San Mei - Midnight
14 Aug 2020
San Mei
// MUSIC
San Mei Digs Deep With Heart-Melting New Song 'Midnight'
"I wrote Midnight after losing my dear mum. For a while, I’d wake up every single night around midnight in a panic about it, struggling to accept what I’d lost. It felt surreal, like a dream.” – San Mei
For Australian singer-songwriter San Mei (Emily Hamilton), music is an escape and place to share her deepest feelings from. Some of those feelings are upbeat and positive, while some are truly heartbreaking. Today San Mei unveils a new cut of self-produced, guitar lead, dream-pop in ‘Midnight’, with additional production by Oscar Dawson (Holy Holy, Ali Barter, Alex Lahey) and Michael McCartney.
For anyone who has felt loss can surely relate to ‘Midnight’; a moving, yet spirited accolade to San Mei’s late mother. " I wanted this song to be a celebration and a sweet send-off, and my way of finally saying goodbye. I wrote the chorus lyrics “go sweetly, out into the night” as a sentiment of letting go, because I decided I didn’t want to keep trying to hold on to something I wasn’t going to get back.,” shares San Mei.
After a couple of rounds in the studio and many sleepless nights tracking and re-tracking at home to get it to its final version, San Mei says, “Midnight has probably been the most challenging song I’ve made so far... At the time it felt like we were never going to finish it, but it literally came down to finding the right guitar part for the verses, and everything finally clicked into place. The song itself is very special and personal to me, and I think that made it harder to get right, because it had to be right. In the end it became the tribute I wanted it to be, feeling hopeful and reminiscent amidst the feelings of loss.”
’Midnight’ follows San Mei’s most recent EP ‘Cry’ from earlier in 2020. The title track and video was premiered by Billboard in time for San Mei’s return to SXSW in 2020. Across the EP, San Mei received attention from a wide variety of markets including BBC Radio 1’s Jack Saunders, Asia Pop 40, US college and non-commercial radio, and hometown network Triple J and Triple J Unearthed. As well as showcasing her own production skills on the 2020 EP, production from Oscar Dawson (Holy Holy, Ali Barter, Alex Lahey), and Scott Horscroft (Oh Mercy, Silverchair, Last Dinosaurs, The Presets), helped make the body of work a pivotal step for the ever-promising San Mei movement.
In 2019, San Mei played a huge 45 local and international shows, including her debut national ‘Something Good’ headline tour, nine shows in six days at SXSW 2019, national support performances for the likes of K.Flay, Ali Barter, Kingswood, G. Flip, and Jack River, and festival slots at This That, Yours & Owls, plus more.
San Mei sparked the interest of tastemakers around the world in 2018 with her breakthrough single ‘Wonder’, which hit #1 on the Hype Machine chart, got added to triple j and cemented her in the most played unsigned artists, before going on to showcase at BIGSOUND Festival 2018. The excitement continued into 2019 when she was hand-picked by triple j Unearthed to make her debut major festival appearance at the iconic Falls Festival, ahead of signing to Australian label etcetc, and being announced to showcase at SXSW 2020 for a consecutive year.
