WISDOM: A PORTRAIT SERIES

M A R I S A H Y L T O N

ARTIST + SONGWRITER

AOSOON

LONDON

I. Wisdom to me is a tool along this journey as a human being to understanding self. What we do with it on the other hand is completely our choice. When we respect it, I feel like we can face circumstances where if we chose to be connected to our hearts and truthful to the words we think/ speak the frequency of our being can penetrate false ideas or society's ideas. I’d call a moment like that enlightenment. Wisdom leads to enlightenment.

II. Writing my first full song was such a cool creative moment. Flew in to London for two weeks while on break from music school. The OG rhythm guitarist Pathik Desai at MI had just given us a class that was still fresh on my mind about how a lot of great songs can be made out of two chords and an effective strum pattern. So I started messing with two chords and I’m fully just feeling what the notes are giving me and then the first line popped up. I wrote the entire first verse that day, the second verse came months later.

III. In secondary school I remember we had one of those days where you go into school in your own clothes. So of course I’m excited for this I’m ready to go to school and show out in my new pink tracksuit, and so I did. I just remember everyone stereotyping me as this hood black girl all day, which I pretty much was but it was in that moment I realised I didn’t want any of that. I started to dress differently. I fell in love with electric guitar. I stopped listening to ‘urban’ music. And before you knew it I’ve moved school and I’m the black girl who wants to be white! People would shout hateful things across the corridors sometimes and I remember I was on my way to my guitar lesson at school and my guitar teacher at the time had witnessed it, I actually kind of broke down in front of him and he told me that one day you’ll get praised for who you are, that it's a great thing to be different, that they are the idiots not me. That talk sticks with me to this day.

IV. I feel there is a strong lack of belief in real artists these days, it's very draining to try and do anything out of the box, here in London anyway.

V. A bunch of seemingly random encounters with people who had seen a vision for our music led us to our publisher/guardian angel Sam Winwood and team in 2014. He invested in us with no fear, he understood it could be hit or miss with the ‘artist approach’ because he has seen things come and go so many times, but he trusted our vision of what it meant to be artists as well as songwriters and really gave us an upper hand to do more of what we love. Two black kids from London got a publishing deal off the back of a 4 track EP? Yeah... We stay masterminding and slowly but surely the creative world and community will become more a part of what we do.

VI. We need to talk more about internalised emotions.

VII. I am for clarity.

TM