MARO is among friends

In 2024, Portuguese singer and songwriter Mariana Secca was there to record SO MUCH HAS CHANGED – her latest solo album as MARO, comprised songs she wrote around the time she turned 30. Surrounding her were four close collaborators – four of many who have entered her life since, a decade ago, she ventured from her home city of Lisbon. The atmosphere at Gargolândia was joyful throughout the process.

“We talked about it by the time we had the songs done, and I sent them the demos,” Secca tells me. “They were like, ‘it’s crazy, I can hear our hang,’ and I was thinking, ‘it’s exactly that.’ It’s five best friends having a time – we were laughing a lot, feeling good, eating well – everything felt easy and wholesome.”

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We’re currently in Lisbon, where the now 31-year-old Secca is preparing for a sold-out performance at her home city’s 4,300 capacity Coliseu De Recreios. It’s the penultimate show on her eighteen-date SO MUCH HAS CHANGED Europe tour. 

Throughout her career Secca has been a relatively nomadic artist – she spent three years studying at Boston’s Berklee College of Music from age twenty, a year in LA, a long stint touring with Jacob Collier, and a more recent few years living and touring between the US and Europe.

Nowadays, however, she’s based mostly in Lisbon – a city which packs close knit streets into a labyrinthine collage of history. When you grow up in Portugal, family ties are often very important, and the relatives whom Secca still has a very strong bond with in the place that raised her, some of whom are here helping her out on tour, pervade SO MUCH HAS CHANGED as lyrical inspiration. 

“Some of the songs are kind of about gratitude to my family and core support system – understanding that all of what I’ve done and lived is because of their unconditional love and support. That all entered into the album – that’s Lisbon to me,” Secca tells me.

But the album’s lyrics often aren’t so direct as that  – they resemble fragments from a larger narrative, or glimpses of an intimate conversation. The emotion she’s describing in the song is what matters, not the life experience she’s reflecting on, or the person she’s addressing. “I’m a big fan of feeling,” she tells me. “Feeling is what drives everything I do, and that’s why if I do full electronics or naked folk, for me it doesn’t matter, as long as the feeling is there.”

Take the chorus of “I OWE IT TO YOU”. Over slowly unfolding, bossa-nova-tinged guitar patterns – a MARO trademark since her early music – joined later by dreamy piano chords and cinematic drums, Secca sings to someone who could just as easily be her past self as another person: “Whatever I do, whatever I say / Whatever may come my way / I owe it to you / You taught me to love, as long as I live / I owe it to you.” Like a good short story, no word is wasted.

Looking back through Secca's career, it’s not too hard to discern that economy of purpose in her work with other artists. Whether it's the spectacularly jazzy live shows she contributed to while touring with Jacob Collier in 2019, or the progressive house album she recorded with Reunion Island-born artist NASAYA (who also worked on SO MUCH HAS CHANGED), Secca has an aptitude for inhabiting another musician’s world – knowing exactly what to play, or sing, and when. On a personal level, she attributes that also to growing up with many relatives. 

“For me, music is a conversation, and that comes from growing with your family, understanding that sometimes you have to listen to your brothers, or cousins. You can’t just be talking all the time; you’ve got to read the room and understand what they need,” she says. “I don’t just go and do my thing, I go open, to understand what is happening and what it needs. A relationship, a friendship – for me both end up being the same thing as music.”

That collaborative spirit was present while making SO MUCH HAS CHANGED. “Nature,” and “family vibes,” Secca explains, were all she needed to stay inspired.

“I ended up writing eight new songs, which immediately changed the whole concept of the record," she says. “Then it was a matter of just stacking things up. There were pieces I was already dreaming of, like, ‘I want to do this guitar part here, and here I want to stack voices.’ It was funny because that was pretty much born already when I wrote the songs. I knew what world I wanted to create.”

Three members of the SO MUCH HAS CHANGED team, Tommaso Taddonio and Gabriel and Pedro Altério, play keys, drums, and guitar in Secca's live band – a quintet, including her, who come onstage at the Coliseu De Recreios, to rapturous applause, several hours after we speak. 

As the show progresses, Secca's tendency to blur the line between music and friendship becomes embodied in the group dynamic. Though her stage presence is impressive, the show seems less about her, and more about what the band do together. 

Arranged in a semi-circle, they trade spots, acknowledge each other with grins, and deliver a profoundly tight, backing-track-less sound which elevates the songs on SO MUCH HAS CHANGED from introspective to cosmic. “It’s been so cool to get more and more comfortable with this new show,” Secca tells me prior to the performance, “then, after a bunch of shows, be really comfortable with it, get to do it at home, then have it sell out. We’re very excited.” The lengthy stretch of practice certainly pays off.