Interview mxmtoon: New Moon Rising
After being faced with some unexpected, life-changing family news, mxmtoon’s perspective shifted entirely. But on third album ‘liminal space’, she’s fighting through the challenges and learning to trust her instincts along the way.
Listen to even just the first few lines from the opening track of mxmtoon’s new album, and you get a sense of where the singer’s head has been at this past year. “I’m not looking for a gradual change,” she sings delicately -almost prophetically - over the buoyant, finger-picked guitar line of ‘dramatic escape’. “No thanks…”
“Yeah, it’s definitely been a lot…” laughs the singer, real name Maia, when the lyrics in question are brought up today. “I think, maybe in retrospect, I would absolutely take some gradual changes, as opposed to these big, life-altering shifts!” Calling in from Berlin, where she’s about to embark on a series of press engagements before heading on to Paris and London, the US singer might be jet-lagged but you wouldn’t have guessed; instead, her energy is infectiously optimistic about this next chapter. “I feel like with this album specifically, I’ve never felt more attached to anything that I’ve ever created.”
For Maia, the last eighteen months have certainly mirrored that opening gambit of ‘liminal space’’s opening track. Having released her second record ‘rising’ back in May 2022 - an album that reflected on her own growth and personal identity as a young woman, whilst dealing with her expanding online audience - she knew that going into her third would be a different experience, with the more insular, pandemic sessions of recent years mostly a thing of the past. It was as she was beginning work on her follow-up, though, that her family received news that would change everything.
“So much of the narrative for ‘liminal space’ was defined by a moment last year where I found out my mum had a cancer diagnosis,” Maia explains today. “It really shifted my entire perspective on what I was doing with my music, who I was working with, what was my goal, what stories I was going to be telling. Music is obviously a really great tool for self expression and processing things that you’re going through, but it’s also deeply vulnerable to share your story and know that a lot of other people are going to hear it, including your family; especially when you’re having a lot of really mixed emotions about something that is happening in your life, and I certainly did around my mum’s diagnosis. But I felt really grateful too to know that music has always been an outlet for me to talk about things that have been hard to discuss, and this album was something I needed and a very pivotal point of my life while watching my mum go through what she was going through.”
“I’ve been very interested in this transition that happens when you go into adulthood of becoming a peer to your parents for the first time.”
Much like with any kind of unexpected turn in life, when dealing with the diagnosis Maia found herself faced with a slew of conflicting emotions, some of which she’d barely wanted to address out loud to herself previously. “I think a lot of the conversations that I was having with myself on this record were things that I’ve thought about for years but never decided to write about because it felt like it would be too damaging for my family or friends to hear about,” she says. After such world-shaking news, though, this time it felt necessary, with the catalyst arriving in the form of tender track ‘rain’. One of the first written for the record, it marked the singer’s first time admitting that she perhaps didn’t want to follow her parents’ guidance or what they thought best.
“If I had not written ‘rain’, I think I would be living in a different place than I currently moved to,” she says, having recently made the switch from NYC to Nashville. “I really do feel very deeply that this chapter of music has impacted my life beyond just writing the songs. I remember sharing ‘rain’ with my family and it was the first time that I had expressed to them that I had a lot of confusion about the idea of moving back to California and not feeling ready [at that point] to leave New York behind. I remember my mum just being so moved that I had written something like that. I’ve never had conversations with my parents before where I’ve told them that, ‘maybe I don’t want to do the thing that you guys are expecting me to do right now’, and ‘rain’ opened the door for me.
”Elsewhere, the album sees her run the full gamut of life-reckoning scenarios across a series of stripped bare, moving moments: facing the complex tangle of heartbreak (‘i hate texas’, ‘passenger side’), self-worth in the face of the patriarchy (‘the situation’), the uglier side of our emotions (‘just a little’) and the complicated relationship between child and parent, especially when faced with their mortality (‘VHS’, ‘now’s not the time’).
“I know that I’ve been very interested in this transition that happens when you go into adulthood of becoming a peer to your parents for the first time in your life,” Maia says, “and I feel so deeply about these songs being the first reckoning of what that experience has been like, and certainly how expedited it was as a result of the news I got last year with my mum. It’s just so complicated, I am always untangling it and I feel really grateful that I got to do that on this album. It feels like a lot of ‘liminal space’ was just bursting to get out of me, and I’m really glad that I took the time to piece together what areas of it I needed to give voice to.”
“It’s not like we have a shortage of talented women working in the music industry — we have a shortage of people that have given them the opportunity to be in the room.”
Digging deep into personal experiences isn’t exactly a pivot for Maia, who first rose to prominence via her YouTube channel of coming-of-age home recordings. But when working on songs so connected to the lives of both her and her loved ones, she knew she had to feel entirely supported during the recording process. To do so, she settled upon an integral rule for ‘liminal space’ of working with an entirely female creative team. “Oh my gosh, it changed everything,” she enthuses today of the decision, which saw her record alongside co-producers Carrie K (Noah Kahn, Suki Waterhouse) and Chloe Kraemer (The Japanese House, Wet Leg) and a myriad of other talented women. “I just remember being 19 and going into a session and talking about my boyfriend at the time with some dude who I’ve never met, who’s sitting on a computer, kind of listening to me but not really. I just remember thinking like, ‘Yeah, I’m young but don’t my stories matter?’. I just felt so frustrated and really anxious to walk into these rooms where it felt like I was rolling a dice to figure out whether or not someone would listen to me.”
In what shouldn’t feel like such a revolutionary move, the singer no longer felt anxious or unseen. “It changes a lot,” she nods. “I think when you’re telling stories that are about your life, and especially attached to your gender, making those alongside people that really do get it in a way that is unspoken sometimes is really different and very, very impactful. It shouldn’t be this jarring for someone to decide to work with just women on a project that’s about her life as a woman. I remember having these conversations even early on and just being like, ‘Hey, I want to do this thing’ and people telling me that’s going to be hard. I was like, ‘But why?!’. It’s not like we have a shortage of talented women working in the music industry - we have a shortage of people that have given them the opportunity to be talented and be in the room.
”Given a new sense of confidence in the studio (“With Chloe and Carrie, I was just excited to come in every single day and really felt so welcomed”), Maia also found herself more comfortable exploring new sonic territory. While ‘rising’ saw her dabbling with poppy melodies and synths, ‘liminal space’ embraces the more delicate, stripped-back storytelling that’s always been at the heart of her own tastes. “A lot of the stuff that is on this record is the most similar to things that I’ve been enjoying listening to for my entire life. mxmtoon obviously started with me on the ukulele, but I didn’t really listen to that kind of music. I do listen to pop music and I listen to produced stuff, but I would say by and large, I still return back to this playlist I made when I was 14, and a lot of it is these indie folk records that are so honest and really narrative-driven and really stripped down, and are just someone with a guitar half the time. It felt interesting to think about finally bridging that divide between the things that I was making and the things that I enjoy, and I really do feel like I hit the nail on the head here.”
Much like its title, ‘liminal space’ may be a record that embodies some of Maia’s biggest transitions, but now - freshly settled in Nashville, with her mum in remission - it sees mxmtoon entering a much stronger era in her life. “So much of the learning process was just really about trusting my gut,” she notes. “I couldn’t have done this record without really trusting my intuition; whether it was knowing that I wanted to work with more women or writing songs about topics that I have wanted to write about for years, but never actually gave a shot, I think it really just opened up the door for me to feel like I deserve the space that maybe I’m occupying.”
‘liminal space’ is out now via AWAL.
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