By Caroline Huckeba
Photographer & Creative Director: Carli Lind // Executive Producer: Ahmari Cameron // Stylist: Todd White // Stylist Assistant: Kevin Stylez Patterson // Hair Stylist & Makeup Artist: Katoya Johnson // PR: Austin Marshall
With her upcoming EP, the Bengaluru-based musician turns childhood nostalgia, complicated attachments, and the experience of feeling too much into something pink, purple, and playfully her own.
For Mary Ann Alexander, revisiting the past has become less about correcting it than learning to look at it with a little more tenderness.
“I do find it really endearing when I listen to older songs of mine,” Alexander tells tmrw Magazine. “I think I have changed from looking at older music and thinking, ‘Oh, that is so cringe.’ I don't feel like that anymore. I feel like I've come to accept my journey.”
For the Bengaluru-based musician, that acceptance is taking shape in her upcoming body of work, which looks to the past without getting stuck there. Inspired by the visual memories of her childhood and the complicated feelings that follow us into adulthood, the project is an exercise in making room for the parts of ourselves we might otherwise try to outgrow. Its world is pink and purple, its emotions oversized and deliberately playful. Think the grassy hills of Teletubbies, the animated absurdity of Adventure Time, and the surreal humor of Adult Swim.
Beneath the colorful exterior, however, is something more intimate: an attempt to understand the younger self who first learned how to feel everything so intensely.
“For this EP, I wanted it to feel like I am doing it for my inner child,” Alexander says. “I have a lot of visual memories from my childhood that I keep.”
Those memories are not just aesthetic references. They are part of how she understands herself, and how she wants her music to feel. Alexander describes the project as an offering to the girl she was, but also to anyone who has ever worried that their emotions take up too much space.
“I feel like this EP is for girls that feel like they're too much,” she says. “Emotional beings, like me, that have a lot of feelings.”
The songs explore what happens when we stop trying to make our feelings fit within the expectations attached to intimacy. They consider the frustrations of wanting to be understood, the ache of wanting someone's attention, and the sometimes irrational demands that emerge when we are afraid of losing closeness.
“I think I did a good job of making all of those feelings feel really light in the EP,” she says. “And playful.”
Alexander connects the project's emotional world to experiences in adult relationships. “A lot of the songs have to do with the wounds that you might have in your attachments growing up, and how that comes across when you're older,” she explains.
She offers an almost comically direct translation of that yearning: “Just talk to me. Why can't you just give all your attention to me and be with me for eternity?”
Her recent release, “Call Me,” offers one example of how she turns those feelings into music. The song grew out of her first trip to London, when the distance from her boyfriend at the time left her yearning for a connection she could maintain through her phone.
“I wanted to make a song of yearning and a lover girl energy song based on that feeling of distance,” she says, “and being on the phone and being able to make up for that.”
The song was also made with an all-female production team, a detail Alexander remembers as part of the atmosphere that shaped its sound.
“I was trying to write music in a space where I make the girls feel understood,” she says. “I want to write a girly song.”
For her, the emotional specificity of a song is not separate from the environment in which it is made. The people in the room, the feelings she brings into it, and the version of herself she is trying to understand all become part of the finished work.
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.”
Her parents played film music at home, while her father, who was particularly devoted to Michael Jackson, passed that enthusiasm on to her. Her grandmother introduced her to songs from her own childhood, including English-language songs she had learned at Anglo-Indian schools, and showed Alexander The Sound of Music for the first time.
Her grandmother's musical memories added another layer to the collection of sounds Alexander carried with her. “I grew up with a mixed bag of diverse sounds,” she explains, describing a childhood in which different musical worlds existed alongside one another.
The universe she is building now is also shaped by her experience as a visual communicator. Although music felt natural to her from an early age, pursuing it professionally was not always an obvious choice. Her father made creating music look effortless, but the realities of the Indian music industry made an independent career seem uncertain.
“My dad is somebody who makes music look easy,” Alexander says. “He is such a natural that being around him makes it feel like it just flows through him.”
She grew up thinking of music as something she simply did. But she also understood that talent alone would not necessarily translate into a sustainable career.
Her compromise was to study visual communication, a field that allowed her to remain close to the arts while imagining a more conventional career. When she moved from Kerala to Bengaluru for college, however, she found herself surrounded by photographers, filmmakers, documentary makers, illustrators, and other creatives.
“I was around so many creatives that it just made me feel closer to my own creativity, in whatever way I expressed myself,” she says.
The internet offered another kind of permission. Watching YouTubers build audiences by sharing everyday aspects of their lives helped Alexander imagine a future in which an artist did not have to wait for traditional industry approval to begin. If people could create their own platforms and invite others into their worlds, why couldn't she do the same with music?
“I'm like, okay, so if you can just do anything on the internet and be known for it, why can't I do what I want to do, like music?”
That shift also expanded her understanding of what it means to be an artist. She now makes visual material for her own projects, including show posters, and sees the skills she has developed through visual communication as part of the same creative practice.
It makes sense, then, that the childhood imagery surrounding her upcoming work feels so integral to the music. She is returning to the visual language through which she first experienced the world, using it to create a space where complicated feelings can exist without becoming overwhelming.
Listening to old songs used to invite a familiar kind of retrospective embarrassment: the feeling that an earlier version of herself had been less sophisticated, less self-aware, or less deserving of being taken seriously. Now, she finds herself responding differently.
“I can see what I've done before and think, ‘Oh, you know what? Cute. Like, I see you,’” she says.
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 don't know. I think she should figure it out exactly the way,” she says. “I don't think I would tell her anything. Honestly, I'd just be like, ‘Yeah, figure it out, girl. You got this. You really do.’”
Then she adds, “You need to go through every single thing that you went through to come to this realization. I don't want to make it any easier.”