Mitchell Coby Michael Grassi (born July 24, 1992) is an American countertenor/tenor singer and musician from Arlington, Texas, who came to international attention as the founder and performer of two groups; the quintet a cappella collective Pentatonix, and the duo Superfruit. As of May 2019, Pentatonix has released ten albums, including two number ones, have had four songs in the Billboard Hot 100, and won three Grammy awards as "the first a cappella group to achieve mainstream success in the modern market". As of February 2019, Superfruit’s YouTube channel has over 2.5 million subscribers and has accumulated over 392 million views. As of 2016, Grassi lives in Hollywood, California.
In April 2020 Grassi debuted a solo moniker, Messer, doing a DJ set of “a range of dark, techno tunes”.
Mitchell "Mitch" Coby Michael Grassi was born ()July 24, 1992 in Arlington, Texas, to Nel Grassi (née Fenton) and Hornell native, Michael Grassi. The couple relocated to the Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas area in the mid-1980s for Mike's career in the airline industry; Nel is a dental hygienist educator. Grassi has an older sister, Jessa, and remembers doing singalongs to then-current pop tunes and Christmas songs in homemade variety shows with her, for his parents when he was very young. His uncle Tony was also "a high tenor and had an incredible range". He met Scott Hoying, another co-founder of Pentatonix, and his partner in the duo Superfruit, when he was young. He also met Kirstin Maldonado, another Pentatonix founder, when he was nine or ten and they were both doing musical theater. Grassi and Hoying were both active in theater arts in Arlington and met when they were cast in the musical Annie, they both also play piano. They were "giggly" together but not best friends immediately; they then were split up being sent to different schools for a year and a half, and reunited while performing in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Though both were still closeted at the time, they feel they had a subconscious connection, as well as their musical theater interests; Grassi's favorite Broadway musical is Rent. When he was fourteen, Grassi knew he wanted to be a singer and musician, "I want to enrich others' lives with the music I make, because that's what music did for me all my life."