FEATURE: Spotlight: Mary Ann Alexander

FEATURE:

Spotlight

Mary Ann Alexander

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WE are getting to the time of year…

where websites are declaring their artists to watch next year. There are some names I have already covered, but there is talent that I am quite new to. I do think that Mary Ann Alexander is going to be a huge name. She is an incredible artist I am interested to know more about. Having released a series of brilliant singles this year, I wonder what is next for Alexander. I will come to some interviews from this year. There is not too much instant biography. What I mean is, I have been searching for a sort of potted biography about Alexander’s background and musical influences, and it takes me to interviews. So I will present a few, so that we can get a picture of her. I am going to start out with Rolling Stone India and their interview from last year. Born and raised in Kerala, India, Mary Ann Alexander’s spellbinding music is resonating with people around the world:

“When Mary Ann Alexander was still in college studying visual communication in Bengaluru, seasoned guitarist-producer Sanjeev T reached out to her for his song “Take My Life With You” from his lo-fi project Future. They were on a serene hill outside of the city shooting the music video when the producer played her the full version of the track, revealing that the second verse features star R&B, Carnatic and film singer Sid Sriram.

Alexander recalls over a Zoom video call, “First of all, he only told me when we’re shooting. I’m like, ‘Are you kidding me?’ There’s this part where Sid comes in harmonizing and ad-libbing over me and then he starts singing. For me to hear both of our voices at the same time was surreal.”

A fan of Sriram’s, the Thiruvananthapuram-raised, Bengaluru-based singer-songwriter says the bluesy “Adiye” (from 2012 Tamil movie Kadal, composed by A.R. Rahman) is her go-to song for most occasions, from soundchecks to close gatherings to intimate gigs. “Day before yesterday was my friend’s birthday and they asked me to sing, and I sang ‘Adiye.’ It was one of the songs that made me realize how much I like R&B and blues because of the style. I would sing it and feel like, ‘This is what I want to do,’” she recounts.

Born into music: Alexander’s father is a seasoned voice in the Malayalam music industry and took her along to recording sessions right from when she was five years old, while her mother held down an office job. Whenever there was a part in the songs that needed a child’s voice, she got a chance to record, starting out as a studio artist as early as seven years old. “Just standing still, singing correctly, delivering everything right, felt natural for me,” she adds.

Moving on up: Although she was surrounded by an encouraging family who were passionate about the arts, her mother did express doubts about her making a career out of music. Alexander knew she always wanted to be an artist, but first took the step to move out of Kerala to Bengaluru to study and even began doing an internship as a graphic designer and illustrator. “I [did] not grow up around people who had the guts to do what they what their heart desired; they would do what they thought [society wanted them to do]. I’ve seen so many people abandoning their dreams. But when I came to Bangalore, I was surrounded by people who, without knowing, inspired me to be who I am,” she says.

Alexander blew up after uploading unreleased snippets of “lovey-dovey R&B” songs and a heartbreak tune produced by the likes of Kerala beatsmith Parimal Shais. She’s aware that these songs are not out yet. even after millions of views on Instagram Reels over the last year. “I feel kind of bad that I have a reputation for not releasing the songs that I tease people with on Instagram,” she admits. But she doesn’t expect people to understand the pace that she works at with producers and her own team. “A lot of new opportunities have been presenting itself to me and I’m kind of trying to decide what’s the best way to go, and what would be the best thing for this song,” she says”.

There is another interview from last year I will get to before moving forward. This incredible chat spotlighted an artist who knows where her roots are and they are part of her. She does not need to wave a flag about it, as she says. Even so, there are few emerging artists from Kerala who are being given this sort of exposure. Mary Ann Alexander is redefining India’s R&B sound globally. She has collaborated with some major artists (including Anderson .Paak), though she is very much at her very best (I feel) when going solo. A distinct and utterly phenomenal artist that everyone needs to listen to:

“Born amidst the monsoon lullabies of Kerala, Mary Ann was seven when she first walked into a recording studio: a place that, for most children, might have felt intimidating. But for her, it was an extension of something already familiar. “Music was just around me,” she says. “The stories, the songs, the rhythm of Malayalam itself... it all seeps in when you grow up there.” Kerala gave her a language that curved and softened like melody. Bengaluru, where she moved to study Visual Communication, gave her a space to experiment, collaborate, and shape sound into identity. “I think college was where everything clicked,” she says. “I met people who were just as obsessed with sound as I was. We’d write, jam, make weird things that sometimes didn’t work but when they did, it felt like magic,” she tells ETV Bharat.

The magic soon found form. Still in college, she sang Take My Life With You for Sanjeev T’s lo-fi project Future. Then came Over the Ocean for the Malayalam film Kolambi, and later, the smooth, honeyed confidence of her 2022 debut single In My Zone, produced by Pranay Parti. Since then, she’s been in steady motion — Bling Bling, The Lovey Dovey Song, Round 2, Good Girl, and two haunting film tracks, Sthuthi (Bougainvillea) and Ulfat (CTRL). Somewhere between these, she’s shared credits with the who’s who of India’s indie scene: Dot, Nate08, Tarang Joseph, and the neo-hip-hop collective Till Apes.

Her music feels like that moment in the evening when the lights dim but the energy doesn’t drop. The warmth of early-2000s R&B (think Alicia Keys and Brandy) meets the slick bounce of modern pop. There’s room for melancholy, but also mischief. It’s intimate music for people who overthink in the dark, then dance it off under fairy lights.

When you’re a South Asian woman making English-language R&B, there’s a good chance someone will try to explain you to yourself! Mary Ann is aware of this but she’s also gracefully uninterested in being explained. “There’s definitely still a perception gap,” she says. “People don’t always know where to place you if you don’t fit into a neat cultural narrative. But I’m not trying to make ‘Indian R&B.’ I’m just making music that feels honest to me. My roots are part of me, I don’t need to wave a flag about it for them to show.”

That refusal to be boxed in is both her rebellion and her creative freedom. Her songs sound like the product of someone who’s figured out how to be entirely herself. “The song tells me what it wants,” she says simply. “If it needs space, I let it breathe”.

There was an interview from this year I was going to include, though it prohibits people from copying and pasting it, which is very annoying. However, I would advise people to read it. I am still going to take from it what I can, as Alexander is working on her second E.P. This follows her debut E.P., Love or a Lesson, that came out in March. The Bengaluru-based musician, acceptance is taking shape in her upcoming work. She is looking to and referencing the past without getting stuck in it. A lot of visual memories from her childhood are in the E.P. Alexander wants to feel like she is doing it for her inner child. The E.P. Alexander said to tmrw, that it is for girls who feel like they are too much. “Emotional beings, like me, that have a lot of feelings”. It is an interesting conversation. I have only just discovered her music, but I am already in love with it. Reading her interviews too is stunning. I would love to interview her one day:

“Love has long been one of her ways of making sense of the world. "I feel like I naturally have a tendency to write a lot of love songs and write about love," she says. "I feel like that's one way that I understand myself and learn about myself, by being in love and being a student of love."

"I've always had such big feelings," Alexander says.

That openness to feeling has roots in the music-filled household in which she grew up. Raised in Kerala in a Malayali family, Alexander encountered music through a wide range of cultural traditions, from Malayalam and Tamil film music to Hindi Bollywood songs and the international pop that reached her through artists such as Michael Jackson, Ne-Yo, Taylor Swift, Bruno Mars, Miley Cyrus, and the Jonas Brothers.

"Growing up, I have listened to a lot of Tamil music, a lot of Malayalam music, which is my own language, a lot of Hindi, like Bollywood music," she says. "We have so many languages and so many music industries. It's so vast."

“Alexander is already working on a future album that she describes as emotionally more mature and darker in sound. The songs reflect thoughts she had not previously known how to articulate, or feelings she was not yet ready to accept.

"It's directly correlating to how I am growing as a person," she says. "I can feel it exploring sides of me that I really would have loved for it to happen before, because I didn't know how to write the right words for it or the right sound for it, or whether I was ready to accept those thoughts and realizations."

When asked what she would tell the younger version of herself who was trying to find her place in music, Alexander does not offer a lesson in perseverance or a list of things she wishes she had known. She does not try to spare that girl the uncertainty that came with finding her way”.

I will end there. I hope that this feature has gone a little way to exploring the phenomenal Mary Ann Alexander. I know that many websites will herald her as one of their artists to watch 2027. When her new E.P. is out, there will be more interviews online. I am not sure whether there are any U.K. dates in the diary. I do hope that Alexander comes and sees us soon. Her jaw-dropping and sensational music is…