Everything and Nothing
A Boston University student’s bedroom experiment took a bigger stage in just two years
By Clinton Nguyen
Marco Lawrence stands with a basketball player’s gait. He’s a student and a musician in the Allston area in Boston. He’s tall, gangly and outfitted with a lot of dangly bits — earrings, piercings and rings, all meticulously chosen, crafted and treasured, much like many of his newer songs. But that’s not exactly who he was just two years back when he first started toying with the idea of a real, independent act.
He was only writing on the piano and wanted to really delve into the world of synthesizers, production and editing that was native to some of his major influences, like Imogen Heap and Depeche Mode.
He started out two years ago with Jenna Calabro, a high school friend, and started performing under the moniker “Hall of Mirrors.” They had been playing music together since 8th grade, so it made total sense that they should start a new act together.
They started showing up at the smaller local joints. They rigged together their signature midnight blue lights using whatever they scrounged up around the house. They started hosting and playing with other acts from out of town in the basement of their house, which they christened the Womb. And then a three-month furor gave birth to his first record, “Begin EP.”
“I was learning all these different things and techniques I heard in music I liked — I knew what they were — I just didn’t know how to do them or what they were called,” he said. And so he started messing around. He looped, he sampled, he tinkered with everything he couldn’t do with instruments alone.
The learning experience hearkened back to a quieter childhood in Cambridge, studying classical music at a Quaker school. He was a flutist in his school band — young, something of a nerd (as it was defined back then), and didn’t have many friends.
But he was impressionable and he loved writing music. One of his music teachers taught him theory on the piano, and one day the white stripes and black keys made total sense to him and he started to improvise.
“Just seeing [the keys and notes] laid out visually made all the theory stuff that I had known click, so then I just sort of sat down by the piano and then I just started writing songs,” Lawrence said. He had never played the piano before that.
“Begin EP” was a rough cut, but Lawrence was satisfied with it in a way that he couldn’t be with his later work as St. Nothing, a name he’s adopted in January 2014.
“I found there to be something really interesting and a little haunting about the two words together,” he said.
Rebranding his act was a lot like starting from scratch; a lot of things changed in the 10 months since he started. His friend Jenna had stopped playing live with him (she was a conservatory student who shied from the grittier show scene), but along the way Sophia Carreras and Meredith Nero joined. They’re both close friends of Lawrence, and Nero’s a housemate who helps organize shows at the Womb.
The whole male vocalist/female instrumentalist gig was a thing that a few people weren’t too keen on. Sexism and preconceived notions were still things Lawrence had to grudgingly answer to.
“They had to be like, ‘why did this happen,’ as if didn’t happen organically. And really it’s just that these are the best musicians I know,” he said, “And these are also some of my best friends. These are people I want to work with. It’s the same thing anyone would say.”
The band chemistry worked because the three were threaded together by secrets and shared commiseration, as close friends are wont to do. Lawrence’s songs touch on very personal topics and circumstances, which, of course, his bandmates needed to be in on to make it work.
“Sometimes it’s like, I have to write a song so I can get over this. I’ll sing about it a lot, even when the situation doesn’t really affect me anymore,” he said. “It’s like, ‘I remember this and it’s fine.’”
“I remember this, and it’s fine.”
They’re still in the process of recording new songs, but the Boston-Amherst distance they have to make for Carreras has been slowing down progress. Lawrence has nonetheless been dribbling live videos of singles and demos over the course of a few months.
“I have this unrealistic expectation of feeling the same way I did the first time, feeling that same kind of excitement of exploring all these new things,” he said, “And a lot of the exciting things that happened over the past year have made me feel pressure [to release new music], but I think I’m getting to a point where that’s not bothering me as much.”
After all, Lawrence recently had a stint in the spotlight when his band took the stage at Boston Calling, the only large-scale music festival to take place in Boston proper. He landed the opening act on day 2 through SonicBids, which partnered up with Boston Calling to bring smaller acts to the fore.
“A lot of the music that we play now wasn’t recorded, so there was an emphasis on newer, live videos and it was very validating, how we were picked.” Lawrence said. It made sense that the judges would focus on a band that was geared more towards audiences, especially college-aged audiences.
St. Nothing gained a lot of traction for a small act that was borne out of a college bedroom. Coincidentally, Boston Calling had been in existence for a year and a half, the Womb for just over a year. And Lawrence’s forays into electronic music span just around two years.
But what comes afterwards for him is like anyone else’s guess about the future.
“I could get really scared about thinking about the future if I tried, but I’ve spent enough time doing that,” he said, “but with the music stuff it’s been incredible, I’ve had opportunities that I’ve never had before and literal dreams have come true. So I think I’ll just ride that for a little longer.”
School, admittedly, had become something of a secondary concern. But St. Nothing, his music, the veiled stories he croons to you from that mic stand, had become everything to him.
This story has been corrected to include the artist’s statement on his band name.
