Mei Semones

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On the night of the Fourth of July, fireworks over Mei Semones’ Brooklyn block were competing with something more primal. Up and down the street, dogs answered each burst with a long, ragged howl of their own. Semones, alone in her apartment with her guitar while the rest of the city celebrated outside, found she didn’t mind the solitude. The howling struck her less as a cry for help than as a kind of greeting: proof that she was never really by herself, not with music always keeping her company. By morning, she had the seed of the title track for her sophomore album, Howl. 

“Sometimes making music feels like howling into the universe,” Semones says. “I make music because I like it, because it feels instinctual — but it also connects me to people close and far. I like to think of this music as my howl.”

At 26, the Brooklyn-based Japanese American guitarist and singer-songwriter — already named an Artist to Watch by The New York Times and Stereogum, and Artist You Need to Know by Rolling Stone and The FADER — has developed a sound that brings together jazz, bossa nova, samba and grungy math rock without treating any of them as separate worlds. Her bilingual songwriting works in much the same way.  

Growing up in Ann Arbor, Semones began playing piano at age four on an instrument gifted by her Japanese grandmother before picking up electric guitar at 11, inspired in part by Marty McFly’s performance of “Johnny B. Goode” in Back to the Future. Semones also spent summers as a child in Yokosuka, Japan — where her grandmother lived — attending a local elementary school for two weeks each year and spending long afternoons catching cicadas, playing soccer, building things with mud, and searching for rhinoceros beetles. Those unhurried childhood experiences would later shape her 2024 EP, Kabutomushi, named after the very beetles she would catch with her school friends in Yokosuka. 

In high school, she was introduced to jazz through greats like Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk and Wes Montgomery, and around the same time she discovered bossa nova through João Gilberto’s recordings. She later studied music with a focus on guitar at Berklee College of Music.  

Howl, the second studio album by Mei Semones, is out on January 15th via Verve/Interscope.

Mei Semones VIP Experience includes the below: 

• A Meet & Greet and photo with Mei Semones
• One (1) VIP exclusive merch item
• Early Entry To The Venue
• Early Access To The Merch Table
• One (1) GA ticket