Biography of Meiko

Meiko is one of the most promising singer-songwriters to emerge from the Los Angeles music scene in recent years. Counting among her influences artists as diverse as Patty Griffin, Sade, and Portishead, Meiko has managed to create songs of sweet disquiet that are all her own.

In early 2007, Meiko performed at the Sundance Film Festival and caught the ear of Paste Magazine editor Josh Jackson, who boldly declared her a "big success story" waiting to happen; predicting it was "only a matter of time" before she found her way onto Nic Harcourt's influential “Morning Becomes Eclectic” radio program on KCRW. It was a prognostication that proved especially prophetic, as just a few months later Meiko's music became a staple of L.A. radio station playlists.

Raised by her dad in their humble hometown of Roberta, Georgia (pop. 808), Meiko first stepped in front of an audience at the tender age of eight, singing “White Christmas” for parishioners of an all-Black Southern Baptist church. In the years that followed she performed everywhere from talent shows to Little League baseball parks. When she wasn't performing, she was practicing - spending countless hours singing into the family's clothes dryer. "Great acoustics," she insists.

Before long she found herself bitten by the songwriting bug and enlisted the help of her dad - a talented back-porch musician who taught her how to play guitar on his old Gibson six-string. When she was thirteen, he bought her one of her own. A flood of songs followed. "As soon I as learned a new chord," she says, "I wrote a new song."

Meiko is a quarter-Japanese, on her maternal grandmother's side; in an attempt to get in touch with their Japanese heritage, she and her sister adopted the names Meiko and Keiko, pronounced "Mee-ko" and "Kee-ko." Alas, "We didn't know that we were misspelling them for quite some time," Meiko remembers. "That's why my name is pronounced 'Mee-ko,