A 21-year-old singer/songwriter hailing from Cleveland, maryjo has the kind of unforgettable voice made for heart-melting piano ballads. But while her songs show a phenomenal vocal command—often drifting from full-throated belting to a gorgeously fragile delivery inflected with cracks—it took years for the Knoxville-born artist to overcome her fear of singing in front of others. “My family’s very musical and singing came to me really naturally, but for some reason I became super-private about it after we moved to Cleveland when I was eight,” says maryjo, who also started writing songs as a little girl and took up piano in fourth grade. As she got older, she worked through her shyness by sharing videos on social media, steadily amassing a devoted following that now includes over 1.3 million followers on TikTok. After bringing her powerhouse vocals to the stage on season 19 of “American Idol,” maryjo landed a deal with Atlantic Records and set to work on her debut single, “Love Fools”: a stripped-back but spellbinding ballad featuring the soul-stirring piano work of two-time Academy of Country Music Award-winner Gordon Mote.
With more new music on the way, maryjo arrived at the breathtaking emotion of “Love Fools” by staying true to her instincts. “When I first went into sessions, the sound we were coming up with was very much like cookie-cutter pop,” she recalls, naming Elvis Presley and Julia Michaels among her main inspirations. “Finally I had to stop and say, ‘This isn’t what I’m supposed to be doing.’ I took a step back and asked myself why I was trying for something that didn’t feel right, and because of that we honed in on a sound that feels like me: something I can put so much emotion into when I’m singing, so that I can give the audience something real to connect to.”