Meet Mary Ann Alexander, the R&B singer turning big feelings into music

If you had asked teenage Mary Ann Alexander what she wanted to be when she grew up, you would’ve gotten a different answer every year. As an only child raised in a house full of creatives, the now 25-year-old dabbled in a bit of everything. Her father, a playback singer in the Malayalam film industry, passed down his genes to Alexander, and she ran with it. She was a regular at school youth festivals and at every event that had a stage and a microphone. She was everywhere but in class. But, when the time came to choose a career path, she didn’t go the artistic route. Having seen the playback singing industry up close, her father advised against it. Music was supposed to be a hobby, not something you built a life on.

Alexander enrolled at St Joseph’s College in Bengaluru for a bachelor’s degree in visual communication—a compromise that gave her the freedom to feel creative while also having a job. It turned out to be the right call, though not quite for the reasons she expected. “After I finished college, I kind of gained faith that an artistic career is not something that can’t be done,” she says over the phone, before we’re briefly interrupted by her doorbell. Alexander has lived alone in Bengaluru ever since she moved from Trivandrum for college. “I do really well for myself when I’m alone and have a lot of solitude,” she admits.

Even though singing was not unthinkable, Alexander did not have a blueprint she could follow. And so, she started teaching music at the Trill Route School of Contemporary Music, while also doing her own thing on the side. At the academy, she built connections that would eventually shape her career—including her now manager, Sange Wangchuk, who was a drum instructor at the institution. “He (Wangchuk) would give me challenges like, ‘Hey, I have booked you a gig in two weeks. Can you write yourself a set? I don’t want you to be doing covers. Can you do all of your own songs?’ And I would be like, ‘I have two songs.’ And he would say, ‘Exactly, write more’.” So she did. And then, of course, there was social media.

If you’re chronically online (like most of us at Cosmopolitan India), chances are you’ve seen at least one of Alexander’s Reels. She has a finsta too, no less. It’s where she gets to be raw, funny, and relatable, without crowding out the music on her main account. After releasing her debut EP Love or a Lesson in March, Alexander took a work trip (she rarely travels for leisure) to the US. Other than discovering the man-made magic of Tide pens, she spent time in LA and NYC meeting artists and getting a shot at showcasing her work. And, in true Angeleno fashion, she also made the rounds on a couple of podcasts, including Cam Sullivan-Brown’s Chillin With Cam and The Noah Rymsza Interview.

Heart on her sleeve

Alexander has been a recording artist since she was seven. She wrote Over the Ocean (2019) at 15 for a movie her friend’s father was directing, and refuses to call it an accurate representation of who she is today (in her defence, she was practically a child). Needless to say, her songwriting has evolved since. Love or a Lesson was made without any strict rules. “I decided I’m not going to think too hard about what I want this project to be. I would just let the music guide me, and then we can make sense of it later.” The result is anything but cloying. Her latest music video for the track Too Much? off the EP has more than 2 million views within a week of its release. The song captures the exhaustion of being told to feel less when you’re someone who feels everything, deeply—a sentiment she immortalises in the lyrics: “Guess I’m running too fast for your tempo / Thought you hold me through it all / But you only love it when I play it small / But I want to have it all.”

R&B didn’t originate in India, but Alexander found her way to it through the internet—and once she did, it made complete sense. “I got very drawn to the genre maybe because of the kind of person I am. I have a lot of big feelings and emotions,” she reflects. As a songwriter who pulls almost entirely from her own life, she found in R&B permission to be vulnerable. “When I was a child, I was always told, ‘Oh my god, why are you so emotional? Why do you cry so much?’,” she shares, adding: “So when I finally found the space to just put all of those big feelings in, it was very relieving.”

Currently working on performing live sets and recording a second EP, Alexander feels she has learnt one of the most important lessons—if not the most important—any artist could learn: Do not wait for inspiration. “Don’t wait for some divine source to come to you—you have to be able to sit down and do it diligently, and you will enter a flow state.” Her favourite thing to say right now is that she wants to be God’s favourite collaborator. “Because when you’re in that flow state, you get ideas from this source, and it almost feels like it’s a collaboration between you and God. And I say God, but God just means whatever you want that feeling to be.”

This article originally appeared in Cosmopolitan India's July-August 2026 print issue.

Image credits: Anurag Baruah 

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