BIO
ON ARTISTRY
Sister Mary Margaret is a classically trained musician and interdisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn, NY. She has written, arranged, and produced her upcoming project “Proud Mary” which is a sonic culmination of rich emotional density and barren rust belt nostalgia. Lush harmonies meet industrial and digital ambience, disintegrating senses of where one exists in time and space. Always with a distinctively dynamic and honest vocal, her sound defies genres and rather serves to embody the beauty of dissonance on all fronts.
ON MUSIC
Growing up in Buffalo, Sister Mary Margaret was classically trained in piano and violin via Suzuki strings and other various private teachers. Though music through instrument became almost exclusively a source of discipline, creative outlets were tapped through voice and writing. She began singing with a jazz band in high school, where she fell in love with the intricacies of phrasing and honed in on influences that run deep, such as Sarah Vaughan, Roberta Flack, Donny Hathaway, and Minnie Riperton. She completed an Opera Performance degree on scholarship at the Purchase Conservatory of Music, which journeyed her through intense study of art song and a series of dramatic roles. She appeared as Blanche in the conservatory’s 2020 mainstage production of Dialogues des Carmelites, as well as her European debut as Mary Warren in the Berlin Opernfest’s 2019 production of The Crucible. After excessive abuse from her opera directors and a global pandemic, Sister Mary Margaret said fuck it, and now she just makes whatever. The raw, visceral nature of the operatic voice can still be found as a major influence in her music.
ON WRITING
Sister Mary Margaret further developed her distinctive writing style through college by translating and interpreting French and German art song, set to poets like Goethe and Mallarme. That, along with her love of hip hop and confessional writings of various prolific women such as Anne Sexton and bell hooks, greatly shaped her sometimes flowery, sometimes curt wordplay. She released a printed zine of poems in 2022 called 9:00 which is available for purchase on her website and in various shops around Brooklyn. Many of her songs are based on these poems, including her single “Two Moons” which weaves words of spirituality, touching on the surrender of oneself to trust in ancestral plotting.
