Amber Mark

Mark was born on December 29, 1993, on a farm in Summertown, Tennessee, to a Jamaican father and a German mother from Kaiserslautern, whose name was Mia Mark.^[1] Her mother was a painter and her biological father is a musician.^[5][6] She has an older half-brother whom she shares the same mom with.^[7] She and her mother lived in Miami, New York, and Munich eventually moving to a monastery in Darjeeling so that her mother could learn Tibetan Buddhist thangka painting.^[6][5][1] After spending a few years there, they returned to Germany, settling in the Pankow borough of Berlin.^[8] While in Berlin, Mark taught herself how to play guitar. Mark and her mother eventually moved back to New York City, where her godparents legally adopted her so that she could attend Talent Unlimited High School in Manhattan.^[1][6]

Mark and her mother later moved to Miami where her brother lived.^[7] Mark attended Miami Beach Senior High.^[7] She joined the high school choir and an after-school rock ensemble.^[7][9] After high school, she moved back to New York City where she interned at Roc Nation.^[7] In her late teens, Mark’s mother died of breast cancer.

Mark released her debut single "Space" to her SoundCloud in 2016.^[10] In 2017 she released her first album, 3:33am. She explained, "[t]hree has been a really common number in my life. My mother was born in 1953, my brother was born in 1983 and I was born in 1993. Then my mum passed away on June 3, at 10:23pm in 2013. Since then, I'd see threes everywhere. When I was writing the EP in New York... and out of the zone, I would check the clock and I always remember it being 3:33am."^[11] The album art features a photo taken by her sister, in which Mark is wearing a watch that reads 3:33.^[12]

Each song on the record represents one of the six stages of grief around the death of her mother. ^[13] The song "Monsoon" includes samples of her mother's voice.^[12][14] In 2018, she released the EP Conexão that included the single "Love Me Right".^[15]