Aotearoa-adoptive American/Spanish citizen of the world, Anderson Rocio has worked in various aspects of the music industry since heading to Los Angeles in 2017. Success arrived in 2020 with a song she’d written being heavily used on the Netflix series Lucifer, which opened up different opportunities and drew her to create music for her other passion, ocean conservation. Returning home to Te Waipounamu in 2025, she also that year launched Riverine Records, her own independent record label. Amanda Mills talked with her.
Described typically as a cinematic pop artist and songwriter, music has surrounded Anderson Rocio all her life. Playing classical piano since age six, she began writing around the age of nine or 10, as she “…always wanted to write songs.”
Her upbringing was nomadic. After living in the UK for eight years, their Spanish and American parents took Anderson and her two brothers on an adventure, living on a boat and sailing around the world, first to Florida, and then via Australia to Aotearoa.
“We got to New Zealand and there was no way we were leaving… we just loved everything,” she smiles. “We felt more aligned spiritually with NZ I think than anywhere else that we’d been. I felt like we’d finally gotten home.”
While music was crucial, after leaving school she tried different career paths that included professional kite-surfing, and diving at the Dubai aquarium her father ran, before returning to study at University of Otago. Initially her path was zoology (with a side of kite-surfing), but she took a minor in piano performance before transferring full time to music, after realising the speed boats were the best part of science.
“If that was the case then maybe four years of lab work wasn’t for me,” she laughs. In 2017 Rocio moved to Los Angeles. “I’d never been to L.A… but it just felt like if I was going to do it, that’s where it should happen.”
Good fortune followed her and she soon made friends in the music industry. “I found a couple of girls there that I just adored, and they took me in… I just became their plus one to these events that they would go to. It was such a big deal for me!”
During this period she was working and recording, having met a local engineer soon after landing in L.A.
“He had a studio in his garage. It was a decked out studio, with Grammys on the wall, and I was like, where am I?” she laughs. “With a lot of luck, I fell into this weird space of being an artist, but also getting to be involved on the industry side. As long as I kept my mouth shut, nobody knew!”
Her interest in the industry itself came from seeing a gap between artists and the business. “How do I have peers who have been doing it as long as I have, that don’t have any idea what a contract looks like?” she ruminates. “I couldn’t believe that there was a such a disparity between the two.”
After releasing a debut EP, ‘Darkerside’, in 2018, Rocio’s music took off in 2020 when her song Paradise featured on the TV series Lucifer. Paradise reached the Global top 50 charts within two days, and was branded as the ‘pandemic anthem’ by The Guardian.
Rocio had signed to sync agents Think Music for a year when they asked her to write something for an advertisement. “It wasn’t for ‘Lucifer’,” she recalls. “They gave me the afternoon to write it. I just wrote it, recorded it, sent it through and didn’t think much about it.”
Six months later Netflix contacted her to use the song, though she didn’t know then how it would be used. Initially, Rocio wasn’t fond of her breakthrough song.
“I thought it was cheesy… something I wrote fast… then I saw it on the show and I thought, ‘Wow, that’s a cool placement.’”
However, Paradise made a difference. “I think understanding that people would stop that show to go and find the song, that was a turning point… Even till this day that is the most important part – that these people I’ve never met have connected to something.”
Afterwards she signed with Auckland management company August Avenue, and toured with Sol3 Mio for six weeks during 2021, at a time when NZ was the only place open to touring artists. The tour, she remembers, “…was just a dream in every way.”
The success of Paradise led her to a TEDx talk on the subject of sharing.
“It was a really surreal moment. That TEDx talk was all about sharing something that I didn’t feel was good enough to share, but it changed my direction. I love that song now, it’s really one of my favourites!”
Paradise had also given her a new platform.
“When I started it was all because I had something to say. I could just dial into what myself as an artist, and what I wanted to be out there. It was humbling, I had seen the behind the scenes for a lot of artists that have gotten to those like major leagues. And it’s never as pretty as it looks.”
While Rocio has always moved across styles which puts her into a different artistic space, her main way of composing has not changed.
“My bones and my soul is me on my piano, that’s how I process emotions or figure out what to do next.”
Her love of story-heavy songs has a thread back to the dozen CDs she had on the boat as a kid; Jewel, Sarah McLachlan, Matchbox 20, Counting Crows, and Joni Mitchell.
“I love the pop world and I love creating for the big scene… but for my own listening processes I’m more inspired by artists that sound like they just had to write that story.”
Rocio has released further singles and EPs since, but has also been working in the non-profit conservation arena. She created ‘The Power in Us’ project out of a need to do something more with her creativity.
The opportunity came from Michael Orr, who was directing a documentary on Antarctica and global warming. Orr approached Rocio’s father to be part of the trip, and also wanted music to play a vital part and speak to a more pop culture space. He had a certain style of song in mind – Paradise.
“Dad said, ‘Oh, that’s my kid!” Rocio laughs. She and Orr met to see if their work aligned. “My second home is the ocean. So I of course, jumped on the opportunity.”
Initially, despondent at the state of the environment after viewing some footage she realised that “… we as humans have the power to destroy, we have the power to undo it and to fix things… we just have to come together to do it.” That thinking the inspiration for Power In Us, the documentary’s theme song.
During the project Rocio saw there was little pop music in the world of conservation. She wanted to engage the pop-culture space with younger audiences from their teens.
“There’s so many people that could actually do something if they felt connected to it,” she explains.
Power in Us was released as a single under her name, with all of the streaming revenue donated back to ocean conservation.
“If artists did this every now and then… we could actually create something that would give back to a different space,” she notes.
They collaborated with the Swedish, female-led ‘Mother’ magazine for visuals, and within a month or two, she says, they had over 500 submissions from the best filmmakers and photographers in the world. This cross-collaboration of visuals, film and pop music was a powerful moment.
So far the project has donated revenue to Live Ocean in NZ, Mission Blue, and UK-based Ocean Generation. The organisation is growing too, collaborating with We’ll See Legacy, and the Dubai Turtle Rehabilitation Centre. The most recent collaboration is with Saving the Wild, a South African-based non-profit organisation on rhino protection laws, which will be launched in Aotearoa next year.
Rocio moved back to NZ recently for the launch of The Power in Us, and her other newly minted passion, Riverine Records an LA-homed independent label ‘dedicated to artist education and development’. Rocio has set four pillars for Riverine; creativity, transparency, independence, and education. How do they support each other? While creativity is self-explanatory, she considers transparency is key.
“If the industry keeps hiding all the parts that matter then it’s going to be hard for any artists to get to where they want to be… that leads into independence. If you have the right education and you’re aware of your choices, then you can create a career that’s yours.”
After the time spent in L.A. she is keen to share her industry insight.
“There’s a big space for education and I think it’s something that we can lend a hand to because we’ve had the experience,” she says. “That was the germ of Riverine Records, the ecosystem that connects all your waterworks from mountains over to the ocean. I thought that’s what we do – we connect everybody that needs to be connected.”
The first artist signed to Riverine Records is east Auckland musician Jack Robertson. They met when Rocio gave a couple of guest lectures in Dunedin. She was keen to hear his work, but knew they weren’t in a position to sign anyone at that stage – but they did. Robertson and Rocio collaborated on a demo for his song Lovesick. Back in L.A. added the female vocal part, and released it as a one-off, before re-arranging the song in different ways.
Riverine had a soft launch early in 2025 with the release of Robertson’s song Easy. His first EP, ‘Risk of Rain’, followed in November.
Rocio’s own work also recently took centre stage again, in the form of new single Grand Scheme, which is accompanied by a powerful, vaudeville-inspired video, providing a very explicit and entertaining visualisation of the song’s message.
“The song was inspired by years of frustration of seeing the power dynamic between industry and artists play out,” she explains. “I thought, ‘Why is it that the one coming up with the music and the art is so powerful but is the underdog, and everybody else is more important?’”
Running with these thoughts Grand Scheme was born.
“Don’t they know that if you take the art away from the industry they don’t have an industry? Why couldn’t we be more in collaboration with each other?”
They had a grander plan for Grand Scheme, originally hoping to show the video at local film festivals.
“Everybody thinks their work’s good enough for a film festival. Whether or not ours was, I’m not sure,” she laughs. “We’ve got a lot of polite declines. I can read into that by saying, “Well, it is an anti-industry statement, and we’re asking the industry to help us out.”
She says she hadn’t made music videos before, but knew they should get involved with the visuals Grand Scheme. “If I haven’t done it, then why do I have any right to suggest anything in that space?”
While she’s hoping to perform live more in the coming year, possibly aligned with the Power in Us project, the artist/entrepreneur’s priorities are now Riverine and Robertson’s work.
“I’m more excited about that than playing my own shows,” she laughs. “I love playing my own shows. It’s one of my favourite things to do on this planet. But listening to an artist that we’ve helped… hearing them as a complete work takes over.”
Presently living in Queenstown, she holds huge faith in the NZ music generally, saying her dream is for a local industry that sustains local Kiwi artists. She notes that international acts are drawn here because of the country’s beauty.
“They all want to be here, so why is there such a disparity between the pop culture world of artists, and then Kiwi artists not being able to penetrate that?” she asks. “It’s easier to do than it was when I first started. I think now everybody’s kind of ready and excited to open the doors… I’m excited about the NZ industry, I think there’s so much potential, and so much talent.”
