Nico Marie McNeese has always loved music and movement. As a child, she took up dance and dreamed of becoming a professional one day. Now she’s a well-known and respected DJ and yogi with over 190,000 followers on YouTube. She’s also doing something she’d never anticipated: releasing an album.
She credits her parents always nurturing the “creative kid” in her to give her the confidence to try something new.
“When you’re younger, you’re just making songs. I’ve recorded songs all throughout life. I have no idea where they are, and some of them I hope can just stay where they’re at,” she said. “My mom had me in choir and dance class. It’s like everything was kind of leading up to this point.”
The album is titled “Meeting Myself for the First Time” and is scheduled to come out this spring. Its first single, “Begin,” will be released Jan. 24. McNeese had no trouble finding other artists of multiple disciplines to collaborate with. That includes musician/sculptor/filmmaker Damon Davis, who produced the forthcoming album.
As he and McNeese produced the album, they avoided prescribing a genre. Davis said how it felt was most important.
“I am in love with concept albums. Each song should be a scene in the movie. So, what is the movie about?” Davis said. “There were certain aspects [McNeese] wanted me to check out. But nothing was like, ‘We’re going to make an R&B album. We’re going to make an instrumental album.’ It was like, ‘What's the feeling we're trying to capture?’ Let's pull sounds and textures to do that.”
McNeese told St. Louis on the Air the inspiration to create her first album came from her YouTube audience.
“I’ve had my YouTube channel for about three years. I keep getting comments on my videos about my voice,” she said. “A lot of my subscribers say my voice is calming and I had one in particular even say: ‘I don’t even do the yoga video. I just want to listen to your voice.’ I want to be able to make that accessible to my audience if that’s something that makes them feel calm, feel good. It was such an easy transition because I’m a music lover, anyway. It was like kismet.”
For more about “Meeting Myself for the First Time” with Nico Marie McNeese and Damon Davis, including a preview of the forthcoming single “Begin,” listen to St. Louis on the Air on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or click the play button below.
“St. Louis on the Air” brings you the stories of St. Louis and the people who live, work and create in our region. The show is produced by Miya Norfleet, Emily Woodbury, Danny Wicentowski, Elaine Cha and Alex Heuer. Jada Jones is our production assistant. The audio engineer is Aaron Doerr.
