I met Maia with a croaked “hi” as we entered Henry Lee’s, a University of Sydney student’s absolute treat. We ordered some wacky variation of a latte — this time red velvet flavoured, as the establishment pumped various 2010s hits from One Direction’s ‘Best Song Ever’ to Justin Bieber’s ‘Beauty and the Beat’. With this accompaniment, Maia began to detail her musically rich childhood, “I remember my dad giving my mum a Missy Higgins album when I was a kid and just being obsessed with that album, and then doing a song from that album in a talent show in like year 1. That was like my first ‘show’. I must have been seven or something, and pretty much from that point onwards, I was like, I love this, and I want to keep going.” But Maia only began writing music during university whilst studying architecture: “I procrastinated getting to that degree by writing songs. And then I got that degree and was like now I have songs.” Her voice and songwriting, both live and in recording, are a well-worn love letter to her youth.
To be or not to be a solo artist, that is the question. Or at least that’s what I think Hamlet said. For Maia, it wasn’t a choice.
“I went to a school that wasn’t very musical, so I didn’t have many musical friends growing up. It was just the way the cookie crumbles, to be honest. I am happy being a solo artist just because I think the way that I song-write is very ‘on my own’ kind of vibe.”
Maia’s stage presence thrives within that palpable independence, from her witty exchanges with the audience to her laudatory bridges that exist almost as a mythical siren, luring in alien gig-goers to the Oxford Art Factory’s gallery room.
Maia explained, “I feel lucky that my stage presence has happened naturally in the sense that I try not to overthink it too much. I definitely have grown a lot since I first started. I’ve always been really honest on stage.”
A long and undecided debate within music circles: is it harder to be a solo artist than being in a band? Maia had a middling conclusion: “There are definitely pros and cons. I’m really lucky that I have a live band that I play with all the time. But, you know, they also play in lots of other bands as well. They’re not mine. Unfortunately, I don’t own them. I try not to lean on them too much for decisions or anything because that’s not their responsibility.”
The rest of the world had ‘BRAT summer’, the Inner West had ‘Pessimist Babe’ summer. The first single off her latest EP, ‘BEFORE I GO’, Maia’s reasoning for such a gut-punch of a title,“ Pessimist babe came to me because I am a pessimist at heart. I always think, ‘Don’t get too excited about things, ’ keep expectations low to keep satisfaction levels high, that kind of thing. I’ve been so lucky in life, statistically, something bad has to happen soon. In terms of big goals, I don’t have too much fear or pessimism in that, it’s like the nitty-gritty pessimism I have.”
The instrumentals of ‘Pessimist Babe’ exemplify that of a heart during a typical panic attack — constantly building like a nagging clock. The chorus is moreish and exudes the same feeling of post-panic attack delirium where tears are glued to the eye-sockets and hiccups ensue.
Ironically, Maia was rather optimistic about female musicians’ treatment in the local Sydney scene with her emphasising that; “I feel very lucky for the scene and community that I’m in, I don’t feel like I’ve experienced any kind of prejudice or feel any disadvantage of being a woman in the local scene. I think we’re a pretty progressive group of people, and there are just as many female artists killing it and playing shows as there are male bands.”
However, a cloud of reality soon rained down upon our conversation as Maia revealed, “People say to me — this is definitely casual sexism — people will say like ‘oh you’re great and you’ve got the look for it’. I remember my old guitar teacher. I ran into him, and he said to me like, ‘Yeah you’ve got the look for it’, I don’t think he’d even ever heard my music. I was just like, that’s not even a compliment.” Casual sexism is a sticky substance that has a deep association with how the music industry functions — like a metastatic gene. But reassuringly, the acknowledgement of female art as being just as good as men’s has begun to shift the musicians’ dialectic.
What makes Maia such a memorable and exciting artist lies within her immensely catchy choruses. They gnaw their way into your brain seamlessly — and happily cohabitate there for a week or so. Maia stressed, “I want people to at least have one line playing over like, you know, stuck in their heads.” ‘Less than Electric’ from her first EP, ‘Reverie’, defines what a great chorus should feel and sound like. Though the grammar is slightly off, causing narrative confusion, Maia clarified, “It’s funny because I think a lot of people think what you think, that it’s a song missing a past relationship, but no. This is why grammar is so important in songwriting. There is a grammar problem, but you know it’s hard because you want the song to sound good, so you give up on grammar. The song is more like ‘Let’s not pretend that sparks were flying.’”
This brought up a ‘Swiftian’ conundrum of whether discussing people you know in lyrics is necessarily moral or really emotionally cleansing. Maia was rather pragmatic, “For me, I write these songs so I can remember the story. It’s almost like a reminder for myself. But sometimes I feel a certain way and then I don’t want to write a song about that because then I’m going to sing about that person for the next three years. I just don’t want to do that, or I’m not ready to admit that, you’re not ready to be honest with yourself.”
Songwriting functions within a dangerously narrow boundary between publicly exposing the people around you and staying loyal to your truth. ‘Eye to Eye’ bravely wanders into the no man’s land of confessional lyricism. Maia’s voice is a painting palette of cavernous blues and blazing yellows that sprawls poignantly poetic lines of middled annoyance at a previously significant other on the canvas. Maia justified the mystery of the song’s sentiment, “I need to be careful with my words. I never want to be the person who’s about to know that it’s about them. To be honest, I don’t really like writing songs like that, where it’s like a dig at a person who I know. I don’t want to have any enemies. I’m not someone who has burned bridges. So, it makes me scared to think that song could do that.”
In addition to fulfilling the legacy of Australia’s iconic female folk singers of Missy Higgins fame, Maia has ventured into the podcast space with her show ‘How Do You Muse?’ Maia spoke of the origins of the podcast as being out of pure curiosity: “I started the podcast not because I wanted to do podcasting. I never was like, ‘Oh, I want to be a podcaster. ’ I [thought that] having all these conversations with bands after a gig, in green rooms, at parties, just being like, ‘So how much did you get paid for that gig?’ or ‘How did you get your booking agent?’ They were telling me all these crazy stories. I remember speaking to one of my friends last year about ‘South’ by Southwest, and she was saying she didn’t get paid for South by Southwest, or if she did, it was very low. She [told me] $1,000 out of pocket or something.”
Maia continued, “My mind was just blown by realizing how much artists were putting all their own money into [their career] and knocking it back basically. I want to start talking about these things. I am also a really nosy person.”
The music industry is becoming a cannibalistic paradox as it attempts to consume the very thing that keeps its heart beating. Maia rather succinctly summarised the average artist’s fundamental and, dare I say, pessimistic ambition: “The standard for being a musician is to try and not get into debt.” In saying this, ‘How Dare You Muse?’ breaks the steely fourth wall of the music industry to reveal its rather unglamorous inner workings, “We’ve got the same questions. What’s the best medium? How do I authentically deliver these conversations, and I [thought] a podcast. I personally love listening to podcasts. I’ve always been a podcast listener, so I was like, ‘Let’s do it.’ I had spoken to a few bands and they were like ‘We’re keen, we want to know these questions’. It’s hard, though, because I’m interviewing emerging artists, and a lot of it is asking artists to tell you exactly how much they’re making or how much they’re getting paid for shows. None of us have made it. [You] don’t want to bite the hand that feeds you, and I don’t want to put artists in a position where they’re having to lose opportunities. It’s a fine line.”
The ‘hand’ in question for Australian artists is Triple J, which as an establishment, Maia has mixed feelings about. “Behind the scenes, people talk so much shit about Triple J, but we all want to get on home and hosed. We all want to have a play on Triple J. We’re all going to promote and post about it when we do. But when I have a win on Triple J, I have this guilt, because I’m like, ‘Oh god, now I’m just sucking up to Triple J’ the second they lend me a hand.”
The claustrophobia of being a working musician, where valid critique is disincentive, was palpable in Maia’s feedback. The music industry will always have growing pains, and Triple J is simply a symptom of the culture’s disjunct relationship with technology and the easy tendency to be monopolistic. Maia further expanded, “I think the problem people have with Triple J is that they’re the tastemakers, and they’ve got the power. I was speaking to a band last week on the podcast, and Triple J has really backed them. They were saying it’s helped them massively. Once Triple J gets behind you, they could really feel the difference. It could raise them up. But that’s not necessarily Triple J’s fault. That’s a problem with the industry.”
Maia began to discuss her production and songwriting approach as our red velvet iced lattes metamorphosed into a swamp-like liquid of tired ice-cubes and damp mocha dust. Maia seems to enjoy crafting the tangible sound more than obsessing over the nitty-gritty process of lyric writing, “I think my favourite thing is coming up with melodies, but equally you need good lyrics. It’s definitely something that, moving forward, I want to be really careful with. ‘Less Than Electric’- I sometimes cringe at those lyrics. I can’t imagine myself writing a song like that again.”
Maia’s third single of her latest EP, ‘Unaware’, is deeply thoughtful in its lyrical and melodic structure. Every note and subtle swing of her voice is of an isolated thatched-roofed cottage in Autumn – hauntingly beautiful. Maia’s lyrical style is incredibly T.S Eliot-esque as she expertly captures the modern moment of coffee headaches and the feeling of perpetual stasis. Her relationship with production has similarly grown and developed since ‘Reverie’ as Maia stressed that, “My music doesn’t rely on a producer too much because we’re just using guitars, bass, drums, and piano. There aren’t too many production elements. That’s something I’m going to stick with for the foreseeable future, where I don’t involve too many moving parts. Being stripped back is important because that’s the kind of music I grew up with, and it’s the kind of music that I want to continue making.”
Overproduction is the norm nowadays, whether that be the use of intricate autotune or pop songs having a thousand producers in the credits. Maia’s stripped-back approach is refreshing compared to TikTok’s priorities of promoting music that is trend-based and reduces our attention deficits. Maia expanded further, “Producing is an interesting one. I’m still figuring it out myself because I don’t have one particular producer that I work with. There are two ways, from what I understand, you write songs: you can write them on your own or with your band. Or you do a songwriting session with the producer, and they’re in the room with you building the song right there. I’ve never done something like that.”
Producers have a symbiotic relationship with artists that either flourish and flower into vines of intricate and memorable work or simply die a stale death that remains locked away in the studio vault. The greatest artists always have had the greatest producers, as seen with The Beatles and George Martin, Mario C and Beastie Boys, and nowadays Chappell Roan and Dan Nigro. But that’s just lightning in a bottle. Maia echoes this struggle: “Finding a producer is hard because you need to find someone that is a collaborator. The people that I have been working with are a bit more similar to recording engineers, where you come to them with fully fleshed songs and you record them rather than the producer coming in.”
The end of our discussion was marked by the clink of our opalescent glasses and the faint rumble of Olivia Rodrigo’s ‘good 4 u. ’ With the crash of Rodrigo’s emotionally charged chorus that welcomed us into the post-brunch sun, I realised the meditative force that lies within Maia’s art — there’s a poignant thoughtfulness that drives each lyric and note, which truly makes her so aspiring and inspiring.
Maia Toakley’s latest EP, ‘BEFORE I LET GO’, is out on all platforms, and her release gig is on April 11th at the Factory Floor in Marrickville.
