Mary Margaret Johnson is a musician, composer and counselor living in Winston-Salem, NC. After 20 years of classical piano study, she now finds herself weaving together minimalist, baroque and traditional Appalachian music influences to create music that, in the words of a friend, “sounds like an honest conversation.”

What a pleasure it was getting to sit down to talk with the immensely talented, Mary Margaret Johnson. We loved hearing her story of how she grew in her skills and love for piano, and her process of composing to release her own music into the world. We also had the honor of capturing photos while she played and the sun streamed through the windows. It’s always a joy to get to witness an artist in operating in their craft. We hope you are inspired by this story, and highly suggest you take a listen to a small preview of Mary Margaret’s songs as you read through. Simply click on the audio link below.

Also, be sure to give her a follow on Instagram at @marymargemusic so you can stay up to date on her newest EP that is set to release this June or July.

How did you discover your love for piano?

MMJ: I grew up in a musical family, from both sides. My earliest memories of playing the piano are at my grandma Bonnie’s house; she had a little upright piano. When I was little we would go over to her house pretty often and I would sneak into the piano room and mess around and play by ear. I think unlike many children, instead of my parents making me play piano, around my eighth birthday I asked them if I could play piano. I just loved it; my parents would even have to ask me to stop practicing. As a child I would feel really anxious, especially before things like going to school. A key that I discovered was to play piano before getting in the car to go to school. I would play for just fifteen minutes and my stomach would settle and I would feel peaceful. Looking back I didn’t know what that was, but it was such a gift at the time.

For the first three or four years of learning piano I really struggled with reading music, but I would fake it by playing by ear. After my lessons I would just go home and listen to the songs and learn by ear, even the classical stuff and then show up to my lesson and play it. One day I had been learning from a teacher who was preparing me to go to North Carolina School of the Arts and we were doing music theory and one day I had to just tell her, [laughing] “Yeah I actually don’t really know what’s going on”. She was really gracious about it. When I decided that I wanted to go to school for it, I was fifteen. I trained and got the acceptance letter to School of the Arts on my sixteenth birthday. I’ve always loved it. I think going to school for it luckily for me never left me feeling burnt out. But at one point I made a conscious choice halfway through college, I thought, ‘I do think I am comfortable, and I am good at it, but it’s not something I want to do fully as a career.’

What was your schooling experience like?

School was challenging in the sense that when you are a teen, your identity is being formed in such an acute way, and you want someone to tell you who you are. It felt good to be good at something, but when I was there, the challenging part was to love myself for who I was, apart from whether or not I was doing well in music. In the program at school we would have ages in ninth grade all the way through grad school, and so there was often a pretty big difference in skill level. I definitely believe that if you’re an artist, it is so important to be surrounded by people who are further ahead, because so much of the learning process is hearing music and figuring out what you wanna sound like, and to have an ear for what you think is beautiful. But if your identity isn’t super rooted, comparison is super hard in art school. I’m so glad that I went because I came out of high school feeling so prepared music theory and history-wise. When I got to college I felt more secure in those subjects. I think what threw me for a loop in college is that once you get here, your whole world is music. And piano is unique because it’s a solo instrument for the most part, so it has the potential to be a lonely instrument since your practice time is alone. For classical pianists, you’re going out on stage on your own for up to thirty minutes, so it requires a lot of comfortability with being alone.

“I definitely believe that if you’re an artist, it is so important to be surrounded by people who are further ahead, because so much of the learning process is hearing music and figuring out what you wanna sound like, and to have an ear for what you think is beautiful.”

When did you realize that you wanted to start composing?

MMJ: I was in grad school in Boone and went through a bit of a hard season, and that combined with intense winter weather so we were snowed in a lot. I lived out in the country which was awesome, and I had a keyboard in the house and so I noticed I just started messing around on it more and more often. I was really intimidated by the idea of writing my own music because I knew such talented people, and I think that mindset held me back from experimenting for a while. But that was when I started writing some stuff with no intention to record. But then about four or five years ago, back when Instagram would only let you post fifteen second long videos, I would start posting quick snippets of me playing piano and I would get so much feedback; people would say, ‘Wow this is so beautiful.’ My good friend texted me and said something like, ‘I would love to bless you and record you playing for free.’ I don’t know that I would have done it unless someone really encouraged me to do it. So we recorded a track and the process was so great that we decided to record more. We did that in the thick of quarantine. It blessed enough people that I realized there was good fruit from the process. And so I released my first EP, Dwell, in November of 2020.

Tell us about your upcoming EP!

MMJ: Yes, I’m so excited. It’s been three years in between releasing music but I’m writing all the time. There are five pieces, but three of them I had started working on two years ago and have just let them sit for a while. But in the past year I’ve really embraced my southern Appalachian roots the most I ever have. I had a vision for how to take old time classical music, and write in that way, or compose neo-classical music that pairs with the aesthetics of the countryside. I really appreciate the simplicity of that culture. So for example, there is a piece called Slow Dance In The Holler. A holler is a geographical area in the mountains, at the bottom of a valley that is pretty hidden and tucked away in the woods. It’s like the most rural of the rural. As I was creating this piece, I wondered, if there was a modern day, old time waltz, what would it sound like? So thats what that piece is like. Slow Dance In The Holler sounds like a slow waltz. The story of the EP is that my neighbor Kevin has a felt upright piano. I asked him if I could record all of my pieces live on that piano so that there could be more of a raw, unpretentious sound, because the countryside is not pretentious. So the record is creaky and you can hear a lot of sounds from the piano, but that’s kind of the point.

What does creativity mean to you, and what words of wisdom would you want to share with fellow creatives?

MMJ: I think the overused answer is being authentic, which is not untrue.

But, I think that creatives should feel more permission to tap into what they’ve experienced and have already found to be beautiful. Often the music that comes out of me definitely has to do with my heritage.

Creativity is the process of giving yourself permission to give life to this sort of invisible thing; all of your experiences, and what you love and what you’ve gone through, and letting that become a medium, and not judge it too much. In my opinion creatives can either swing from an avant garde mentality, like, ‘I don’t care what anyone thinks’ or, their work has to feel so curated and perfect before it’s done. I’m convinced more and more, that you don’t wanna put anything out that doesn’t feel authentic to your season, but I don’t know that’s ever gonna be perfect. Especially art.

I think thats the biggest key I have: it’s that I can’t wait for it to feel 100%. Part of the creative process is to release it. I think it’s kinda funny that people release albums, cause I wonder, ‘Do they really?’ Because you release it but you can still hold it close. And to actually release it is to say ‘Yes, I am putting it out into the world and I’m not going to overthink it, I’ve released it.’