Singer, songwriter and instrumentalist Michael Mayo describes his debut album, Bones (Mack Avenue), as the culmination of a journey many years in the making. Fresh off of touring with Herbie Hancock, Mayo, 29, began writing for the album in earnest in 2018. He recorded it live at Figure8 Recordings in Brooklyn, pre-pandemic, with his tightly
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Grammy-winning producer Eli Wolf produced your album. What contributions did he bring to the creative process? Eli was such a gift. He was my rock during this process. Before we even booked studio time, he and I got together for these coffee demo hangs, where we would go to a coffee shop and I’d play him some of the demos I was working on and we’d talked about the sonic landscape of each song. He’s a pro. It’s very clear that he’s really good at what he does and we found a really nice balance of communication.
How has being in New York inspired you as an artist and what were you searching for in New York that you weren’t finding in L.A.? I immediately felt a push and a pull — a push to create, to write, to sing, to practice, and a pull to go to shows, to hang out with friends, to get on the train and go all the way to Harlem to see someone that I had been listening to for years. New York has this amazing energy to it and also art is so readily available … I’m talking pre-COVID. The situation is looking differently now, but it’s all around you. But I really like to chill and I really like to vibe, and I think I get that from L.A. New York has pushed me to not only chill.
What were your formative years like as a student at New England Conservatory of Music and the Thelonious Monk Institute? NEC was really amazing for a lot of different reasons. I think one of the main ones was that it exposed me to a lot of music that I didn’t even know existed before. It really opened my eyes to the fact that a lot of the things that we take for granted, a lot of the things that we accept as rules, are just arbitrary standards that can serve a function if it resonates with someone but doesn’t need to be the end all/be all. And I think that I learned to question that which we seem to believe is like a rule.
Similar to the arbitrary societal constructs regarding sexuality. Totally. And I’m all about challenging that stuff, and not even necessarily for the sake of challenging, but also just to show yourself that any label is just a descriptor and it has no bearing on what you should allow yourself to do or what you should keep yourself from doing. All it does is it describes what’s happening.
What was it like having Herbie Hancock as a mentor? I mean, Herbie is amazing. The stuff that I’m talking about right now, I was sort of already playing around with these ideas in college. But you know, I was 19 and 20, and the ideas were sort of forming but I wasn’t able to verbalize them very well yet. So when I got to grad school and started working with Herbie and Wayne Shorter and all these other artists, hearing them talk about their life experiences — and also honestly just watching them be and move to the world — is what really got me thinking about this stuff on a deeper level.
Who are some of your other influences? I could spend all day talking about that. But to name a few people that have been especially significant to me, I would say Ella Fitzgerald, Bobby McFerrin, Brandy, D’Angelo, Donny Hathaway, Aretha Franklin, Freddie Hubbard, Miles Davis — I could literally keep going forever. 
It’s evident that you’re moved by different influences — neo soul, jazz, R&B, harmonization, drum ’n’ bass, hip-hop. Do you see plurality as being a driving force in your music? It seems as though, in the not-so-distant future, genres will cease to exist. They just don’t seem to speak to people as much anymore. I would agree with that — we can’t know, but I would wager that. I think genre labels serve a purpose of sorting more than anything else. I think they’re really useful to help people get into a style that speaks to their interests. I believe that anything that’s made by a human, you’re going to be able to find some common thread between that and any other thing that’s made by a human. And once we start realizing that all this stuff exists on the spectrum, like discreet things that have nothing to do with each other, then I think we’ll start to realize that genre labels don’t really serve much of a purpose.
The track “Stolen Moments” rides on a single verse, and ironically, you recorded it in the closet of your new apartment after moving to New York. There are all these layers of vocals that you stack using a looper pedal. Is this a metaphor for something you were going through? What’s funny is that it just happened that way because I didn’t have any furniture. I moved into this apartment. It was my first solo apartment and it was exactly around the time that I was making the record. And so suddenly I had all of these new circumstances and no couch [laughs], so there was something that felt really stark about the track. The clarity that I had of wanting to make this album, mixed with the very real thing of not having any belongings, I think that really spoke to me and made me want to talk about these moments that we take for granted, that if we took the time to explore could lead to something cool and beautiful if we allowed ourselves.
What role does technology play in your music and how do you use it to elevate your sound and make it more textured, layered and complex? I started looping in college. I got a looper before my senior recital just by a total fluke because a friend of mine was getting rid of his looper pedal. It’s funny because that actually totally changed the course of a lot of stuff for me. I like to use technology because it provides something that playing live with other people or singing solo doesn’t provide, in that it’s not human. When I’m playing with people, there’s an unknown in that there are other human beings that are influencing what I’m doing and are influenced by what I’m doing. But the looper isn’t human, so you can experiment with sound in ways you wouldn’t be able to otherwise. I like to use it as a compositional tool as well as a performance tool and as an extension of my technique.
You speak four languages. How does that shade your voice in terms of tone and inflection, and how does it influence how you use language in your music? I’ve always been totally enamored by language ever since I was a little kid playing Japanese video games and trying to mimic what the characters were saying. I think it’s really shaped the way that I hear things. I’m all about using abstraction as a tool to understand the world on a deeper level. Like, to me, when I see the number four, I immediately say the sound four and it’s instant and simultaneous because English is my first language and so that’s what comes out. But when you stop to realize that there are thousands of ways to communicate that same idea, then you’re realizing that the sounds themselves don’t mean anything, it’s the concept that means something. And I like that idea, because when you apply it to music, suddenly the possibilities are endless.
How does it feel, now that you’ve come out with this album and you’ve expressed your authenticity through music? Where do you see yourself now that the album is out? I’m so incredibly thrilled that the album is finally out. I told my friends for a long time it felt like it was burning a hole in my computer. It represents a lot for me personally, but also on a more abstract level, it’s proof that you can take a huge undertaking and as long as you follow through the baby steps, the action steps, you can create something meaningful and you can see how it reacts with the world. And that’s one of the things that I find most exciting, because at a certain point, it’s not yours anymore. Moving forward, I’m excited to start writing again. I think I gave this project the space that I thought it needed and really tried to honor that. And now that it’s out, I already have stuff cooking for album number two. - Lissette Corsa https://youtu.be/9U36Z-gHJHA