Riley Max – Year One

Riley Max is a 21-year-old singer-songwriter and multimedia artist from Colorado. Her debut album ROY G BIV – recorded at just 18 years old – received widespread acclaim, and her second album is set to release this fall. She is a rising senior at Harvard University, where she studies Art, Film and Visual Studies. She is also the music director of The Harvard-Radcliffe Veritones, and appears in a wide variety of musical theater productions. Her penchant for storytelling stems from an early love of 90s rom-coms and childhood exposure to copious amounts of 80s music, and extends beyond just music. Her background as a cover artist and comic creator for the Harvard Independent pairs with her skills as a composer to serve as the basis of her undergraduate thesis this coming year, which will take the form of a fully animated short film.

Her new single “Year One” is a poignant folk pop journey through her own personal struggles with mental and physical health.

She shares, “I wrote “Year One” when I was having a really tough time during my first year at Harvard. I was coming back from having some issues with my vocal chords, and I was dealing with a lot of other mental and physical health issues, as well as being completely and totally responsible for my life for the first time ever. It was a lot. I wasn’t sure when—or if—I was ever going to start feeling like myself again, musically or otherwise. So this song means a lot to me, because every time I listen to it I remember how far I’ve come. The animation was completed in a class that I took last year, and I knew immediately once I finished it that I had to turn it into a full music video, because I was really happy with the way it turned out. It was so rewarding to be able to express my feelings through such a uniquely creative medium, and it really made me fall in love with stop motion animation even more — to the point that I’m going to pursue a stop-motion thesis this year! It’s always a joy to be able to combine my many artistic loves.”

The accompanied music video contains an animated segment that is currently on display at Harvard’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, in their exhibit No Slop, No Second Screen: Animation–the hard-won image.

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