On March 24, Mary Collins, Class of 2022, performed an opening set for the Mary McBride Band at the East Plaza. The band first performed at NYU Abu Dhabi during the Arts Center’s 2015 preview season. A six member band hailing from the United States, the group is led by namesake Mary McBride, who is a prominent figure in cultural diplomacy and international exchange.

“I’m not sure exactly why [the Arts Center] asked me specifically, but I think they’re like, oh, we need someone to open for Mary McBride and here’s Mary,” Collins chuckled. The singer-songwriter previously performed at Rooftop Rhythms in February when the event went back in person at Manarat Al Saadiyat. There, she caught the attention of Bill Bragin, Executive Artistic Director of the NYUAD Arts Center, who asked her to head the opening act.

Taking the stage with just her guitar and her voice, the senior student is no stranger to the limelight. Collins was born into a very musical family in Michigan. The youngest of four children, she would regularly sing with her parents and siblings, while her parents played the banjo, making bluegrass music together.

“I’ve always had music around me and I can’t really picture my life without it. It’s always been a part of how I express myself, how I connect with other people and just a way that I find joy in the world,” she shared.

At the age of nine, she started taking guitar lessons from a local musician in Ann Arbor. As she grew more comfortable playing the guitar, she began coming up with tunes and experimenting with songwriting.

“[I started writing songs] when I was twelve or thirteen, ever since then it’s become this really central way I’ve processed growing up and just everything in my life,” she said.

While most songwriters come up with the lyrics before the melody, Collins prefers to sit down with her guitar and come up with the instrumental part before adding a melody and thinking of words and phrases that go along with it.

“You want to write lyrics in the way that you would say the words, you want them to follow the cadence of how you would speak them. That’s really important to me,” she noted.

This isn’t the only way she songwrites. Sometimes, ideas come sporadically as a line pops into her head during a commute, and she would pull out her phone to record it in a voice note. Other times, she employs more structured methods such as a songwriting challenge when she commits to writing at least a part of a song every day of the month.

Even though she had been passionate about music ever since she was a child, Collins decided to major in Literature and Creative Writing: “I think of myself as a multidisciplinary artist, so I’m a writer and a musician.” She is currently working on a children’s novel for her capstone project.

“I knew that music was always going to be something that I [wanted] to do, and writing songs and sharing them and performing was always going to be central to my life. But I think that there's this kind of false dichotomy or false message that is sent by the way that we perceive the music industry that you have to either make it or not,” she observed.

She felt that studying writing while remaining involved with music extracurricularly would equip her with the skills she needed for her future career. Upon graduation in May, she plans on looking for opportunities to stay in the UAE for about a year and then applying for a MFA in creative writing.

“Ideally I want to end up in a career where I would have some combination of teaching, writing and doing music,” she mentioned her work as a peer tutor at the Writing Center and how much she enjoyed it.

As a young musician, Collins felt that there has been a trend in recent years where youth is put on a pedestal and pop icons are becoming successful at an extremely early age.

“I’m 22 and this should be the beginning of my career, but sometimes you feel like, oh I’m already 22 and what am I offering,” she admitted. “There is just a lot to navigate about the music industry in terms of finding a career in it that I’m trying to work against [this overemphasis of youth.”