CR 065: Musician Anderson Rocio on Making the Leap and Trusting the Lily Pad Will Appear
The singer-songwriter discusses her extraordinary upbringing, her passion for music education, and her efforts to support emerging artists.
Anderson Rocio’s life has been far from ordinary. Born in Italy to an American mother and Spanish father, Rocio—a singer-songwriter and classically trained pianist—spent her formative years living in England. When she was 11, her parents quit their jobs, bought a boat in Florida, and with their three children in tow embarked on a three-year sail around the world, eventually settling in New Zealand. That experience—along with her mother’s advice to “jump, and the lily pad will appear”—played a pivotal role in how Rocio approaches her work.
“The way they’ve brought us up, that’s how they live,” she says. “They just thought, ‘We can do this. Why can’t we?’ and jumped. And we were lucky enough for the lily pad to always appear. Now I’m more educated around the decisions I make, but in my early 20s, it was, ‘Why not buy a one-way ticket to L.A.? Somebody has to do it. Why can’t it be me?’ It’s probably been the reason I’ve gotten into places I didn’t expect, and then it’s just the sink or swim technique. [Laughs]”
Now back in New Zealand after a few years living in Los Angeles, Rocio is juggling multiple tasks: her music, which is often used in film and television; the Power in Us Project, a global nonprofit she founded to help fund environmental conservation efforts; and Riverine Records, an indie label she’s launched to build support for emerging musicians. And though it sounds like a lot to handle, Rocio says she’s exactly where she wants to be.
“I’m consistently pivoting. I’ve always had one foot in each world. It has pulled me off stages, but it’s allowed me to do education development, and this feels like where I’m supposed to be. I get to do my artist stuff, as well as the Power in Us project. That feels more me than what I thought it would be at the start.”
Over a recent Zoom call, I chatted with Rocio from her home in New Zealand about her upbringing, her love for visual art, and what advice she’d give to up-and-coming artists.
SANDRA EBEJER: I went to your first Instagram post and scrolled through your feed chronologically. There’s a lot of footage of you playing in tiny clubs, chipping away at building an audience. And then in 2020, your song “Paradise” was featured in an episode of Lucifer and suddenly you were on a totally different level. What was that experience like?
ANDERSON ROCIO: I’d come home to get married, and we were going to do two weeks in New Zealand and move back to L.A. Covid hit a week after the wedding and we thought, “Well, there goes the last few years of everything we’ve done. I guess we’ll just travel New Zealand and enjoy the fact we’re lucky to be here.” And then that show came out. It was a perfect storm. It was the only show that had a new season that month because everybody pushed their productions back, so I think the whole world was watching. And the song happened to be about dark turning into light, and there being light at the end of the tunnel. I think it was a Friday night [when] we watched it and Saturday we woke to all these messages.
[My husband] had gotten laid off from work because of Covid, which we were grateful for because it became a full-time gig for both of us to manage it. I think one of the most important things is to be able to ride the momentum when it comes because I don’t think it comes very often. Every day, we’d wake up and something new would happen. I felt lucky that it kept going and grateful that I could keep riding the wave. It was a cool experience in retrospect, to see how it all unfolded and why. It makes a lot of sense now. At the time, I was just blindly jumping, but it’s worked out.
You’ve had many songs in different film and TV projects. Do you write music specifically for a show? Or do they come to you and request one of your older songs?
I was signed to a sync agency. They take my catalog and then they pitch it. So they get asked for songs to put in The Challenge or Lucifer, and they go through their catalog, which my stuff is in, and they say, “Anderson would be a good fit for this.” Before Lucifer happened, I would look at briefs and try to be more intentional about what I was writing for. Lucifer gave me a platform where I could just write my own music and people would come and look for that style of music. There’s been a couple of projects where I’ve written specifically for a brief or show, but most of it now is I’ll write what I’m going to write in my own space and then I send it off to them and they find a good place for it.
Can you talk a bit about “Power in Us,” not only the song but the project that has come from it?
[My father] got a call from an amazing man that’s head of Ocean Geographic. He had a research vessel called HMS Sylvia Earle that was going to Antarctica to do a documentary on climate change. He’d rung my father, who is a marine biologist filmmaker, and said, “Could you be part of this project?” Dad said, “I’d love to.” And the man said, “We’d really like to get this composer on board to do the theme song. I think she lives in New Zealand. Don’t you live in New Zealand? She wrote this song called ‘Paradise’ for Lucifer.” And my dad’s like, “That’s my kid!” He rung me and said, “Do you think you could write the theme song for this expedition that we’re doing for this film?” And I said, “Yeah, I love that world.”
So they went down and did a bunch of filming and sent me clips. I started to write the theme song for that project [and] realized there’s not a lot of pop music in the world of ocean conservation. It’s mostly classical, which I love, but it seemed like a waste of a fan base. I decided maybe it was a bigger project. Maybe I release the song as my own single under my artist profile. I donated 100% of the streaming revenue back to ocean conservation. Then the film came out—they renamed it to Power in Us [after the song].
The concept of that [song is] there’s power in all of us to do something. I spent about three weeks trying to write it, which is odd, because writing is quick for me. I couldn’t figure out a way not to be depressed. And then I saw 15 minutes of the filming of a BBC documentary and I saw those filmmakers and photographers in jackets waiting out in the cold for three months just for that one shot of an iceberg falling so they could showcase what’s going on. I thought, “As powerful as we are to destroy it, it’s amazing what individuals can do to try to help it.” So that’s where the inspiration of the song came from. And then it snowballed. I released it as a single, and the more I dug into that space, the more I realized there’s so much work to be done in bringing pop music into that world.
I thought, “How cool would this be if it had a visual aspect to [the song] that’s not my face?” That’s when I came across Mother Magazine. Melissa Schaefer, the editor-in-chief, created magazines of women photographers around the world. I emailed her and said, “Here’s a song I wrote. I want to put a video to it, but I don’t know anyone in that world. Do you think any of your people would be interested?” She reached out to her network and had some interest, so I made a platform that would allow people to send us their stuff. Honestly, I thought maybe a couple would [respond], but within 10 days, we had 500 submissions from filmmakers and photographers all around the world. That’s when I realized we’d stumbled onto something, that people do want to be a part of something like this. Artists, photographers, filmmakers want their work to be used for something bigger than the awe factor.
The video for your song “Grand Scheme” coincided with the announcement about the launch of Riverine Records. What brought about the label and what are your goals for it?
I spent a lot of time writing for younger artists who are about to be signed by or have just been signed by major labels. I love what majors do, but it’s not a fair-trade model. I was tired of watching kids sign deals that will essentially ruin their career because they’ll eventually be uninspired. They get pushed around so much, they get benched, their manager leaves, they start resenting music, and they go find something else to do.
We love the idea of creators just being able to write and play. That’s the dream. We want other people to do the other stuff because we want to live in this world. Unfortunately, as soon as you start adding more people to do that stuff, if you are a beginning artist, you start losing control and understanding what’s going on and then you’re stranded. Working in that space for enough years, I thought, “There has to be a better way. There has to be some kind of development program or education system that teaches these kids what they need to know so they can make informed decisions.” If they do sign a major label deal, it’s because it’s the best deal for them as well as the label, and everybody works together. Because it’s incredible what those majors can do, but so often the artist is in this little bubble of, “You don’t need to know any of this. Just keep writing music and we’ll take care of the rest.” I’ve seen it go wrong so many times.
So when I did the [“Grand Scheme”] music video, I had the idea of this ecosystem. I had a lot of friends in the States that are amazing at what they do. I thought, “What if we put all these people together? Can’t we use this ecosystem and look after other artists?” The [writers’ and actors’] strikes were happening at the time, but you could still film music videos because they weren’t scripted. I thought, “Why is it that all the people that create everything don’t have any power? They’re not getting paid. They’re not allowed to do what they want to do.” So I took the idea—if you take the art away from the industry, there’s always going to be art, but there might not be an industry—to a girlfriend of mine that was a director at Disney, and she was like, “I think many people would love to do this, and nobody’s working right now. Why don’t we see who we can get together?”
The idea was to spend the same amount of money that a label would spend on a music video and say, “We can do the same thing with the same people. We don’t need the machine.” Now, whether or not I would advise that for anybody else now that I’ve done it... [Laughs] It came with a world of challenge that I had no idea about. I learned a lot in the process. But that’s where the music video originated: Why can’t we do this? We’ve got the same people. We took about five months to get what we needed together. We had the team, we had the idea, but we didn’t have the funding. That was the biggest challenge. And then, it was just a process of, how do we film? I’d never been a part of films or videos. I was Googling what a producer does before I started the project.
I thought, “This is a great test.” I can’t bring an artist [into the label] and say, “We’ll do a music video” and have no idea what a producer does. So we used me as a guinea pig. Through that process, I understood where the importance of these big machines come in and how money is the most important thing in that space, which was obviously where that power dynamic shifts, because they have the money and the independent artist doesn’t. It helped curate what the label would become.
Over the last two-and-a-half years, after we did the actual project, it was building out details of what it was that we could do for other artists. I can’t say, “We’re going to throw you on a $100,000 stage and get everything you need so you have this particular vision come to life.” But I can get an artist who has an incredible voice, lyrics, and personality and get them started so they know where they’re going and what they want to do and have an idea of what that looks like realistically. I wanted to create a space where younger artists could get the information and then go from there, so we weren’t losing artists left, right, and center, to being benched or quieted because they don’t sound like the recent viral hit that hit two hours ago.
Do you write or play music every day? Are you constantly creating?
Not play as much. I need a piano. I’ve got a keyboard that I’ve had for a long time. It’s not as inspiring as sitting next to a piano. We’ve just moved home to New Zealand, and the deal was when we moved, I get my piano, so I’m waiting for that. I write every day in some capacity. There’s something creative happening every day. One of the big reasons of moving back to New Zealand and doing this here for a chapter is so that I can bring creativity back. I’ve been working in the business side for so long. Being here, it’s a little bit of a slower pace. It might give me extra time to be able to play and create in my own world. I mean, I love doing the collabs. I work a lot with other artists overseas, so I’m always listening. But it’s not specifically coming from my soul, and I’d like to add that more to my life.
One of the things I love about your website is you highlight the artists you’ve worked with on the visuals for your music. Can you talk a bit about what the process is like for you to connect with artists on that front?
I love art. I love it so much that when I finish a song and think about releasing it, I think about the actual art of it. I don’t think about a photo shoot, really. That’s no fun for me, whereas it’s fun for me to look through artwork. I’ll just go on social media and flick through what I see. I’ll have an idea in my head, whether it’s waves or people or an object of some sort, but I’ll flick through different art that the algorithms target at me and look for something that I connect to. And then I’ll dig into that artist and find their other work, and if I love what they do, I’ll message them and say, “I have a song coming out. I would love if you could draw or paint something, or if you had a piece that connected with this song.” And then I’ll send them the song, because I feel like unless you connect with the song, there’s really no point. So far, they’ve all come back really positive: “I love the song. I would like to do a custom piece for it.”
The only one that wasn’t custom was Gossamer. I actually thought it was a photo. I saw it and I thought, “That’s exactly what the song is.” I messaged Robin [Hanna, the artist] and said, “I wonder if I could license this for this particular song, if you think it’s the right match?” And she just gave it to me. There’s another artist, Ruth Marie, who did a portrait of my face. I sent her the song and said, “Do you have something that’s in this realm?” And she’s like, “Could I just draw you?” You get so much more out of it when you connect with the artists. It also gives the art another story. Again, I lean to what’s enjoyable. I really enjoy meeting these people and that just has become part of the story, versus going out to have an agenda with it. It’s just more fun.
Who are your influences? Who do you turn to when you need some inspiration?
I got very lucky with [my parents]. I mean, they stuck the three of us on a boat in Florida and sailed to New Zealand for three years, and just thought, “Why not?” They always told us, “If you like it enough, you’ll make money from it, and you can have your career that way.” I don’t know if that’s true, but I do think it’s set us up to know that we’re privileged enough to have the decision of, “If we don’t like this, we can change it. We can figure out something else to do, because we have the skills to transition if we need to.” All of that has been my inspiration.
Dad’s currently the director of a 600-kilometer reef that they’re building off the coast of Dubai. He’s one of those [who] works a particular project for a while and then it becomes stagnant. He doesn’t know what to do next, and he’ll just jump again. I think to be able to jump like that is unique. All of that has been my inspiration to keep going and to find these paths and pivot all the time. So the people around me are the most inspiring.
That’s a good segue to my next question. You’re at the start of your career. You undoubtedly have many great things ahead of you. Are there any goals that you have? Is there anything you haven’t done yet professionally that you’d love to achieve?
I would love to curate an education program that kids in New Zealand could take. You could take your music industry class and learn what it’s like to be an artist and how to do that sustainably. Education is a big goal of mine. [My] goal for the Power in Us Project is for it to become standard for artists to be advocating for things that are bigger than just the art. To normalize artists being on the forefront of bigger projects would be cool. And with the Power in Us Project, I think we can do that. Putting artists on expeditions, putting pop music in conservation—normalizing that would be a big goal.
But specific goals? I’m not sure. They always shift. Every time I pick one, I end up going a different way. So, just heading towards it being a positive impact on education spaces and conservation and involving people. I don’t want to do this on my own. I want other people to get to feel what it feels like to be in that space. Like you said, it’s very, very early stages on all fronts, and hopefully this is the beginning of getting to build wider teams and have more people involved. I’ve got ideas, but that’s that lily pad thing.
You’ve put a lot of work into your career—not just writing and performing but moving back and forth between New Zealand and the U.S., networking, waitressing while playing gigs and trying to build a following. With that in mind, what is your advice to aspiring songwriters who might want to follow in your footsteps?
If you like it enough, do it. Go for it. Jump, because it’s so much better to have jumped and go, “Well, that didn’t work,” than to not have jumped and always wonder what could have been. I have never jumped and looked back and thought, “God, I wish I didn’t do that.” Even on the times where it didn’t work, I thought, “That was useful.” Looking back, I’ve never gone for it and regretted it. So try it, because what’s the worst that could happen?
My parents jumped when they were in their 40s and quit their jobs, sold up, and left. There’s no one way to do it. Your way is going to look so much different from everybody else. And there’s so much more behind the curtain than you think there is, so you can’t look at anybody else. You’ve just got to go and do it. Figure it out yourself and then work from there.
To learn more about Anderson Rocio, visit her website.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
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