To say that Mac Ayres’ emotional sensitivity sometimes gets to him would be an understatement; it feels more like his north star, a reference point that comes up several times in our conversation where we discuss songwriting. “I cry a lot. As a kid, my mom would tell you that I was a crybaby,” he admits. Despite having relationships with some music industry greats, you can count his number of collaborations on one hand. He instead most reliably works with Chris Anderson, a drummer he’s known since the tenth grade, while producing and playing piano, guitar, and bass himself. “I’m very sensitive about my energy and the energy around me,” he says. “I just like to see out how I hear it in my head, so I just gotta do it myself.” Ayres even moved away from Brooklyn, where we’re meeting for this interview, because he was overwhelmed by the chaotic sounds and bustle of the city.
But that same sensitivity has made him one of modern R&B’s most persistent working musicians, moving on his own terms while satisfying a dedicated fan base with emotive songwriting and lush melodies.
“I just always knew how I felt, and I’ve never been able to pretend. In that aspect, I’m pretty much an open book as far as how I’m feeling,” Ayres says, leaning back in the corner of a Brooklyn restaurant as he prepares to devour a fish sandwich he ordered. He’s fresh off a slab of tour dates with Houston’s Keshi and taking a few weeks off before heading back on the road for his own headlining piano tour. “Putting pen to paper was just a good outlet for me, but I’ve always been in tune with my emotions.”
Mac grew up in Sea Cliff, New York, a Long Island community that he describes as “a one-square-mile village with about 6,000 people.” His parents enrolled him in vocal lessons and his church choir, and he eventually taught himself by ear to play multiple instruments. At age 12, he was playing covers by the likes of John Mayer, Stevie Wonder, and Michael Jackson at a hometown bar owned by his mother’s high school friend. “[My audience] would be like two people eating a sandwich; you know they’re not there for you,” he remembers. “But you learn things like making a set list, how to be up there, how to talk a little bit. I gained a lot of knowledge from those years.”
Mayer’s music inspired him to begin writing his own songs in high school, but he began to build his current musical identity as a student at Boston’s Berklee College of Music. He took a class there that helped him make more sense of the chords and song structures of the vocals that he’d always admired by singers like Jackson, Wonder, and Marvin Gaye. College was also when he was introduced to the music of one of his largest influences: D’Angelo. His long-delayed album Black Messiah was released during Mac’s freshman year, and after being impressed by it, he went back to discover D’Angelo’s sophomore opus, Voodoo. Ayres excitedly recounts details of both albums’ backgrounds: he refers to D’Angelo’s bandmates (Chris Dave, Pino Palladino, and Jesse Johnson) as “the f**king Avengers,” while admiring Voodoo for studio engineer Russell Elevado’s analog recording processes and the late J Dilla’s production influence.
From there, Ayres began to release his own music on Soundcloud. The streaming service had a robust community of musicians in the mid-2010s, with musicians who were using the service to communicate with other artists just as much as they were resonating with their audiences. He first realized his music was taking off on the platform when his upload of “Easy” had tallied 200 plays when he went to bed one evening, before quickly passing 1,000 the next morning. He eventually left school behind to focus on his music, splitting time between his girlfriend’s apartment (whom he met in college) and recording Drive Slow at his own place.
He remembers his parents having split reactions about his decision to leave Berklee: “My mom has always been unwavering in her support for me. So when I called her and told her, she was like, ‘Duh. I sort of was expecting this someday,’” Mac recalls. “But when I called my dad, he was a little bit more like, ‘what? I’m paying for school, and you’re dropping out?’ I just said, ‘Give me a year to prove you wrong, and then you could yell at me in a year if I’m still not sh*t.’” Within that following year, Mac says, he had released his first EP Drive Slow, put the finishing touches on his 2018 follow-up Something To Feel, and sold out his first headlining tour. When his father pulled up to one of his early shows at NYC’s Mercury Lounge and saw that a crowd of 250 people had come out to see him, his decision was validated.
“I just believed in myself so much that I think there was not even a part of my mind that was thinking, ‘what if I fail?’” he continues. “I was like, ‘well, people listen to that one song, so I could write another good song.’”
Since then, Mac Ayres has mostly kept up with the pace of releasing another album every year. He cites Paul Simon, The Beatles’ George Harrison, and Mayer as some of his largest songwriting influences, while also admiring Anderson .Paak’s pen on Yes Lawd, .Paak’s first album with producer Knxwledge as the duo NxWorries. “A lot of songwriting is like, ‘Here’s the beginning and here’s the end,’ and it’s a whole story. But I like .Paak’s ability in that album to write about what was essentially two seconds of time could have gone by of him looking at somebody, and he makes it last for a whole four-minute song.”
Mac knows that much of the greatest R&B is fueled by heartbreak, but he says that being in a healthy, committed relationship for the better part of the last decade has pushed him to be more inventive with his songwriting. He admits that his breakout song “Easy,” which appears to be about the serenity of romantic companionship, is actually about weed. (His eyes widen with surprise when I tell him that D’Angelo’s “Brown Sugar” has a similar hidden meaning, despite it being commonly thought of as an ode to dark-skinned women.) Juicebox highlight “Get Away” hits well as a breakup song (“ain’t no feeling like moving forward” he croons in the song’s first verse), but he’s actually singing about severing a business relationship. His 2022 album Comfortable Enough takes an approach inspired by Knxwledge’s album 1988: he wrote a poem, turned the poem’s lines into song titles, and used them as the basis for his songwriting. (“I was proud with how it turned out, but I felt like I was using more brain power than I needed to,” he says, comparing himself to the famous meme from the TV series Always Sunny In Philadelphia, where its character Charlie is deliriously pointing to a board of conspiracy theories after days without sleep. “I think my whole family would attest to the fact that I was a lunatic.”)
The intro of Juicebox, “I Wanna Give Up,” has what Mac describes as disco vibes, but it was inspired by him becoming disenchanted with the music industry after frustrating record label meetings when he lived in LA. He admits that he wouldn’t have wanted to go to label meetings anyway, regardless of the content of the conversations. But his biggest concern was being pressed to make changes to his public persona.
“They didn’t want me to change my music. They wanted me to change my personality. They wanted me to be a little more influencer-y,” he says, visibly cringing at the thought. “I’m not doing a TikTok. It sounds like such an f**king old head thing to say, but I’m not gonna do a little dancey dance to promote my music. Sh*t means way too much to me. And it’s not to knock other people that do it, but for my beliefs, as far as the person I’d like to be, I just will not do it. And I don’t think that labels like that very much.” It’s tough to blame him: his approach has worked well so far.
“I feel like all of my influences and my musicians that I aspire to be are not social media personalities. They’re just making music I admire,” he says. “I don’t want to be an influencer; I want to be a musician.”
Mac may not use social media to peddle products or give revelations about his social life, but he can still use the Net to his advantage. During the pandemic, he gave a memorable performance on NPR’s Tiny Desk series, performing at home and showing his instrumental prowess on piano, bass, and guitar in different panels with layered harmonies. (“I thought it was a good opportunity to flex my musicality,” he remembers. “I’ll be ready for when they invite me back for the real thing [to perform in person].”)
In the Tiny Desk video’s comment section, fans begged him to put older songs from the video on streaming services — a request that he satisfied with cloudy, a compilation of songs from his days at Berklee. He explains that fan favorites like “she won’t stay long” and “alone with you” originally lived on Soundcloud when he was first starting out, and that he never formally released them because he felt that they didn’t fit on his albums. But while many artists are anxious to move on from their old material, Mac was grateful for the opportunity to revisit his past and give fans the old gems they’ve always wanted.
“[Those songs] bring back a lot of good memories. It was that kid that was calling his dad and saying, ‘Let me prove something.’ I was just trying to prove something to everybody,” he says.
“I was writing them without thinking, ‘Who would hear it?’ because I didn’t think anybody would hear it. For better or for worse, I’ll never be able to be in that headspace again.”