Jessica Mazin isn’t Afraid to Claim Her Nepo-Fame
Written for a class project, I interviewed and wrote a profile on Jessica Mazin, an up-and-coming singer-songwriter at Berklee College of Music. In the piece, we discuss Mazin’s life-long relationship with music, her work on the Emmy-nominated hit television show The Last of Us, her latest single “The Devil,” and what’s next for Mazin as she takes on college and bringing more of her music to light.
Sitting in a corner booth of a bustling Boylston street cafe, Jessica Mazin blends in with the crowd of college students typing away on their laptops, bundled in sweaters against the brisk chill whistling outside with their headphones on. She wears a black sweatshirt with a pink and blue disco ball printed on the front, the former color almost matching the shade of her cheeks as she smiles, talking about the cold weather.
“It’s my first proper winter ever, actually,” she says, her grin crinkling the skin around her brown eyes.
Originally from La Cañada, California, Mazin is a first-year student at Berklee College of Music in Boston. She speaks animatedly about what she has already done since arriving—two open mics with another coming up, an audition for Berklee’s competitive Career Jam, and a song-writers club on campus. Her bright tone is a stark contrast from the haunting, melancholic voice of her music, including her latest single “The Devil,” which she released in September, only a month into her first semester.
A stripped-back ode to a broken relationship, the lyrics weigh heavy against the soft plea of her voice, her harmonies building into a luring tone equal to a siren, remaining with the listener long after the song is finished.
“If I somehow, like, couldn't ever write a song again,” Mazin begins, “I would explode. Like, it's the only way I know how to process my feelings, and even then, to have this tool at such a young age, like, it made me become an emotionally intelligent person. It’s allowed me, like, sooner than other people, I think, to be able to identify what I'm feeling and be able to say why I'm feeling it.”
While an intimate and emotional orchestration, “The Devil” is not just another song to add to Mazin’s repertoire. The song’s release also marks a shift in her musical career—a strange thing to write given she is only 18 and three months into her degree at Berklee.
But it’s true.
Because even though Mazin is still in the early years of her musical career, she already has one achievement under her belt that likely none of her classmates have: a musical feature in the Emmy-nominated television show.
While she might not be a household name yet, the 32 million people who watched HBO’s The Last of Us, the spring 2023 hit television show based on the critically acclaimed video game, have heard Mazin’s voice on episode six, “Kin.”
Her somber cover of Depeche Mode’s “Never Let Me Down Again” comes at a point of crisis for the primary characters, with Mazin’s haunting allure capturing the fear and desperation that marks the end of the episode, and a stark difference from the original; a testimony to Mazin’s ability to shape songs to reflect her distinct tone. However, Mazin doesn’t actually like doing covers.
“When I have to sing covers,” Mazin explains, “it's, like, really hard. I don't know. I get really nervous because it's not mine.”
But with her own songs, Mazin does just fine. “I've always been really proud of the songs I’ve written, even back when I was like 14 and they were super angsty, and weird, and, like, not good,” she laughs. “I don't know. Because [the songs] came from my brain, for some reason, I just have a lot of trust in them.”
Mazin has been writing her own music since the second grade, when she won her elementary school’s PTA competition Reflections with her song titled “Believing Makes Achieving.”
“I still have the paper I wrote it on,” says Mazin, smiling and tucking a strand of her dark hair that’s not pinned back by bobby pins behind her pierced ear. “I bring it with me everywhere. It was on my wall in my bedroom. Now it's on my dorm wall. It's like, this is the first song I wrote. It's special to me.”
Since then, Mazin has been writing non-stop, crafting songs and sharing them through school talent shows and open mic performances. But before performing her own music, she was performing musicals on her local theater’s stage.
“She was always clever and very good with words,” says Melissa Mazin, 53, about her daughter’s passion for music. “She wasn’t afraid to be silly and kind of out there. She was a performer from early on. Started at age five in a little local production in our town.”
As a stay at home mom, Mazin’s mother sought ways to entertain Mazin and her older sister during the summer and won a gift certificate to the local theater’s program, enrolling them both. Mazin ended up staying with the theater for eight years, doing three shows a year until she was thirteen.
“When she was younger, she did a lot of, like, musical theater stuff because that's kind of what was available to us when we were kids,” explains Ruby Joy, 18, one of Jessica’s close childhood friends. “That was like the way she could get on stage and keep singing. And she does love theater, but I think that she really just wanted to be on stage singing. So, when we went to high school, she kind of dropped that and she started basically just doing choir because she just really loved singing, and at our high school, she really got attached to the choir department.”
“Choir was the biggest part of my life for a post post theater world,” says Mazin. “The only reason why I went to the high school I went to was for the choir program there.”
Mazin attended La Cañada High School and spent three years in the chamber choir, being one of the few selected to join as a sophomore in 2020 just before the Covid-19 pandemic forced Mazin and students across the United States to attend school online from their homes.
“During that time, I was just, like, so chronically online,” expresses Mazin. “Like, everyone was on the internet all the time and a lot of bad stuff was also happening in the world.”
She pauses for a moment, falling into silence, before a small smile tips the corner of her lips.
“I was also constantly arguing online about politics within the One Direction fandom.”
Yes.
One Direction: the English-Irish pop boy band who dominated music charts in the early 2010’s, stealing just about every American teenage girl’s heart with their British charm.
“The group wasn’t even together anymore,” Mazin laughs. “Like, they broke up such a long time ago.”
But while the members of One Direction split in 2016, Mazin found stability in the fandom and in music while the future of the world outside remained unknown.
“She had released a little EP with some stuff,” says Melissa Mazin. “She'd gotten it on all streaming platforms and people were listening to it, but not like in big amounts. And then, during lockdown, she had like a creative burst of some sort and she wrote this file. It was based on some, I don't know, like, fanfiction?”
“It was called Duplicity,” Mazin confesses, naming the title of the fanfiction—a fictional writing written by fans of a particular television series, movie, book, or in Mazin’s case, a band—that inspired her song “The Peak of My Existence.”
“Honestly, like, the pandemic is a big contributor to this hysteria that went on because during 2020 and 2021, there was this very active community on TikTok, a very niche community for this fanfiction,” explains Mazin, “and I wrote a song inspired by the plot of that and it went viral in this niche community. Like, it got a bunch of streams.”
By a bunch, Mazin means thousands.
“It still gets a lot of listens. Like, I get 13,000 streams a week on that song, or like seven or eight or nine thoughts, something around there.”
Mazin shrugs as if the four-figure numbers are nothing while “The Peak of My Existence” climbs to nearly 1.5 million listens on Spotify.
“That was the first time I ever got attention from my music,” says Mazin. And the attention motivated her to release more, shortly following up with her song “Beautiful But Dark” and in the following year, “To Avoid Pain.”
“I gotta think that there was some solace in the music there for her,” says Mazin’s mother about her daughter’s song-writing. “She has to have music in her life. Like, that's just a compulsion. Not a compulsion, but it's a requirement. She’s kind of like her dad that way. Her dad is a writer, and it's not really a choice. He just has to write.”
The saying about how the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree applies strongly to Mazin with her father.
“My dad and I are really similar,” says Mazin, “and sometimes we clash because of it.”
Mazin’s father is Craig Mazin, the Emmy award-winning creator, writer, and producer of HBO’s Chernobyl. He also co-created, co-wrote, and executive produced The Last of Us alongside Neil Druckmann, the co-creator of the original video game and co-president of the video game developer Naughty Dog, hence why Mazin cites her musical feature on the show as her “nepo-boost.”
“Like, it is nepotism,” Mazin states bluntly. “I only got that opportunity because of [my father] and I was nervous that people were going to hate me because of it. That's why I made a vow to always be transparent about it.”
Mazin’s father was the one to approach her about recording a cover for the show, with the proposal arriving in the form of a casual text exchange:
Craig Mazin: If I ask you to do a cover of a song for me, would you do it?
Craig Mazin: Just as a demo?
Jessica Mazin: yeah
Craig Mazin: Excellent. Stand by.
Jessica Mazin: i cant do it right now though
Craig Mazin: In the next few weeks… whenever you feel inspired.
Following the message was a link to the official video for Depeche Mode’s “Never Let Me Down Again.”
“And then like three weeks went by and I completely forgot about it because, like, if I don't want to do it, I'm going to forget about it,” says Mazin.
But her father was adamant and asked Mazin to record the cover again, telling her she would really want to do it despite her lack of interest.
“I think that's when he told me what it was for,” Mazin recalls. So, she agreed and recorded a demo in an hour, sending it to her father without a second thought. “I just thought he wanted me to, like, arrange it and then someone else was going to sing it or something.”
When the episode aired on February 19th, 2023 it was Mazin’s exact vocals she had recorded in her room.
“I mean, it was great. I had always wanted a nepo-moment, and I guess he’d seen, like, how hard I had worked and finally gave it to me.”
The reception of Mazin’s cover was generally well received, with several news outlets including Esquire and Billboard picking up on who she was and her unique twist of a classic song. As expected, she was introduced to a wide range of new listeners, including fans of Depeche Mode, who also happen to be notorious for criticizing covers of the band’s discography and Mazin wasn’t spared.
“They didn’t like it,” Mazin says, her voice tipping up into a soft laugh before she adds confidently, “I don't care, though. Because those people aren't my audience. The reason why they didn't like it is because it's not for them. Like, that would be like if I got mad because some 35-year-old metalhead didn't like my music. Not saying that that's the same demographic, but like, same distance away from what I make.”
“She's always kind of had her own internal confidence,” Mazin’s mother says, “which is just like, ‘Yeah, here's my stuff. I like it. I'm going to put it out there, do what you want with it.’ I mean, I'm not going to say she doesn't feel hurt when there's criticism, but she's definitely she's she's got a real reasonable kind of attitude about it and a sense of humor about it.”
And while the fans of Depeche Mode weren’t in favor of Mazin’s cover, Mazin notes how the band itself enjoyed it.
“Depeche Mode was really supportive of me. Like they invited me and my family to their concert for free. I didn't go there because it was the night before I was supposed to go to Italy with my choir and it was like a really big thing and I just couldn't go. But they invited me and my parents went.”
The band also did a collaborative post with Mazin on Instagram, featuring her cover with a clip from The Last of Us.
“Like, they were supportive,” Mazin emphasizes. “The fans were not.”
Mazin pauses for a moment, her brow furrowing before she adds, “[The fans] were very misogynistic, honestly, in the comments. Like, ‘I hate when girls just make everything sad and slow’ and stuff like that. Or like, ‘Why do girls just ruin every song by making it all indie?’”
Another laugh escapes her with a small smile.
“And it didn't actually upset me at all because I know that those aren't the people that I'm trying to reach,” Mazin states assuredly. “Like, I would be upset if Depeche Mode fans were like a bunch of cool, 22-year-old, like, indie people. I would be really sad.”
Eight months passed between the release of Mazin’s cover of Depeche Mode’s “Never Let Me Down Again” for her father’s television adaption of The Last of Us and the release of her latest song ‘The Devil’. And while The Last of Us brought more attention to Mazin, it also challenged her identity as an artist.
“I was kind of in this place of worry,” Mazin describes the months following the release of her cover. “Because [‘Never Let Me Down Again’] got a lot of attention, my artist identity [on Spotify] was, like, getting a little bit warped. Like, if you went to see ‘fans also like,' it was all The Last of Us stuff. It was ‘fans also like this song from The Last of Us,’ and I didn’t really want that to be my thing.
So, she sought a clean slate, deleting the EP she’d made when she was 14, along with all of the music she’d released before 2020. Then she got to work on making new music with the help of her high school friend and producer, Henry Dearborn.
The pair met in the La Cañada chamber singers, with Dearborn, 17, being accepted the year following Mazin. He admits to being intimidated by her when they first met, having watched her perform. But that quickly washed away as they connected on their “odd sense of humor” and soon enough, they were producing “The Devil.”
“We kind of had danced around the idea a little bit,” says Dearborn. “Like, why don't we ever do anything together? We both write songs, etc. We can at least, you know, explore it.”
“Henry is not only one of my best friends, but like, musically, he just gets me,” Mazin says. “Like, we made ‘The Devil’ in his bedroom and I’d just be sitting on the floor and I'd be like, ‘I want a sound that sounds like when you sit on a couch.’ And he'd be like, ‘Oh, you want to phump?’ And I'm like, ‘Yeah, I want a phump.’ And then he just does it. Like, he just knows.”
“The Devil” took nine months to produce, though Mazin notes it didn’t take nine months in total to produce the song. “It just took nine months for us to meet six or seven times to actually do it.”
Between starting production in January and finishing it, both Mazin and Dearborn were balancing school, with Mazin finishing her senior year of high school and preparing to move across the country to start college at Berklee College of Music.
“We would also goof around a lot,” Mazin confesses, “because we're friends. So sometimes, like, we wouldn't get super focused and we’d just mess around, so it took a while. But it was fun.”
However, when the pair finished “The Devil,” there was a moment where Mazin questioned whether or not she wanted to release it—though not because she thought it wasn’t good.
“When I release a song or, like, share a song, I'm never worried it's bad,” Mazin says bluntly. “I always know it's good.”
She was worried people would think it was bad.
“I spent so long on [“The Devil”] and it's very personal. Like, very personal,” explains Mazin. She knew family and friends would support it, but what about her new audience, the one who only knew her from The Last of Us?
In the end, it was Gustavo Santaoalalla, the award-winning composer of The Last of Us video game soundtrack and producer of Mazin’s Depeche Mode cover, who persuaded Mazin to release the song.
“He was just like, ‘You just have to let it go. Because it's good, and you just have to let it go.’ And I was like, ‘Thank you.’ And that's why I released it.”
Mazin used “The Devil” for her audition into Berklee’s annual Career Jam, a large-scale performance exhibition that connects performers with industry professionals like the Grammy award-winning artist Childish Gambino, who attended last year’s competition.
“I applied just for shits and giggles,” says Mazin. “Why not?”
She had her callback a week prior and now waits to hear whether or not got a spot.
“Maybe I'll get in.” She pauses, then says, “Probably not, though, because I’m a first-year.”
The only first-year to have received a callback.
“Her voice is so beautiful, and honest, and oftentimes, haunting,” says Dearborn about Mazin. “I know the sound is very similar to a lot of popular singer-songwriters today, but I think she stands out quite a bit because she's very raw and very honest. I feel like, when I listen to her music and listen to her perform it, I can really feel whatever emotion she was feeling when she wrote the song.”
“She touches people,” Mazin’s mother states simply. “I mean, I've seen it happen. She touches me, obviously. I’m her mom. But she touches people who don't know her. And that, to me, is magic.”
A magic that has placed Mazin with nearly sixty-thousand monthly followers on Spotify.
“I can't put into words,” Mazin says about how she is able to craft songs. “Like, it just is the only thing that I can, like, naturally just do. It's the only thing that will make me feel better without fail. And like, I don't know, it's just in my blood.”
Regardless of whether or not Mazin gets a spot in the Career Jam, she is already looking ahead and working toward other dreams, including an album.
“I’ve already written it and have planned out. Like, I have the title, I have the track list, everything. I just need to find a studio to record it.” She pauses for a moment. “Then again, I made ‘The Devil’ in a bedroom.”
Nonetheless, she is in no rush.
“I'm just trying to get every chance I can to perform. Even if it is useless, it's still practice,” says Mazin. “Once I started becoming serious about songwriting, I’d really gotten a new appreciation for, like, authenticity, and when I think about who I want to be like in the music industry, I want to be really real.”
Her eyes crinkle again as her lips lift into a wide smile.
“I really have faith in a slow burn.”
