Meet Mei Semones, the jazz-founded guitar virtuoso whose genre-defying music knows no bounds
It’s Mei Semones’ world and we’re all just living in it. Well, it certainly feels that way when you’re at one of her concerts and the room erupts in a vortex of jazz, indie pop, accompanying scat singing and threads of bossa nova. It’s funny, feeling so overwhelmed by the technical prowess blasting from stage yet melting totally into its magnetism.
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But this Brooklyn-based guitar enthusiast embodies genre fusion in its truest form, wielding her usual PRS McCarty 594 to produce spellbinding jazz-adjacent songs that build from the foundation Chet Baker laid down. And with her full-length debut album Animaru a raging success, this Berklee alumna is well on her way.
“One of the things I love about jazz is that it values the individual voice of a musician, and you really need to have your own voice and your own sound,” Semones tells us from her home in New York. “It’s a tradition that people are learning from, and transcribing what other people have played and taking that language to make it your own… I don’t know, I just really like that part of it.”
But it wasn’t always jazz guitar for Semones. In fact, it wasn’t always guitar at all. At four years old she’d picked up the piano – a gift from Grandma to Semones and her sister. But it didn’t feel quite… right. “I switched to guitar when I was 11,” says Semones.
“I just wasn’t enjoying piano as much anymore, and I watched this movie called Back to the Future.” A sly smile tugs knowingly on her lips before she continues: “There’s that scene where Marty McFly plays a Chuck Berry song and I thought it was really cool. I wanted to play electric guitar because of that.”
Image: Alec Hirata
Shining Light
Still, it took a little longer to find the area of guitar where Semones now feels most comfortable. Although she’d expressed a new interest in learning guitar, she first had to try nylon-stringed models, classical guitar and rock before she settled on jazz in high school. “My school had a really good jazz program, so that’s when I got into it and started writing my own songs,” she says. Her songwriting and immediate talent for the instrument shone right through, earning Semones a place at Berklee shortly afterwards, which is when she moved from her home town in Michigan to New York to start a blossoming music career.
When Guitar.com speaks to Mei Semones now, she’s just finished a busy tour in Europe and is gearing up to perform in Japan before ending the show run in the US. One of the things her fans adore about her style is how you can hear grains of rock and chamber pop in every third or fourth bar when Semones’ PRS and her bandmate’s drums marry at just the right volume and ferocity. But the next bar might fall into this intoxicating jazz scale that Semones effortlessly mimics with her weightless, dainty vocal. In truth, you never know what you’re going to get at a Mei Semones gig.
“Writing this way comes pretty naturally to me,” says Semones after a pause. “I’m not necessarily thinking about blending different genres to go from bossa nova to rock, say, because I don’t really think of that. I just happen to enjoy these different types of music and they’re also my influences. That’s what I’ve listened to and that’s what I’ve studied, so what comes out is just a blend of those things together.”
Image: Dan Hureira
Tools For The Job
But as much as you can credit the songwriter and performer for creating such charismatic music, the player must also pick the right instrument and equipment that works best for their style to get the most attuned result. Semones is no exception to this rule:
“My primary guitar is the PRS McCarty 594, semi hollow body, mostly because of how it feels to play, the tone and how comfortable it is. But my first electric guitar was an Epiphone Les Paul, which my dad got me. Not long after that I went to a guitar building camp and made my own Stratocaster-style guitar, which was my second one. Then I got my first acoustic steel string guitar, which was a Hohner, and I still have it now.
“My dad then got me an Ibanez Artcore guitar for high school jazz before I got my PRS for college as a professional-grade guitar. We picked it up from Sweetwater at their headquarters in Indiana, which we drove to from Michigan, and we were there for around eight hours because I tried out so many guitars.
“At first, I didn’t like the bird inlays on the neck of the PRS because I thought it was a bit too flashy. But I just fell in love with it as soon as I played it. Now, it’s probably my favourite guitar I’ve ever had.”
It’s no wonder Semones loves her PRS so much – it’s taken her from being a humble college student to a rising innovator, known for writing original work orchestrated to fit both English and Japanese lyrics.
Since her debut EP Kabutomushi came out in 2024, it’s been clear the 25-year-old is brilliant at conveying feelings of platonic love in both languages. “Both feel pretty natural, because I feel like I’ve been writing songs with lyrics in both languages for a good while now,” she says. “Whatever pops into my head first or fits the melody better in that moment is what I go for.”
Everything Semones releases feels entirely original, and it’s pretty difficult to find another artist she directly sounds like. And when that’s the case with a musician, it can be pretty hard to guess who their inspirations were growing up.
Semones has a good think about her answer for this question before she delves into one: “When I was younger, it was definitely Nirvana for me,” she begins. “But when the Smashing Pumpkins came about, I’d say they were the first band I got into that were directly similar to my own taste. But other than that, I listen to a lot of jazz grades. I really like [Thelonious] Monk and Charlie Parker and Wes Montgomery. There are those classic [musicians] that a lot of people love like Jim Hall or Wayne Shorter as well, but on the flip side I really enjoy João Gilbertoi who’s a Brazilian artist and a huge influence for me.”
Image: Katherine M. Salvador
Needless to say, there’s certainly an amalgam of inspiration swirling around the music industry. There are the classic trailblazers Semones so aptly credits, plus new performers alike who are inventing their own pocket of genre, but it’s hard to imagine any jazz performer or similar going without crediting Chet Baker at some point. In 2025, Semones contributed towards a collaborative album, Chet Baker Re:imagined, which featured various other young, inspirational musicians like Matilda Mann and dodie covering some of Baker’s greatest hits.
“It was great because I actually love Chet Baker so much,” says Semones of her experience covering My Ideal for the record. “In terms of vocal inspiration, Chet Baker is one of the big ones. Alongside Gilbertoi, they’re my two main vocal inspirations, I would say. So, I was so happy when they reached out to me about [contributing to this record]. I had three options for the songs I wanted to pick, and My Ideal happened to be one of them. It’s actually my favourite song on Chet Baker Sings, so I was really happy about that.”
Having achieved so much in her short career so far, Semones wants to continue reaching for the stars. But, at the same time, she doesn’t have too many expectations as of yet. “I just want to keep going this way and developing as a songwriter,” she says. “I guess the main focus and my long-term goal would be to continue practicing guitar and getting better at it. I want to be the best guitarist that I can be in my lifetime. Hopefully one day I’ll get to the point where I’m good enough at guitar to record a jazz trio album or something like that, because I would love to do that. Or, although it’s definitely not time yet, maybe one day I’ll get to do a jazz standards album and have friends come on and feature on it with me.
“I just hope everyone can listen to and enjoy my music. What makes me really happy is seeing kids at my show who are there with their parents, because I think that’s really sweet. And sometimes I’ll get to meet fans who are learning the guitar and say my music is inspiring them to do it, and that makes me really happy. Music can be interesting to everyone, of all ages too, and I just love it.”
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