“No tears, baby, don’t cry, hold on to this lullaby.” Four lines into Rieko’s new single, she’s already doing something that comes naturally to her: using words to reach another person. The song promises, “My love for you is oceans wide, I’ll swim to you from the other side.” The melody stays simple and haunting, carried by layered vocals and Rieko’s own whistling running underneath. The sound doesn’t chase whatever’s trending right now. It simply supports what the lyrics are already doing. On “Oceans Wide Lullaby,” the writing leads, and the music follows it.
Ask her what writing gives her that nothing else does, and she doesn’t hesitate. “Writing allows me to express myself in a way that nothing else can because I’m able to tell my story,” she said. That habit started young. As a talkative kid, she began writing letters just to share what was on her mind. Nobody told her to do it. The letters grew into poetry and a love of reading, then eventually songwriting. Around eleven or twelve, she remembers watching Alicia Keys sing and play piano on TV and thinking, “I could really do that.”
At seventeen, Rieko had to decide how far she was willing to follow that instinct. She had a full scholarship to study international relations at Washington & Jefferson, or she could pay her own way at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia to pursue music. She couldn’t decide until her uncle asked her one question: what would get you up every day. “I was like, oh, music,” she said. It wasn’t close.
That instinct still shapes how she works today, and it comes at a real cost. She’s an independent artist with no label, so she covers every part of a release herself, from writing to recording to mixing to promotion, before fans ever pay a cent. “It’s labor intensive,” she said. “It takes time, takes energy, money, resources.” She’s careful about giving up that control for label support. “I don’t want to jump into anything or sign anything that would put me in a position where I don’t have autonomy over everything I’ve built so far, because that means so much to me,” she said. On “Oceans Wide Lullaby,” the same commitment shows up in the writing itself. The words are simple and direct, and she doesn’t crowd the song with language to prove what she can do. She writes toward the person on the other end of it, the instinct that started with those first letters.
Asked what audiences can expect from her, Rieko’s answer was simple: “The music. Really stepping into my world. More of everything.” That’s a fitting way to describe someone whose writing has been the throughline of her work long before there was an audience attached to it. It carried her through those first letters. It carries her through a career built without a label, where nothing gets made until she decides what it needs to say. And it carries “Oceans Wide Lullaby,” a song where the writing leads and everything else follows.
Listen to “Oceans Wide Lullaby.”