I went to had a bunch of small combos and that’s how I got into it. At first, I just started doing it because I was like ‘Oh, there’s a class at my school where I can play guitar, I might as well do that. Then, I actually ended up really liking jazz and studied it in college.”

While performing in these small combos, Mei Semones was exposed to a world of new influences—like Charlie Parker, Wes Montgomery, Jim Hall and Bill Evans, as well as jazz torchbearers like Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis and John Coltrane. At Berklee, she majored in professional music, taking music business classes and primarily focusing on guitar performance. She cut her teeth in the Boston DIY scene while studying, performing at house shows and in basements across the city alongside peers from school. “That was a really great experience. I really liked it. I learned a lot, I got a lot better at playing guitar. I feel like my songwriting developed a lot while I was there and as a person, I feel like I developed a lot,” Semones says.

Upon finishing her studies, Semones moved to Brooklyn in 2022—where she began working full-time at a Japanese preschool and released her first EP, Tsukino. “I really love the city now and I feel super comfortable,” she says. “When I first moved here, it was a little bit rough because it was my first time having to get a full time job and doing all that. I was really tired all the time and didn’t have music time to work on music or do anything to be honest. So that was a little rough. I found a better balance for my life where I have a part time job and the rest of the time, I can work on music and it’s definitely way more chill now. I feel a lot better now than when I first moved.”

Semones recently opened for indie pop artist Bratty, playing packed clubs and sold-out venues on a North American tour in anticipation of Kabutomushi’s release. The EP was patiently crafted over years of fragmented work. Semones sings in both English and Japanese throughout the tracklist, expressing her strong connection to her cultural upbringing. The title itself pays homage to Semones’ late grandmother, who she grew up visiting in Yokosuka—a Japanese city by the ocean that’s about an hour and a half away from Tokyo. “Kabutomushi” is known as the rhinoceros beetle in English and, as a child, Semones would go to the park with her grandma to catch them.

“I was just thinking of memories from when I was a kid and I would go to Japan, thinking of different things I really liked about that. I started with just picking those things out and that’s where a lot of the lyrics came from,” she says of the title-track. “Then it kind of developed into more of a thing of dedicating it for my grandma, who passed away a few years ago, because I think she was a big part of that—a big part of whenever I went to Japan. She would always be there welcoming us and making us food and making sure we’re having a nice time and all that. So, it’s for her.”

Sonically, much of Mei Semones’ songwriting on Kabutomushi is centered around an eagerness to experiment and blend genres. The intro to the track “Takaramono” was inspired by seeing folk musician Lily Talmers perform at a house show in New York. “Her music has a lot of different influences,” she says. “Something I appreciated about her music is that sometimes there’s a classical guitar vibe going on. I was like ‘Oh, that’s so cool. What if I try to do something that’s kind of in that vein?’ That’s how the intro came about.” She explains even further, ““It was actually a really hard song for me to write because I felt like I had all these different sections but I didn’t know how to make them fit together well into a cohesive song. It was kind of just figuring out how to put everything together. The ending is more indie rock and the choruses I was trying to make are kind of J-Pop-y.”

Semones and producer Kai Tsao traveled back and forth from New York to Boston to record portions of the EP with bassist Jaden Raso and drummer Ransom McCafferty. She says of the process that “the winter of 2022 going into 2023 is when we recorded most of it. That was basically me and my friend Kai Tsao who engineered, mixed, mastered everything on the whole project. Me and him [were] working out the demos of me just playing guitar and singing. Then we would go to Boston, which is where my drummer and bassist lived at the time.” Band members Noah Leong and Claudius Agrippa provided strings on the EP, adding layers of viola and violin to an already rich sonic tapestry. “It was fragmented in a way but I do think that it helped with getting thing super tight because it was building a foundation of bass and drums and then on top of that, making sure everything is locked in with each layer,” Semones concludes.

The result is a lush, sweeping arrangement of guitar, strings and percussion that seamlessly imbues elements of jazz, bossa nova, j-pop and math rock into a cohesive and unexpected mosaic of sound. The lavish and whimsical instrumentals glide across the tracklist in a balmy haze under her feathery vocals, and Mei Semones’ daring, experimental songwriting and fusion of melodic oddities and jazz improvisation have solidified the framework of her climbing rise in this business—and you’d be foolish to not pay close attention to it.

‘Kabutomushi’ is out April 5th via Bayonet Records.

Mei Semones: The Best of What’s Next