FEATURE:
Spotlight
Maya Hawke
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THERE are artists who…
PHOTO CREDIT: Heather Hazzan for Variety
are accused of being nepo babies or industries plants. That they are there because of their parents’ fame and influence. Maybe the industry has funded them and put money their way meaning they can get a head start. A cynical move to make a group or artist seem new and independent, when it fact they are already signed and getting support. This is something that is levied against quite a few different artists. The Last Dinner Party were accused of being industry plants. Even though her parents are actors Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman, Maya Hawke is definitely not a nepo baby. Not having to rely on that link to her famed parents to get noticed in music. She is a genuine and talented artist who would have got in the industry regardless. Music has always been her passion. The New York-born actor and artist released her second studio album, Moss, in 2022. She is set to release Chaos Angel in May. I will come to some interview with Hawke. A couple of from last year/2022 and one that is very recent. An artist that people should know about and follow, I am excited to see where she takes her music career. I really love Moss, so I am excited to see what Chaos Angel offers. Here are more details about it:
“Maya Hawke is a musician, songwriter, actor and producer - She has released two lauded albums of music to date, Moss (2022) and Blush (2020), both of which showcase her natural gift for songwriting and storytelling, as well as a knack for striking visual presentation with sleeve designs of her own creation - "Therese," the lead single from Moss, garnered global attention with its mesmerizing Brady Corbet-directed video - and tens of millions of streams - and saw Maya make an impressive network TV performance debut on the Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon.
Now 25 years old, Maya's third album, Chaos Angel, takes the spare, viscerally honest songwriting she has made her name on and goes deeper and bolder. Both her most sonically sophisticated and thematically nuanced collection to date, it feels like a culmination. Across these 10 songs, Hawke catalogues upheavals, revelations, foibles, and broken promises, all while navigating the patterns we repeat while reaching towards growth, wandering astray, and finding our way back to some core understanding of ourselves.
Chaos Angel is also a document of Hawke coming more fully into her own as a musician. More adventurous in the studio after her previous two albums, Hawke leaned into her ambition. Many of these tracks are still anchored by acoustic guitar and Hawke's graceful yet conversational vocals, but their surroundings are more intricate and lush than ever before. She reconvened with longtime collaborators Benjamin Lazar Davis and Will Graefe, with Christian Lee Hutson serving as producer”.
I want to start out with a feature from The Line of Best Fit. They spoke with Maya Hawke in 2022 and asked her about some of her favourite songs. Those most important to her. I have chosen a few from the selection. Useful and interesting tracing some of the origins and influences in her music:
“The 24-year-old daughter of Uma Thurman and Ethan Hawke is an actor with chameleonic instinct, capable of channelling a certain charisma through a lens of vulnerability that belies her years.
She is Robin Buckley in Stranger Things, wry and whip-smart on the surface, but untangling the complexities of her sexuality beneath; she is ‘Flowerchild’, Linda Kasabian in Manson’s California in Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood; she is Jo March in Vanessa Caswill's Little Women, fiery and outspoken - and most recently, she is Eleanor Levetan, an inciter of chaos in the pastel-kissed world of Do Revenge. She is certainly more than a familiar surname.
Hawke’s mind whirrs at a pace that her words have no hope to match – though she is naturally observant, more prone to introspection and quiet pauses of thoughtfulness than her enthusiastic fizz would have you believe. Though the uninitiated may cynically assume that Hawke’s success was pre-ordained through pulled strings, the fact remains that this would soon fizzle were it not sustained by her talent. That, and a devotion to her craft; a sense of humility, of knowing that she is still, and always hopes to be, a student.
As Hawke’s career has gained momentum, she has become a figure of fascination – a ‘Someone’ with a capital S whose life, beyond her work, is deemed worthy of dissection. Reflecting on putting together her Nine Songs, she tells me, “I love doing this kind of thing. Any opportunity to talk about anything without having to talk too much about, like, ‘what you’re wearing’,” she laughs. “It’s nice to have these jumping off points that feel creative and connected to why you wanted to make art in the first place. It’s my privilege,” she adds, “So thank you.”
I catch Hawke at an interesting moment in her life. Everything is about to happen, and right now, she is standing on the edge of it all. Next year, Hawke is set to star in Bradley Cooper’s biographical film about Leonard Bernstein, Maestro, and Wes Anderson’s upcoming romantic dramedy, Asteroid City. “I’m in a beautiful moment of giving away a lot of hard work from the last two years of my life, and closing a chapter,” she tells me. “It’s so nice to give these things away to the world and share them.”
Among these gifts Hawke is leaving with us is her second record, Moss, following the release of her critically acclaimed 2020 debut, Blush. Many described Blush as a “coming-of-age record”, but that’s a chapter that Hawke still feels is being written. “We’re always coming of age to a new place until we die,” she observes. “We’re always changing and evolving. Moss is just as much a coming-of-age record – it’s just coming into a different moment.”
It feels apt, given Hawke’s gift for evocative imagery in her lyrics, that she would say: “You know when you’re playing tarot cards and you draw a death card, and tarot card readers say, ‘Don’t worry, it’s a great card?’ – well that’s how I feel about this record. It was a death card draw. It’s a good death, it’s a great death: a death that will lead to something new.”
Hawke assembled her Nine Songs choices based on retracing her steps. Each crystallises a moment in time from which there was no turning back; without these songs, we wouldn’t know the same person Hawke came to be. Her greatest enthusiasm, however, is reserved for an unexpected corner of music – one which she feels she could make a dozen playlists for, in itself: children’s music.
One of her earliest memories was listening to the likes of Woodie Guthrie’s Songs to Grow on for Mother and Child in the car. And when you listen to Hawke’s music now, that same luminosity, the finely-spun blend of rich, but simplistic language and sharp imagery, is common to both.
“The best children’s music is interesting to listen to, even as an adult, and that’s because it’s good storytelling,” she explains, having written her senior thesis in high school on the genre’s evolution. “It’s an interesting lesson in songwriting. The message is very clear, but if you go back and listen, there’s something powerful, moving and mysterious that lies beneath.”
“Extraordinary Machine” by Fiona Apple
I wanted to start with “Extraordinary Machine” because It's one of the first songs that was put on for me by my parents in the house that wasn't older music - that wasn't Elvis, and Johnny and Willie. This was a new voice. It felt confident. And feminine. And modern. It was rich and lyrically complex.
I was probably eight or nine years old. I was in my dad's house in Chelsea, and I was like, ‘What is this? Because I want to be an extraordinary machine! I want my brain to work that way.’ I certainly hadn’t been shopping for any news shoes; I hadn’t been spreading myself around. I was like, ‘What are those things? What do they mean?’
It made me want to write down all the words and dissect them, to figure out what the lyrics meant. There’s a lyric about being the youngest sibling; there’s a lyric about being a chaperone while wearing sheep’s clothes. I remember it turning my brain on in a big way. There was this voice in it - and I would really say ‘brain’ - inside that made me be like, ‘Who is that person, and how do I turn out like that?’
“Vincent” by Don McLean
This is more my mom’s influence, It’s another on the chapter of sadness with “Radio Cure”, but I was a little bit older. There’s this genre of music in my head that I know means something to some people, and that I know means something to me – and I don’t even really know if it’s true for this song or not – but I call it an ‘upstate feel’.
My mom had this beautiful, kind of ramshackle cottage out at the end of a long, winding road in Upstate New York. There’s something about “Vincent” that really evokes those long drives up that winding road. I’ve been revisiting this song a lot recently – it recalls this sense of being alone in nature.
It’s also ekphrastic, just like my own song, “Thérèse”. This is a song about Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night in many ways, and I wrote “Thérèse” about Thérèse Dreaming by Balthus. I think I was really influenced by the art of other people, so it’s a combination of those two things. One is that detail of the connective tissue to “Thérèse” and the way in which I’ve been inspired by stealing. I feel that stealing is an artist’s greatest tool, like being a thought thief who runs around finding things that inspire you and make you want to make art.
My favourite movies to watch are movies that make me want to write movies. My favourite music to listen to is music that makes me want to write music. It feels very natural to me: I’m lying on the grass, looking up at the sky and having this melancholy feeling of wanting the people you love to be safe.
BEST FIT: There are so many interesting elements to this song. I had no idea that Don McLean had written the lyrics on a paper bag that sold at auction for $1.5 million, or that this was played when Tupac was taken to hospital after he had been shot.
That’s so beautiful and fascinating. It sounds like a song I’d want to hear in the hospital. It’s comfortable with sadness, and I feel that way about this song and “Radio Cure”. Sometimes, there’s a certain kind of sadness that sets in where you want to escape it – and sometimes you just want permission to feel it. This song gives you that permission, I think.
“Hard Drive” by Evan Dando
This song became really important to me when I left drama school, I was living by myself in Brooklyn and trying to figure out who I was going to be as an adult. You break out of your youth - you have the “Fluorescent Adolescent” roar that comes with older adolescence, and then there’s this moment where you wonder who you are, what it all means, where it’s all going to go and how you want to be loved.
There’s a need to make space for yourself as a person in this world, and the lyrics of this song: “This is the town I’m living in / This is the street I’m walking down”; “This is the girl I’m marrying”, and “This is the face I make when I’m sad” – it was this sense of self-acceptance and self-actualisation in the world; claiming things as your own. Whether they’re big or small, good or bad, they’re yours. That always felt good to me.
The lyrics are so simple, but they kick me in my heart when I hear them. We’re just these big bundles of love and grief and we’re always changing. Sometimes I can be ecstatically happy and sometimes I can be so down. But I think figuring out how to accept yourself as a bundle of feelings is so powerful.
Moving from adolescence to adulthood is about coming to the realisation that even if you’re sad, you will be happy again; if you’re happy, you will be sad again – you can’t have one thing without the other.
A debate that applies to her music career as well as acting, the subject of being a nepo baby arose when Variety spoke with Maya and Ethan Hawke about them acting together. Rather than it being a case of Maya Hawke getting into acting because she has actor parents, she is a natural talent who found her path and forged success on her own terms:
“It’s a testament to her effortless, cool vibe that Maya can make a wonky thesis about a long-dead short-story writer seem like a great idea for a movie. She successfully pitched the passion project to her dad’s production company, Under the Influence; she felt that Ethan’s recent work as a producer and director of “The Good Lord Bird,” an offbeat look at abolitionist John Brown, as well as the Blaze Foley biopic “Blaze,” shared themes with O’Connor’s life story. Also, she admits, “I don’t know anyone else that interested in art, faith and America.”
Ethan was flattered that Maya thought of him. He was approaching 50 at the time and had his own reasons for taking on the film, beyond the chance to create art with his daughter. He envisioned the movie about O’Connor, a deeply religious Catholic, as a way to answer an ever-nagging question: Is human creativity an act of faith?
It would be easy to dismiss the Hawkes’ collaboration as an example of nepotism in an industry where who you know is more important than how talented you are. And both father and daughter are sensitive to the way that sort of thing can be characterized in today’s world. But Ethan reiterates that “Wildcat” was all Maya’s idea.
“Put simply, I’m a nepo dad!” Ethan jokes. “And I’m not embarrassed about it.” The look on Maya’s face suggests she’s instantly concerned about how that declaration will resonate.
She’s not wrong. The conversation about nepo babies — the children of celebrities and the advantages they enjoy — has been a recent obsession of the internet. When Anjelica and John Huston collaborated on “Prizzi’s Honors,” they didn’t have to endure the wrath of Twitter. In a time when simply pursuing the same career as your famous relatives is enough to provoke outrage, starring in a movie directed by your father is basically a declaration of war.
“I had moments of insecurity about it while we were shooting the movie,” admits Maya, who was also a producer. ”But the internet doesn’t have a lot of nuances. My dad has been a massive teacher for me, and we want to work together. We like being with each other”.
PHOTO CREDIT: Josefina Santos
I will finish off with a new interview from The Guardian. Forging her way with a daring new Folk album, there will be a lot of eyes on Chaos Angel. In the interview, Maya Hawke spoke about her acting career and shaking off those ‘nepo baby’ tags. She also discussed her upbringing and path into music:
“I think you probably can tell that I love this work and I’m so grateful to be getting to do it,” she adds. “I can believe anything I want to believe about me having found a way to be an artist even if I’d been adopted. But I don’t know – I’m so grateful for the world I grew up around, for the New York City theatre scene I was raised in, getting to go see plays and sit backstage, and to know about great directors and how I wanted to be.”
She says her upbringing was “rooted in poetry, and a constant conversation about what it means to make art”. Yesterday, Hawke received a phone call from her father “philosophising” about art and life. “It [was] about responding to when things get positive attention that are not your favourite things you’ve ever done, and your favourite things don’t get that much attention,” she says. “How do you not follow the bad wolf that leads you towards being likable? How do you stay true to yourself?”
PHOTO CREDIT: Josefina Santos
An individualistic streak surges through Chaos Angel, where the poetry of 70s folk rock is orbited by modern sounds – a vocodered sea shanty here, impudent brass toots there and an occasional beat switch that suggests the entire mixing desk has been plunged underwater. The record is produced by frequent Phoebe Bridgers collaborator Christian Lee Hutson, who is also Hawke’s boyfriend. Did they get together while making the record? “Not exactly,” she says. “It’s not a secret, but I think it’s a very odd thing about modern pop culture that people that have been dating for two weeks talk about their relationship to the public. It’s a bit unhinged.”
Chaos Angel is a little off the rails itself with its spectrum of sounds enlivened by a performer’s knack for personae. During recording sessions, Hawke tried her hand at different characters, like “whispery depressive” and “pop maniac”. A song titled Okay is a quietly devastating exploration of codependency inspired by Cassavetes’ A Woman Under the Influence. At other times, Hawke’s airy, sure voice needs little else: the opener, Black Ice, recalls the hushed longing of cult songwriters such as Linda Perhacs or Kath Bloom. Talking about her new music gets her fired up. “I’m more excited to put this record out than I’ve been about anything in my life,” Hawke says decisively. “I think you have to narrow down your audience as a creative. If you’re trying to make art for everybody, you’re gonna make bad, neutral art.”
Growing up in New York, Hawke lived between her parents’ New York homes after they split when she was five. While her mother listened to pop radio in the car, her father’s CD collection was packed with Willie Nelson, Wilco and Patti Smith. It wasn’t uncommon for dad and daughter to write poetry, paint and play guitar together well into the night. Still, she was a kid growing up in the 00s. At nine, she saw her first concert. “Hannah Montana meets Miley Cyrus,” Hawke recalls. “She did half the show in the blond wig and half without”
An amazing young artist who should be on everyone’s radar, take out of the equation the fact that she is well-known because of her acting career. Music is definitely a big focus and passion. Maya Hawke is a phenomenal artist that is going to have a long career in music. Such a wonderful talent with a distinct voice and songwriting style, you need to go and pre-order Chaos Angel. This is an artist who is…
AMONG the very best out there.