Artist Profile: May Rio

Photo Credit: Anya Good

The pursuit of music, for Brooklyn-based songwriter May Rio, came initially by chance. After years of training as a painter and visual artist, she stumbled into a pawn shop in Rhode Island and, on a whim, came out with a guitar. But in those initial periods of learning the instrument, she discovered a feeling of freedom and lightness that had long since escaped her in her primary craft.

Now, after a long stint in a New York indie band and a trio of solo albums, the growth of both May Rio’s sound and artistic consciousness has continued to follow that distinct thread— everything she creates is in pursuit of that freedom she felt when she first decided to lend her creative consciousness to music.

It’s not as though music first entered May’s life as a college student, though. Growing up, she was constantly surrounded by the annals of her father’s extensive .mp3 collection—which primarily featured music from ‘50s and ‘60s acts. As she grew older, a distinct garage and indie rock phase dominated her musical consciousness. Bands like the Pixies and The Strokes composed most of her regular listening rotation.

But painting was her first focus, at least from an artistic perspective. She won awards throughout high school for her works, and when the time came to choose a pursuit in college, art school felt like the natural path. And yet like many people who achieve highly in specific areas from a young age, there quickly came a point where most of the joy of the activity had been lost for her.

When she began noodling around on a guitar and etching out her first sets of lyrics, the pure creative license she felt almost spawned a sort of existential crisis. Had she taken the wrong path? Was it too late to make anything of herself as a musician when everyone around her had seemingly been making music since they could talk?

And yet that feeling persisted.

“I had to stop [painting] for years, honestly.  I started again a couple of years ago, and having that space is very helpful. But I think at a certain point, my painting almost felt more like rendering. It felt very tight. And I think, with writing, it felt very free and intuitive. I felt more like I was following my intuition than I was trying to make the right thing.”

While many musicians’ initial steps with guitar are defined by their careful combing of YouTube tutorials and a rudimentary understanding of music theory, music felt most appealing to May when she was songwriting. Almost as soon as she had a basic grasp on chord structures, she began fervently jotting down lyrics, and with the completion of each new song, she felt a sense of creative accomplishment that had long been missing in her life.

“When I finished a painting, I'd be like, ‘Get this thing out of my f*cking face. I never want to look at this again.’ [laughs] And the experience of writing a song, it really felt like this gift that I had given to myself, and I could keep experiencing it.  I'm gonna play it again. I'm gonna go through this experience again. It felt like a generative gift.”

When she ultimately moved to New York, her experiences as the vocalist for the indie rock outfit Poppies threw her into the music scene. With them, she not only sharpened her skills as a performer, but she learned she was also able to songwrite in a more structured environment, with competing voices and desires working their way into the process as well.

And yet as the dynamics of that group became more strained, May began developing May Rio on the side as a solo project—not with the intention of leaving the band, but with a distinct aim of recapturing some of the freedom that had captivated her in the first place. 

“With the band, we spent a long time making these recordings, figuring out the songs. It was a very long process and [there were] a lot of conversations involved… Even though I was writing for the band, it still felt like this kind of due process that my writing had to go through. It was really cool to just make something really quickly and just write whatever the f*ck I wanted to. I didn't have to fit this thing that had been established.”

The initial sketches and demos for her debut, 2021’s Easy Bammer, were, in fact, not originally intended to see the light of day. May felt, at least at first, that it was simply something she needed to do.

But as she listened to that first set of tantalizing, spaced-out pop ballads, she found that she couldn’t put them down. Even while her involvement in Poppies was still going strong, she knew that May Rio—as a solo venture—had to be given life.

That ultimately led to the fully fleshed-out version of Easy Bammer, which across 11 tracks, puts the full range of May’s early experimentations on display. The subdued rhythms of tracks like “Butter” and the collapsing swells of tracks like “Reservations” are tied together by the unifying factor of May’s voice—which is in turns as deeply plaintive as it is triumphant and joyfully expressive.

If Easy Bammer was a sorting out of May’s vision, then French Bath was its full realization. 

“I think the second album, I'd broken through that barrier of showing myself that I could do this thing…It does feel a little bit more grown up to me. The songs do feel a little more developed. I spent a longer time making it. I also brought in my friends to do live drums on [the project]— it was kind of more of a collage process.”

French Bath, although it carries only one less track than Easy Bammer, is much more focused and clearly crystallized. Tracks like “Monkey Do” and “Aspartame,” while they borrow from May’s indie rock roots in underlying ways, lean fully into the pop sound—the layered melodies and bubbly production—that has become her calling card as she’s continued to spread her wings across the Brooklyn music scene.

Many of those tracks were then given new life on Elegant Ensemble—a project May recorded with a full, orchestral band after what was originally meant to be a one-time live performance of her songs.

Now, as her newest album nears completion, May feels as though she has the whole world in front of her sonically. But even as her discography grows, it’s still the ease and freedom she feels in the act of songwriting that draws her into her creations again and again. There are no rules for May to follow—simply an unabashed creative intuition.