Mei Semones

About this event

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."It's a title that might invite a familiar story of pressure and release, but Semones sees songwriting differently. Nothing was bottled up, she says, waiting to come pouring out. Music is simply something she does, every day, because it feels natural to her. That idea runs through Howl, an album that embraces the full range of her experiences rather than settling into a single emotional register. Tenderness and joy coexist with grief, self-doubt and memories of loss — the same range audible in a sound that can move from delicate fingerpicking to distorted, rhythmically restless swells within a single song.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. Few songwriters weave between languages as naturally as Semones does, slipping between English and Japanese within the same song — sometimes the same line — and letting both…

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