Marlo in the Making

For most artists, a viral moment is something they spend years chasing. For Marlo Goeller, known simply as “Marlo,” it arrived just as she was graduating high school.

Her single “Just Like You” took off after she posted a video showing the song being built from her bedroom: recording individual parts, layering tracks, and producing the song from her laptop. The video accumulated millions of views on Instagram, while listeners began drawing comparisons to artists like Clairo, Tyler the Creator, and Willow. Now approaching 200,000 streams, “Just Like You” has brought Marlo a new level of attention, including interest from record labels and others across the music industry.

But the viral video only captures a small piece of a musical background that has been developing for most of her life.

Marlo grew up playing music alongside her siblings after her parents enrolled them in lessons so they could be “well rounded.” Her older brother played guitar, Marlo sang, and her younger brother played drums. Together, they essentially formed what she described as “a little band.” Eventually, her brothers lost interest, but Marlo didn’t. Instead, she began taking over the instruments herself.

As her family moved around the world, including time spent living in Hong Kong, music remained a constant. She eventually developed into a multi-instrumentalist, playing guitar, piano, and bass in addition to singing, and is the first female multi-instrumentalist in the pop music program at USC.

That background has also made it difficult to place Marlo neatly within a single genre. While jazz has played a significant role in her musical development, especially with her album “Public Transport,” she said she is currently leaning toward a “rock genre,” combining her instrumental background with a growing interest in production and experimentation.

For Marlo, songwriting and production aren’t necessarily two separate stages. When describing her creative process, she said she tends to do “both at the same time,” using production as a tool to help her write rather than waiting until a song is finished to begin building out its sound. That process became especially important in the creation of “Just Like You.”

Surprisingly, the song that would eventually introduce millions of people to Marlo began as a high school English assignment. The prompt was to “express yourself in the way you best know how.” For Marlo, that meant writing a song.

The song eventually found an audience far beyond her classroom. In the video that took off online, Marlo didn’t simply perform the finished track. Instead, she pulled viewers into the process, showing herself producing the song from her bedroom. 

“Female producers are still very surprising to people,” Marlo said, pointing to the relative lack of visibility women continue to have on the production side of the industry. That surprise became part of the video’s appeal. Viewers weren’t just discovering a new song; they were watching a young female artist build it herself. By making the creative process visible, Marlo gave audiences another reason to stop scrolling, helping “Just Like You” get incredible outreach.

The timing made the experience even more surreal. “I was just about to graduate,” Marlo said of the moment the song began taking off. Suddenly, while finishing high school, she was watching something she had written and produced independently reach millions of people.

Virality also brought something more complicated: attention from the music industry.

Since “Just Like You” took off, Marlo has found herself receiving interest from labels and industry professionals at an unusually early point in her career. While she appreciates the opportunities that have come from the song’s success, navigating them has also made her more aware of the potentially exploitative side of the industry. “It’s nice to get recognition, but sometimes it feels threatening,” she said. With so much attention arriving so quickly, she has been learning to navigate an industry that can be exciting while also being difficult for a young artist to fully trust.

Now a student at USC (University of Southern California), Marlo is entering this new stage of her career surrounded by other musicians, producers, and artists. She hopes to use that community to continue experimenting with her sound and collaborate with as many people as possible.

And despite the sudden attention surrounding “Just Like You,” Marlo is already thinking beyond one viral song. She is hoping to soon release another full-length album.

“Just Like You” may have been the song that made people stop scrolling, but for Marlo, it seems much more like a starting point than a destination.