Teen artist makes music with a flair
Marcello Morgueta is a talented musician. Photos submitted
By Tom Victoria
Marcello Morgueta has a dash of the Piano Man, a touch of The Purple One and a myriad of other influences. The singer and producer plays the keys akin to Billy Joel and possesses creativity a la Prince.
The talented musician described his style.
"I'd say that my music is very varied," he said. "I pull from so many influences. There is a descriptor that used to be given to ex-Beatle Paul McCartney that he was a sponge. I often feel the same way. I listen to a lot of music. Music is my one true love. As a result, I'm picking up a lot of stuff. So it's hard to categorize my music into one box besides a variety show, which is the lazy excuse and the lazy answer I'd like to give. Here's the comedic answer that I usually give: I usually say if Billy Joel went off of his antidepressants. The more serious answer that I like to give is a modern-day Todd Rundgren, a pop star that isn't afraid to push the boundaries on what is considered pop."
Marcello developed his musical taste via a unique route.
"I did not grow up listening to rock and roll," he said. "I was born in Sao Paulo, Brazil. My family and I immigrated here when I was 4 or 5 years old. Two styles of music that I was commonly exposed to were sertanejo, Brazilian country, and samba, bossa nova and whatever was playing on the pop radio. And I despised it. So I would always look to older records. I found myself drawn to '80s pop and eventually '70s funk, soul, disco, R&B, gospel. My familiarity with music is more in the realm of funk and disco, such as Prince."
Marcello, 18, of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, also adopted an artistic look.
"I haven't had the opportunity too much yet in my earlier career just because I grew up in a more conservative community," he said. "Trying to express myself in more artistic or extravagant or effeminate ways was deemed out there, so I never bothered. But with this next record that I'm working on and in general with the whole public image that I've been trying to create for myself since, it takes a lot of inspiration from glam rock and people like Prince, David Bowie, obviously, Lou Reed to a very small degree and acts like such."
Marcello's latest release was kk thx bye bye:3 in August.
"This is probably my favorite song on the entire project, maybe only beat by the title track or Jester’s Privilege," he said. "The song is a subversion of the love song and breakup song tropes, combining the two in a sick, twisted way, meant to show how love and obsession can appear as endearing on the surface, but in reality are complicated emotions that often appear in unhealthy ways in a relationship, especially a fractured one. The chorus is a subtle play on the typical breakup song routine of 'don’t leave,' instead opting for the funnier and more toxic 'don’t let me leave.' I am a little ashamed but willing to admit that this song as well as much of the upcoming Juxtapositions album is heavily inspired by my own life. As a result, certain lyrics may sound incoherent to the average listener as they mention very specific happenings in my life. However, especially in the case of :3 this gives each and every listener an opportunity to decipher and attach their own meanings to these songs. On the surface, they will often appear absurd and meaningless, but with each and every person’s own personal and emotional baggage, they will breathe meaning into the songs themselves."
Marcello's prior release was Jester's Privilege.
"I didn't expect to be getting as much traction as it has," he said. "I wrote it back in February. It was just an improvisational thing. I was having a bit of a crisis around that time because it had been shortly after I learned that I was getting into Berklee. I was freaking out because I don't consider myself as good as these guys. It feels weird that four years ago, I was a nobody. I was the quiet kid in school that everyone just pushed aside. And then suddenly, I have not only all this attention on me from the Internet, but now you're telling me that the big music school in the United States wants me to attend and walk through those doors. I still can't believe it. I still have something in the back of my mind that says this is a mistake. I passed the audition. I can't believe it. So I wrote a quick chorus very improvisationally, and I posted it on TikTok. I didn't even have the words written down. They just came to me and I posted it. The video got a couple hundred likes on TikTok. That was before I started posting on Instagram. It surprised me. It really did. I tried writing it to completion, and I wasn't a fan of how it turned out, so I let it sit."
"It's often I'll get a melody or a piece of music in my head or I'm playing it on the piano and then make lyrics out of it, or sometimes both will come at the same time.”
But Marcello's song wouldn't remain incomplete.
"Graduation rolled around, and I played the song again, and same reaction if not a little bit bigger," he said. "I decided that settles it. I'm gonna finish this song. In May, I finished writing it and recorded a quick demo, which to me, a quick demo just means drums, bass, guitar, piano and then my voice. I write the words last. From there, I let it sit in the hard drive for about a month, went back, revisited it, added all the rest of the instrumentation, recorded, left that sitting there, recorded a few more vocals for it, and it was mostly complete at that point. And then I had an idea. How about during the show, I make it an audience participation thing in which the audience sings the chorus, and then I put it in the song. It turned out fantastic. I am delighted with how the song sounds, and I'm quite excited for people to hear it. I think it's my best work yet, and I think it's a very good representation of my second record as a whole."
Marcello's previous release was Misanthropologist.
"It's a cover of an unreleased Will Wood song," he said. "One of the exercises that I've loved doing since my freshman year of high school is I love recording covers and trying to give them my own spin on them. Just as a way to get better as a recording engineer, figuring out where things should be placed, how things should sound. I always come out after recording those covers feeling like I've picked up new methods that I can apply to my own songs. Every so often, I'll come across a song that I've dug from the crates that it seems like nobody else knows what this song is, and my mind is blown by it. I feel like there is something that I can do with it, impose my own artistic will on it. Misanthropologist is one of those examples in which I found the song that I was surprised to see barely anybody knew. And I had an idea with it. I pitched it as initially as a collaboration between myself and a few other who will be incoming freshmen at Berklee College of Music, which is where I'll be attending for the next four years. It started as a collab project. It fell through. A few people still ended up playing on it, but it was mostly me, and I was very happy with that turnout. The reason why I say it's unreleased in quotations is because it was included in one of his live albums."
Marcello is working on the release of his third record following the second one, Shortcomings of a Not-So-Tortured Artist, released earlier this year.
"That record is technically my second record," he said. "It is the one that I like to consider my first real album. But back in 2023 when I was 15, I put out a record of demos called Electric and it is still up on streaming. Uses my old stage name Marc Cello. It's a quite rough-around-the-edges record that I nevertheless have some fondness for looking back since the production is genuinely somewhat impressive for a 15-year-old who had just begun to write and record music. I aimed for this next one to be a true showcase of who I am as an artist as thoroughly as I can. I always like my records to have several purposes artistically. And this one on the surface level, it was supposed to be a love letter to home recording and people who do everything at home in their own home studios. People like Todd Rundgren, Prince, Paul McCartney, Emitt Rhodes, all folks whose songwriting is very intricate, but it has a lo-fi quality because it's being done at home. So that was my aim with that first record. There are some songs which demonstrate the pop aspect, pop rock, the swing, the rock and roll. I wanted to have a lot of that theatrical influence that I've had growing up from being in theater and listening to and being exposed to theater, but also still having a bit of a rock edge. I see that first record that I just put out as a bit of a middle ground in which it's not quite the '60s and '70s home recording stuff, but it's still modern enough to feel like it fits in with today's world, but it's not so out there that the average listener can't find it. I don't make music for the average listener, but I still have had people who I wouldn't expect listening to my stuff. And that's something that I appreciate."
Marcello explained the nature of his newest album.
"The next record that I'm doing is meant to be a bit of the opposite," he said. "For the other one (Shortcomings of a Not-So-Tortured Artist), the other artistic intent of that record is that it was a album that I developed over the span of two, maybe even three years. After Electric came out, I spent a lot of time trying to discover my sound. I just kept creating projects and then they would go unfinished and then unreleased. But by 2026 this year, when I put out this record, when I was recording it in late 2025, I envisioned it as a collection of songs that I wanted to see, my favorite collection of songs that I had written over that span of two years from several different projects. For a period of time, I imagined that this record would go unfinished by me. I put it out and I look at it as more so a testament of that time of songs that I want to see released in case I wasn't around to see them released. And that leads into the idea for the next record. Because whilst the first one is very cynical because of the nature of where these songs came from, I want the next one to maintain the same cynical energy but with a more positive outlook on my life. If Shortcomings is a look upon the past and what I've done wrong and where I have faulted and things that aren't proper in my life, then I want the next one, Juxtapositions, to be a look forward, a look to the present. What exists and what is happening now and what will be happening. It's a much more energetic and upbeat record. It takes a lot of influence from new wave and bossa nova and funk and tango and a lot of different styles of dance music. It aims to create a more polished and danceable sound. They're supposed to be sister records. If Shortcomings is cynical and depressed and meant to be the past, then Juxtapositions is the energetic side of myself, the side that wants to be a performer, that sees that the world may suck, but there are things to look forward to, there are things happening now and there are things that are to happen to look forward for."
Marcello also will be performing with a group.
"This isn't set in stone yet that there are gents that I've been speaking to who will be attending Berklee, and the four of us together have decided to start a little band together," he said. "More stuff will be coming out about that soon. The group is called Wunderful."
Marcello said forming a band is not an easy task.
"Bands are weird," he said. "Trying to get people in a room together and learn all this music and get along with each other is so much more difficult than you think. I'm saying that from a very cynical point of view, because I've been in two bands, technically three, and all of them really fell apart. I never thought about how much work you put in to make a band work. But there is so much more beyond the music. It's the personalities that have to mesh together. It's the ideas and the workflows and the schedules that have to be all in sync, the maturity. If you're in a band and you are not able to set aside your differences with other people, you might as well stay solo. You might as well find a different career. Being a musician, it's all about compromise."
Melodies come to Marcello before the words.
"I find it difficult to write a melody around a lyric," he said. "It's often I'll get a melody or a piece of music in my head or I'm playing it on the piano and then make lyrics out of it, or sometimes both will come at the same time. It is very rare that a piece of few words will come into my head at once. Occasionally, I'll get an idea for a song. I don't know if that counts as lyricism, but even then I'll always write the melody first. And then the way that I like to do it when I come up with lyrics is either when I'm recording on my piano or the piano at my mother's house, or I'll record the entire demo and then instead of writing lyrics — this is when I'm especially feeling lazy — I'll just get my microphone that I know, sing on right here and I'll blurt out the vowels and the consonances and just mumble my way through this with the melody that I already have. I'll listen back and very analytically, we'll get a notebook or a piece of note card and just figure out if this sounds like a word. Oh, this sounds like a word. This sounds like a word. And then piece together what the song is saying through the mumbo jumbo that I am spitting out."
Marcello relies on real life for inspiration.
"I find it very difficult to write fictional stories," he said. "I can write absurdism. Absurdism is fun. Absurdist fiction is fun, but trying to write about things that I have never experienced is very difficult because there's a cutoff point in which you can only describe something so much before you're becoming superficial. I try to write more about myself and my own experiences. Oftentimes, it's fictional in the sense of it's loosely based around things or people or feelings or anything going on in my life that then I'll pull from and try to make into songs like, for example, Two Lovely Ladies. It is a piece of fiction that is loosely based off of my own life. And so that's how I'll write. There was a record that I tried doing called A Dinner with George, which went unreleased because I did not think it was complete enough in which I tried to do the opposite approach. I tried to write stories from someone, a character that isn't myself. In some instances, it worked well. For example, Arylynne was a song that was meant to be on that record and then it was pulled from it because it ended up on the one that I released instead. That song is a work of entirely fiction, of just me observing a cultural phenomenon. I probably can't discuss what it's about, but observing a cultural phenomenon and then making my own commentary through the form of mockery through a character that I'm portraying in the song."
Anyone who dates Marcello likely won't have to fret about being named in a song as the Taylor Swifts tend to do to their former paramours.
"I try not to write too much simply about love songs, because I feel like there's already too many out there," he said. "And I don't think I'm gonna be able to add any more depth to what is love or what is the meaning after a breakup. I don't think I can, so I try not to write about love songs too much. When I do, it's more so I don't write directly about a person. It's more so I try to write about the abstract feelings that I felt during it."
Marcello pointed out people may interpret songs differently than the musician's intent.
"It's happened before with me with one of my songs, Ms. O'Connell, which is definitely one of the deeper cuts," he said. "I'm already niche, so that's several layers there. Ms. O'Connell was interpreted to a surface level meaning of it. Usually you associate Ms. Last Name to someone that's more formal than you. People initially thought that song was about a school teacher and about it being a weird relationship between a student and his teacher, which really surprised me. But I could see it. I could completely see it. With other songs, I don't remember what the interpretation was, but there was an interpretation for one of the longer pop operas that I did. It's a song that's very easy to get lost into interpretation because it's very abstract. It's a song I wrote about my parents' divorce. I can't remember what someone got out of it, but I think someone thought it was a song about cheating on your spouse, which, you know, close enough. It's interesting that people can pull these meanings out of stuff. Or So Long, Mom (by Tom Lehrer) as well. People thought that that was a today song. People are worried about the future, which makes sense. It's interesting that people are pulling together meaning from this even though this is a song that pertains to the 1950s and 1960s. I'm not gonna dispel it, but if anybody asks me, I'm gonna tell them, yeah, this is not about that. There's a good balance between artistic perception and then artistic intent. In some way, they're the same thing. The artist doesn't know what they are creating until the very end of the creation process. It's just the artist imposes their own meaning before everyone else gets to impose their meaning. There's a balance between what is really intended versus what is perceived."
The King of Pop was the first musician to impact Marcello as a youth.
"Michael Jackson, which I think is everyone's universal response," he said. "I remember the first time I heard Billie Jean, it changed my life completely. I was so lost in the intricacies of the production in that. I knew from then that I wanted to do music ever since I heard that song or at least a little bit after that. Another thing that I grew up listening to was video game soundtracks, was huge into that. I suppose that's given that was my first experience with constantly seeking out music. With pop music, it was the more layered, more intricate stuff that called my attention which fits Michael Jackson and Quincy Jones into that."
Marcello would take his music as far as it can go despite any drawbacks to fame.
"Life is too short to ever put any kind of barrier or anything," he said. "If there is a constant exponential growth in the people who are listening to my music and hence my success, which maybe will mean that I'm going to be limited to certain things. I can't imagine ever getting so famous to the point that I can't step outside. That seems otherworldly to me. But if it were to get to that point, I feel like, sure, I wouldn't be able to go out to these places that I want, but I'm a very reclusive person anyways. I'm a total introvert. You're telling me that I can in the future would be able to make money off of simply doing something that is second nature to me, something that I absolutely love, doing something that never gets tiring to me, never feels like work even when it is work, that sounds like a wonderful trade-off. You're telling me I get to live my best life in exchange for maybe I can't go to a coffee shop. It's a good trade-off. There's so many doors that get opened up, and I think it's best to just take life wherever it takes you and not cut it off at any point."
Marcello takes steps to take care of his voice.
"I took vocal lessons since my freshman year of high school with three different teachers, and they kept me pretty sharp," he said. "I wasn't a great singer when I was younger, but they got me up there. I never imagined that people would know me for my voice, but people seem to think that I have a very distinctive voice. If people think that my voice is good, then I'll sing. But I never imagined I'd be a singer. I started drinking tea to keep my throat healthy. I like to keep a humidifier in my room. I do voice lessons and I try to warm up and I try to sing every single day just to keep my voice sharp and never let it fall. I don't do too much, but I try to at least keep it sharp to an extent."
Marcello doesn't hide his orientation even though some people may not be enamored by it.
"As soon as I started being more expressive about my gender fluidity and my sexuality, I noticed that people who previously were there for my Beatles covers low key vibe started getting turned off by that,” he said. “They do say that one door closes, another door opens and the door that I open by closing the other one was definitely the better door to go through. But I do think nevertheless, it is a shame that it's difficult to express yourself without offending somebody simply because of who you are. That's always been the case. I definitely think it's gotten better over the years. This is the best time to be alive for that, at least in the past two centuries. But nevertheless, it is unfortunate and I know that there will definitely be some people who my music will never reach the ears of because they will not be able to look past the fact that I am openly queer. But so be it. I don't make music for normies now do I?"
Marcello concurred with a theory that there are many creative people in the LGBTQ+ community because they don't limit themselves in any way.
"The journey to accepting yourself is a long and never-ending one in which you're constantly fighting uphill battles not only in yourself, but also artistically," he said. "And they're intertwined. I feel like it's less so about accepting yourself and more so accepting that you will never fully accept yourself, so why not just express yourself as is?"
Marcello said artists' image for the stage becomes intermingled with how they look offstage.
"The desire to express yourself as a musician ultimately bleeds into other artistic ventures," he said. "Not everyone considers fashion an art form, but to an extent, it certainly is. I've definitely noticed that as I became more entrenched in music. I started from I just want to make music to accepting that, okay, I'm gonna have to put myself out there and then I'm gonna have to develop a brand image. You're kind of forced to develop a brand image. You have this freedom of deciding what exactly you want your brand image to be. That not only influences your persona on stage, but then off of the stage, you start absorbing what you've been doing on stage and in the studio into your everyday life. My hairstyle used to be very short, very in front of my face, but as I got older and more confident, especially through my music, I began to show my face more and more. Another example is the perm I got when I was younger, trying to look like those '80s rockers. The arts and the music definitely does influence your style. And then you develop your own thing from there."
Marcello would like to be remembered for his creativity.
"I want to be known as a craftsman more than anything, an artist who does everything himself," he said. "He writes everything, performs every instrument you know. Everything is me. And I don't want to just have that in my own work. I want to produce and write for other acts. I want to be known as this studio wizard that if you pay attention to these pop or rock records, you can hear my voice very briefly in the backing vocals, or you can tell that's me playing the keyboard, or that's me on the drums, or that's me on the bass, or that's me on guitar. That's something that I want to be known for. In terms of my own stage persona, which I think is the more superficial thing, I want to be seen as a glam rock act. Someone that is constantly morphing and reinventing himself, but at the same time, it manages to border the line between what is mainstream and what most people can conventionally accept and what scares away the average person at the same time. Something controversial for the better reasons."
Marcello doesn't just play the keys.
"I'm not only a piano player and a singer, but I'm also a guitar player, a bass player, a drummer," he said. "I produce everything myself in my own home studio. Nothing is outsourced to anybody. I have my own mixing console. I have my own microphones micing up my kit. I have my own percussion throughout the room. This is the room that I've built up over a year. Everything is done myself. It's a very important part of not even just my artistry, but me as a person. I consider myself a well-rounded studio wizard."
“To people who are at a point in their life in which they want to do art but don't have the skills or the knowledge to do it, don't take the shortcuts. It's better to take the time and learn everything yourself and really indulge yourself in the art to figure out if it's something that you really want than it is to just take a shortcut.”
Marcello keeps making music to keep artistic momentum.
"I don't always stay motivated to make music," he said. "There are long periods of time often correlating with mental health that I just don't feel like it. And I think that goes for a lot of people. The best thing that you can do as an artist is just making it a habit. I'll write one song every day even if it's not good. I'll do these overdubs on this day, or I'll do editing. Doing one little thing, making it a force of habit rather than a force of gut feeling. Even though gut feeling can be very helpful to creating great art, going out of practice is the worst thing you can do. For me, it's the practice that keeps me going, the motions of it. What motivates me is simply that I enjoy doing it. Like a lot of other art forms, it's a means of expression. But it's also I have this goal in my head that I have to do this because I want to be able to keep doing this in the future. If I stop now, then I won't be at where I want to be in my career. And if I'm not there, then that means I can't continue doing this. It's the thing about art. If you don't keep building it up, then you won't be able to make a living off of it. That's what motivates me in that sense. I want to be able to live and survive in this economy."
Marcello dispensed advice to aspiring musicians.
"When I first started out, I knew nothing about music," he said. "I knew not how to play an instrument. I didn't know how to sing. I taught myself everything along the way. But I think back to those times and I imagined myself as that kid who knew nothing. I feel if I was presented with a shortcut, I would have taken it. But I've seen people take those shortcuts. Now with AI existing, it's very easy to take those shortcuts, but you lose so much out of it. To people who are at a point in their life in which they want to do art but don't have the skills or the knowledge to do it, don't take the shortcuts. It's better to take the time and learn everything yourself and really indulge yourself in the art to figure out if it's something that you really want than it is to just take a shortcut. For people who are great musicians and already know how to sing and play and all that, but never made a record before, my biggest piece of advice from when I started learning how to record music is I did everything simultaneously. I taught myself piano, started taking voice lessons and started teaching myself how to produce, write and mix all in the same year, 2022."
Marcello explained the most difficult part of teaching himself how to play the piano.
"The hardest aspect of teaching himself the piano was and remains the technique required," he said. "You can develop your own technique and grow an understanding of how to play an instrument through a simultaneous study of music theory, even if it's through your own instrument and methods alone noticing the patterns and relationships between chords and the keys. But oftentimes without the guidance of a teacher, it's quite difficult to know what you're doing wrong technique-wise."
Marcello said learning how to play both a guitar and bass was a benefit.
"Learning bass and guitar simultaneously sped up the process a lot faster," he said. "The guitar and bass share the same first four string tunings, which means the scales on the guitar and bass are the same and can be followed up on the guitar easily adding those two other strings by keeping music theory and the relationship of pitches in mind. The only drawback is that I play bass with a pick, which in the music world is often seen as a big no-no, but c'est la vie."
Marcello said musicians need to fully learn the music writing process.
"Ableton Live Lite was the program that I first started learning how to do music on and I hated it, because I didn't understand what I was missing at first," he said. "The biggest thing that I took away from music and that every aspiring songwriter and producer should take away if they already know how to play an instrument, learn how to write structurally. Learn the structure of writing because music is very formulaic, especially pop music. Once you understand the way that music is formulated, it doesn't matter how good you are or have how much of a knowledge you have of music theory. If you know how music is structured, then you can start making songs. That's the most important thing beyond all important things. The other thing is learn music theory, but that's only later down the line."
Marcello’s Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marcello_morgueta/
Marcello’s YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@marcello_morgueta