Mary Lambert

2013 Songwriting Alumna

Cottage: Waterfall

BIO: Mary Lambert is not your typical multi-platinum artist. While studying Music Composition at Cornish College of the Arts, she found a home in the spoken word community of Seattle and began experimenting with infusing poetry into her music, performing frequently as a cellist, singer-songwriter, and poet. Lambert had never released music and was juggling multiple food service jobs when she received a call from Macklemore and Ryan Lewis to collaborate on their marriage equality anthem, “Same Love”. Writing and singing the hook to “Same Love” led to an MTV VMA win and two Grammy nominations: Song of The Year and Album of The Year, and culminated in the iconic 2014 Grammys performance, which featured a mass wedding officiated by Queen Latifah and Lambert’s unforgettable duet with Madonna. After the viral success of releasing a standalone version of the song, “She Keeps Me Warm” Lambert shortly signed to Capitol Records. She released Welcome to the Age of My Body, an EP with a re-release of the Top 20 hit “She Keeps Me Warm” and “Body Love”, a spoken-word piece about body image. Later that year, she debuted her first pop song: a tongue-in-cheek single, “Secrets,” that went RIAA Gold and shot to No. 1 on the Billboard Dance charts, which was followed by her debut full-length album, Heart on My Sleeve. Lambert received the Human Rights Campaign’s Visibility Award, The SAMHSA Special Recognition Award from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services for her work on destigmatizing mental illness, and was invited to speak at the UN. She has performed on the Colbert Show, Ellen, The Today Show, Good Morning America, The Tonight Show, and the American Music Awards. 

Lambert was successful in the eyes of the public; but below the surface, she was struggling with frequent panic attacks and suicidal thoughts. In 2015, she parted ways with formal management and Capitol Records. The desire was to reclaim her independence and to focus her attention on other aspects of her career: poetry, acting, composing, writing, and production. Lambert self-released the joyful indie-pop EP Bold and a self-recorded holiday EP, Happy Holigays under her own label, Tender Heart Records. In 2018, Lambert signed a book deal with Macmillian to release a poetry collection centered around trauma and mental illness called Shame is an Ocean I Swim Across, and she released her sophomore album, Grief Creature, as a complementary work shortly thereafter. Written, produced, and arranged almost entirely by Lambert, the “breaking up with shame” album contains heart-rending adult-pop songs, intense spoken-word tracks, and slick collaborations with musician-friends Macklemore, Julien Baker, Maiah Manser, and Hollis. 

Lambert is currently working on a new book and album about body image; co-starring in the Netflix animated musical and series, I ♥ Arlo and Arlo the Alligator Boy; co-hosting The Manic Episodes, a queer and mental health podcast with her spouse, Dr. Wyatt Paige Hermansen; and facilitates a virtual workshop on body image called Everybody is a Babe. Lambert is also the film composer for 1946: The Mistranslation That Shifted Culture, a documentary about the mistranslation of the word “homosexual” in the bible. 1946 won the Audience Award at Doc NYC and OutFEST and broke records for the most viewed film in Doc NYC history. She lives between Seattle and Western Massachusetts with her spouse and her two dogs, Turnip and Georgie.