Michelle Mouw uses nature as a catalyst for discovering new parts of herself. When you’ve grown up in a city with a population of 21.54 million—and no squirrels—you kind of have to spend your college years seeking out thriving green spaces. Under the moniker Meiwei, the Beijing-born, Boston-based singer/songwriter is doing just that and writing acoustic, dreamy songs along the way. Today, she releases her self titled debut EP.
“I feel like a kid in complete awe of all this nature,” she says about living in the U.S. compared to China. “I had limited access to green spaces growing up and for most of my teenage years, the pollution was quite severe. In the U.S., not once do I think about the air quality and there are parks everywhere.”
Listen to Meiwei’s lyrics closely, and you’ll hear that sense of awe in her music, too. Over and over, she mentions rivers, water, trees, and other landscape imagery. That, coupled with her fingerpicking guitar style, make it easy to believe that she learned how to play “basically every Laura Marling song in my bedroom in high school.” Today, she draws more folk-spiration from other artists who lean on nature and the outdoors: Adrianne Lenker (of Big Thief) and Haley Heynderickx.
In stark contrast to the lush landscape imagery, Meiwei also writes about cityscapes. We can almost feel the bustling of gritty, grey city life in “Ring Roads.” First, we hear a 2017 field recording of a bus in Beijing; the bus is announcing its arrival at the stop that Mouw gets off to go see her grandmother. “I have no idea what compelled me to record it back then. Maybe ‘past me’ could sense ‘future me’ was going to write “Ring Roads” about Beijing,” she muses. Under Meiwei’s signature, gentle fingerpicking, we can also make out a second, more subtle sound: her rusty and very well-loved bike. “I played it by setting it upside down and spinning the pedals with my hands.” The idea was to make it sound like she was commuting on her bike the whole song.
Throughout the tune, she describes city life—”The sun barely made it out that year,” “Cigarette smoke and AstroTurf,” “Spring would only last a week, and winter a year.” Just before the 3 minute mark, she opens up the song with open strumming. Finally, in a few lines inspired by Mitski’s Japanese lines in “First Love/ Late Spring,” Meiwei sings in Mandarin.
She goes on to sing about city life in “The Valley,” too. Again she uses field recordings to set the scene, this time over what might be rain sounds. She adds echoey piano notes and sings a refrain that any city-dwelling romantic can feel in their bones: “I know you hate this city, but goddamnit you love me.”
“Apples and Ginger” highlights Meiwei’s skillful, lilting vocals, while she gets more experimental with “Swing Song,” using harmonics while fingerpicking, and using the swing as a metaphor for a hot and cold relationship, repeatedly singing, “Pull me close / let me go.”
Mouw wrote those four songs in her Boston apartment while she was a student at Northeastern during the course of 2020. However, the first song on the EP (and the EP’s single), “December’s End,” was penned from a small cabin that her uncle built in the woods of Wisconsin around New Years of last year. Talk about big Bon Iver vibes.
One of Meiwei’s songs written during 2020, which does not actually appear on the EP, was “Unusual Spring.” She dropped that one as a single in May of 2020, at the height of COVID’s spring peak. Unsurprisingly, the song is much informed by the pandemic. “The other thing different about ‘Unusual Spring’ is that it was recorded in my bedroom under the virtual guidance of my friend and the wonderful producer Craig Short, who lived down the street from me, but because of the intensity of COVID in the spring, I couldn’t actually see in person.” The rest of the songs on the EP were recorded in a renovated barn-turned-recording studio in Weston, MA, called Nothing Productions, and were also produced by Short.
What’s next for Mouw is yet to be determined (as with most performers these days). She’s just accepted a job working at a farm in Washington in March. “I plan on being one with the vegetables for the next 9-months and writing songs in my cabin.”
In 2021, she says she plans to write enough songs to put out a proper debut LP, and play with real-life human beings. “I saw an ad on a bulletin board the other day,” she says, “where a 65-year-old piano player was looking for someone to ‘play and share the joys of music with.’ I HEAR YOU my friend and I relate.” If that ‘missed connections’ moment doesn’t pan out, getting billed with any of her local inspirations (Anjimile, Carol, and Brennan Wedl) would serve us just fine. Let’s cross our fingers.
Stream Meiwei’s EP below via Bandcamp.