Wellspring - Mree and the Gift of Explosive Talent

Every so often talent flares into the universe with such intensity you almost have to turn away. I've been following Mree (Marie Hsiao) for a few years now. I don't remember exactly when I first came across her, but I originally remember her as one of a crop of talented YouTube cover artists, armed with a guitar and great singing voices, who burst onto the scene and have since moved onto bigger things: David Choi, Kina Grannis, Clara Chung and Mree.

I came across most of the singers independently looking for good covers of popular songs and these singers easily floated to the top of the heap. Clara Chung's cover of Coldplay's Yellow and David Choi's cover of Owl City's Fireflies are among my favorite videos on the site. I didn't notice till later that all of the singers I was encountering were young and Asian-American. There's been a few articles written about this phenomenon, but it's an outgrowth of the difficulties that talented Asian-Americans have getting recognition and making it in the mainstream music business. There's talent here, real talent, and as these artists have shown over the last few years, they aren't afraid of the hard, knuckle grinding, work it takes to try and make it.

Among this group, one of the artists I came across was Mree. Her first videos are of her, still in high school, sitting in front of a piano or behind a guitar in a stairwell, singing her heart out to some of her favorite tunes. These were great covers by a talented high schooler with a great a voice and lots of promise. I mentally filed away her stage name and checked in on her channel every once in a while. Then one day she posted this cover

Within the first 10 seconds I was awestruck. 34 seconds in she started to sing and I had to sit down. *instant frisson* By the end of her second phrase I had become a fan for life.

At 1:36 I realized that this wasn't just another video of a girl sitting in a stairwell, singing a song she happened to like, this was something of an entirely different sort. Layer upon layer, she built this song into a magnificent edifice, filling the space of the audio stage with drama and a sudden intensity and then at the moment of rapture pulling the phrasing back perfectly. And all this appeared to come off as effortlessly for her as breathing.

Barely able to contain myself, I listened to this song over and over again for hours.

Excited, I dove in. I found out that she had done all the filming, recording, audio and video editing, arranging and of course the performance herself. Having messed around a bit with just the audio mixing bits myself, I was stunned. Still a teenager, she was producing world class music videos from her bedroom.

A day later it dawned on me that I wasn't even familiar with the original song. It turns out to be a good song, a perfectly fine sort of catchy post-rock indie folk tune I might have found myself humming in an idle moment. But Mree's cover was stupendous. She had taken the original material and transformed it into

something otherworldly. The delta between the original and her version was a gulf as musically wide as the Grand Canyon.

I dug around a bit more and found out she wanted to do more than just sing in a stairwell, she had real ambition and conspired to be an honest to goodness recording artist. "Grow" her debut album of original songs was released in 2011 and charted well (as did some of her singles) -- for a self published entirely independent girl still in high school. To promote herself, she set up and went on a mini tour to people's houses (mostly local, she was still in school!). Recording industry be damned, she was going to muscle her way to success. If more people possessed this kind of indomitable moxy, the world would be a better place.

Without pretension she kept working, self-producing more videos, doing more covers and working out the tough bits of a solo artist with a deeply textured and rapidly maturing multi-layered sound in a live performance. Each new release was better than the last. From stairwell singer to mature recording artist with MTV ready music videos - it's simply super human. It's unpossible.

Then she hit back to back to back to back with four incredibly crafted songs/videos:

With her last two videos she once again introduced me to new artists whom she has long surpassed with not so much covers but complete recraftings of the originals. Her cover of Empire of the Sun's "Walking on a Dream" is not so much a fan tribute as a rocket ship, launched off the original into the tranquil depths of space. It was simply awesome and it blew my socks off.

I followed Mree on Facebook and saw her starting to get attention -- playing local venues, getting a reviews. She'd already accomplished more before graduating high school than most artists do in a career. Was it too much? Can somebody sing, play, write, film, edit, mix, storyboard and produce this much musical magic just by themselves without burning out? Could this wellspring of talent go on?

Then slowly little trickles started coming in -- a new project, a new album "Winterwell", I was as excited as a 12 year old on Christmas day opening a pile of toys. Little snippets on vine teased as an avalanche of delicious musical layers built a musical space that I wanted to be in.

The title song, "Into the Well" is a masterpiece. It hits with layers of acoustic guitars and builds into a rich fantasy. A complex but subtle polyrythm drives it along. The video Mree produced (shot by fan and photographer Joey Cardella) is no less astonishing for something shot partially in a neighbor's pool and using string and colored paint as a special effect. This is music making, no that's not the right word, this is art making at its absolutely best. Limitations and resources be damned, this will exist.

She's followed up with more shows, a band, guest editor spots and even a tune making it onto a popular TV show. What next? I can only imagine, but she's only got to keep working, keep maturing, keep advancing her art and it'll spread itself out to the right people. She'll be on Conan before you know it and a household name before she's 25. It's been such fun watching the girl in the stairwell grow (just like her first album's namesake) as an artist, I can't wait to see what's next...and then what's next after that.

Go buy her stuff, buy both albums, buy them on iTunes and get the physical disks too, seriously, they're that good, and in the interest of advancing the human species by supporting the best of the arts and the best of the artists, it's just the right thing to do. We're only going to continue to see amazing stuff out of this young artist and it makes me wonderfully glad to be around to see it happen.