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Making a Scene Presents an Interview with Mare

With gospel roots, classical training, and a powerhouse voice, Mare creates intimate, modern R&B that feels both timeless and deeply personal. Her music carries the emotional weight of church harmonies, the discipline of classical study, and the smooth confidence of contemporary soul. It is a sound that has taken her around the world, from the churches of Philadelphia, where she first began singing as a toddler, to stages alongside Lauryn Hill, Sam Smith, Lizzo, and The Bacon Brothers.

Now, Mare steps fully into her own spotlight with Becoming, an empowered solo album that marks a major turning point in her artistic life. After years of supporting other artists as a keyboardist, harmony vocalist, and bandleader, she is using this new project to tell her own story with honesty, strength, and emotional clarity.

“I’m saying goodbye to my old life,” she sings on “Home,” one of the album’s defining tracks. Built around piano chords and bright pop melodies, the song captures Mare’s journey toward self-discovery, both as a musician and as a person. “It’s a melting pot of everything that represents me,” she says. “‘Home’ has a twofold meaning. I finally found my sound, while simultaneously settling into this new version of myself. When I think of that feeling, moving into a new house came to mind. I wanted the song to feel and showcase that same emotion and excitement, because this indeed feels like home.”

Mare’s first idea of home was the deeply Christian household where she was raised. Her upbringing was sheltered, but music became a doorway to something larger. At just three years old, she enrolled in Philadelphia’s historic Settlement Music School, where she began studying classical piano while most children her age were still learning the alphabet. That early musical foundation shaped her discipline, ear, and emotional range.

Music was also central at home. During holidays, her family would gather around the dinner table and sing gospel classics in harmony. Those moments left a lasting mark on Mare’s sound, giving her music a spiritual center even when the songs move through R&B, pop, soul, and contemporary textures.

She began channeling that upbringing into her solo work with releases like 2020’s Wish Me Well, an album that captured an artist in transition. The project built a bridge between the gospel music that shaped her childhood and the R&B sounds she discovered later in life. As her artistic world expanded, so did her career. Musicians across genres began hiring Mare for her gifts as a keyboardist, vocalist, arranger, and bandleader. She performed with chart-topping artists and Grammy winners, traveled internationally, and built a reputation as a deeply skilled and emotionally intuitive musician.

Still, Mare shines brightest when she is telling her own story. As a solo artist, she can bring every part of herself to the surface: her voice, her piano playing, her songwriting, her roots, and her lived experience. Becoming gives her the space to do exactly that.

The album opens with “Nothing,” a sparse piano-driven song layered with gospel harmonies that point back to Mare’s church upbringing. Her voice is the centerpiece — flexible, expressive, and deeply affecting. She can croon softly, rise with power, and pull emotion from even the smallest phrase. Across the album, she blurs the lines between genres, moving from soul to pop to R&B with ease.

Songs like “Pearl” reveal the inner tension between self-confidence and self-doubt, while “Bad Habits” brings rhythmic energy to the complicated patterns of relationships. Each track adds another layer to Mare’s story, showing an artist learning to let go, grow forward, and trust the person she is becoming.

“This album is about letting go of the negative things that don’t align with my life, and having the strength to move forward while opening myself up to new experiences,” she says.

Deeply felt and unflinchingly personal, Becoming does not hide from difficult truths. Instead, it turns them into songs that feel both intimate and universal. Mare is adding her own chapter to Philadelphia’s long history of soul and R&B, but she is also doing something more personal: breaking down walls within herself and making music shaped by emotional landscapes rather than genre boundaries alone.

With Becoming, Mare blends the classical with the contemporary, the spiritual with the sensual, and the personal with the universal. It is a record for anyone trying to understand who they really are, delivered by a lifelong musician who has never sounded more fully like herself.

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