Like and Transcribe

“Try to stay composed,” MEI Semones sings on her 2024 track “Wakare No Kotaba.” Watching Semones perform the song—or really any song in her growing catalog—it's easy to hear the line as a mantra, given the complicated and technical arrangement. Yet in her nimble combination of jazz and bossa nova–inflected guitars, hypnotic metric switch-ups, and lyrical pivots between English and Japanese, the effect is somehow effortless. 

That sound defies easy categorization and has garnered high praise from Rolling Stone, Variety, and Pitchfork. In 2024, Paste named Semones the “best of what’s next,” and in March 2025 she was featured on the cover of NME ahead of the release of her acclaimed debut full-length, Animaru. Since 2022, the Michigan native has moved at a blistering pace, releasing her first two EPs, Tsukino and Sukikirai, prior to graduating. She moved to New York City and began a full-time job as a teacher at a Japanese preschool before releasing what was to be her breakout EP, Kabutomushi, in 2024. A year later came Animaru, released by Bayonet Records, followed by her first headlining tour, backed by her all-Berklee band: violist Noah Leong BM ’21,  violinist Claudius Agrippa BM ’23, bassist Noam Tanzer BM ’19 MM ’21, and drummer Ransom McCafferty BM ’23. 

Semones describes her music as “jazz-influenced indie J-pop,” though she admits that genre isn’t really something she considers, especially while writing. “When I'm making music, I'm not thinking too much about, oh, I'm gonna take this genre and this genre and blend them together,” she says. “I try not to plan it out too much because I feel like that would take away from the music in a sense.” Blending languages in her lyrics emerged from a similar mindset. While English is her native language, she grew up speaking Japanese with her mother. “I would say it felt pretty natural. . . . To me it kind of makes sense that my music would also be in both languages.”

There’s a nonchalance in the way Semones speaks about her process that masks the complexity of the music that emerges. In “Wakare No Kotoba,” for example, her fingers flit over the fretboard like a spider crossing its intricate web. The part makes use of the wide interval arpeggios she first learned in Professor Tim Miller’s Advanced Guitar Performance class. Then there are the song’s vocals, which chronicle the end of a friendship with a disarming wistfulness. For English speakers, translation adds another layer of depth. The refrain begins with the song’s title (“Parting Words” in English), but the following line translates as either, “I don’t have any,” or, “There’s no such thing”—in the first, the speaker is at a loss; in the second, all is lost.

Fueling her creativity is a deep curiosity and a desire for new challenges. As she told Stereogum about her time at Berklee, “Everything I was learning, I was excited about. People might be like, ‘Oh, ear training is so annoying.’ But I genuinely enjoyed it.” Semones also began transcribing solos from the artists she loved, a practice that still sparks her songwriting. The Animaru tracks “Dumb Feeling” and “Zarigani,” for instance, contain licks inspired by Coltrane and Charlie Parker, respectively. 

This is why, however unexpected it might seem on paper to combine J-pop with Gilberto, for Semones, these combinations feel completely natural. “The best way of finding inspiration for writing songs is from diving into other people's music,” she says. “You have to learn a language; you have to transcribe. You have to see what came before you and make it your own."

See the full Spring 2026 issue of Berklee Today.