Now, a decade or so later, she’s starting to realize she may not need to pick a lane. Maybe, instead, she can create her own.
And sometimes that lane leads you far from your Brooklyn home.
Take this moment, for example. A couple of years ago, when they were on their way to SXSW in Austin, a member of Semones’ band mentioned something that still makes her laugh.
Instead, the now 24-year-old artist and her band met, as she puts it, “really nice, sweet people that were excited we were there.” The breakfast tacos weren’t bad, either. But it’s those people that stick out — the fans who gave a young artist a little bit of their time and a lot of motivation to keep pushing her craft.
Now the pop singer-songwriter, whose tracks blend English and Japanese lyrics, returns to Texas as part of her headlining Animaru Tour. She’ll play Club Dada for her first-ever Dallas show on July 11 with Lionmilk, and in an interview a week before the show, Semones calls performing live “my favorite part of being a musician.”
“It inspires my writing a lot,” she says. “After a tour, when I come back to Brooklyn, I go back to being alone and writing. I think about, ‘OK, how do I write a song that’s going to be interesting? How do I write something people are going to get something out of?’”
In her words, Semones’ music is “jazz-influenced J-pop.” The largely positive reviews of her full-length debut album, Animaru, describe a collision of jazz and indie pop, with some bossa nova thrown in. Ultimately, Semones hopes it defies easy definition: She wants you to listen to it and draw your own conclusions.
Plenty of people have been listening. Rolling Stone profiled her, and in a gushing Instagram post, Flea, the bassist for Red Hot Chili Peppers, told his followers that Semones gives him faith for the new generation of artists.
“She's an incredible musician, deep guitar player and singer,” he wrote, specifically citing her 2024 EP Kabutomushi. “The music is deft, articulate, and carries a mysterious power. So many good riffs, melodies, and rhythms."
Much of that skill can likely be attributed to Semones’ time at Boston’s vaunted Berklee College of Music. However, she told the Observer that playing house shows in Boston was equally helpful to both her craft and her confidence.
“It was a lot of indie bands, some friends and a lot of people I knew,” she says. “I never felt like I had to be a certain way or present a certain product that was really polished. People were open to different types of music, and that made me more open, too.”
Now, in most of Semones’s songs, her experimentation with different sounds takes center stage, not her voice. The result is often soothing, which may be part of what she’s hoping to accomplish.
Semones says the songs she loves most are the ones that make her feel less alone, and when she’s struggling to finish writing a song of her own, she often turns to some of her old favorites — a list that includes Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins, John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk. When putting together her first album, she focused on one song at a time.
“I think it's really cool when people can have a really big concept that’s arcing over multiple records, but I just don't really think in that way,” she says. “For me, it's just song by song. I want to focus on saying one thing at a time and saying it clearly.” It also helps her to write in both English and Japanese. She’s been doing that ever since her first official release, "Hfoas,” which came out when Semones was 19. The song also bears the jazz influence that’s become her other trademark.
“Having it be more jazz-influenced and having both English and Japanese lyrics was really what helped me find the start of my sound,” she says. “I realized, ‘OK, this is the first I've ever written that I actually really feel proud of and want to share.’ It felt like the first piece of music that was starting to approach how I want to represent myself as a person and as an artist.”
That decision to mix languages was the culmination of a long journey for Semones — a journey that stretches back as long as she can remember. Growing up, she wasn’t confident as a person or an artist. Some days, she still isn’t. But she’s come a long way, and her genre- and language-blending music is helping her carve out a niche as an artist to watch, the kind of performer you want to see before everyone knows their name.
And even if she doesn’t attain that kind of fame, Semones is still hopeful for what’s next.
“I think I've come to a point where I'm like, ‘OK, I can just focus on music that I love,’” she says. “If I do that, maybe other people will love it, too.”
Mei Semones will perform on Friday, July 11, at 7 p.m. at Club Dada, 2720 Elm St. Tickets are available starting at $23.81 on Spune.
