MAITA
Interview Conducted on February 2, 2022
By Dan Locke
Portland’s MAITA will release their new album I Just Want To Be Wild For You next month via Kill Rock Stars and today they have shared album single “Loneliness” alongside a beautiful video. The band will also kick off a national US tour which wraps up at SXSW + Treefort Music Fest!
How did you discover music?
To be honest I first started discovering my own favorite music (diverging from the tastes of my parents and mainstream radio) from TV shows in the mid 2000’s. I remember watching shows like The OC and Grey’s Anatomy and diving into the world of indie music whole-heartedly, falling in love with artists like Elliott Smith and Iron and Wine and Regina Spektor, artists who taught me how to write songs and how to sing and offered a glimpse into the kind of songwriter I could be, or wanted to be. This launched me on a path of music hunger—I combed LimeWire with a fervent passion, borrowed and burned CDs from the library, assembled mismatched mixtapes to play religiously in my car. I was obsessed with emotional storytelling, with falling asleep to dramas that played in my head set to the tune of my beloved music.
What was the title of your first original song? Did you record it?
This maybe wasn’t my first song, but it is the first song for which I remember the title. I had to write a paper in high school for the book My Antonia by Willa Cather, but was given the option of writing a shorter essay if I also created an accompanying art piece. I decided to write a song from the character Antonia’s perspective called Love, Antonia, and rip that songwriter band aid off by performing it live for my class, which then turned into performing it live for half a dozen school functions after that at the request of my teachers. I recorded it on Garageband and it’ll probably resurface again at some point.
Would you share the process of writing your music?
Lyrics and meaning are incredibly important to me. I usually start with an emotional hook, that ‘aha’ moment where you realize: this is what the song needs to be about. I need to capture this feeling. I then flesh out the verses around that, which is where I usually dig into more wordy lyricism. Often, I start by writing a melody and improvise words until something subconsciously emerges that feels like that hook, and then I workshop the verses. It’s never the same twice though; sometimes songwriting feels like patchwork to me, pieces coming together until a song feels right, and sometimes a song just emerges fully formed. You just never know.
Your new album “I Just Want to be Wild for You” will be out soon – could you share a bit about making this record?
Fortunately, we tracked basics with the band shortly before the pandemic. We tracked at Room 13, a studio in Portland, OR located in the basement of a church (no affiliation). We always choose recording settings that feel very comfortable and allow us to feel creatively inspired. Matthew Zeltzer, who co-manages MAITA with me and plays guitar in the project, helped build the studio and engineered the record, while Nevada Sowle, who is also an engineer and plays bass, assistant engineered. His girlfriend at the time Toni Trizano is also an engineer, and she assisted when all four of us were playing. Then Matthew and I worked on overdubs together throughout the pandemic.
Do you have a favorite track on this album? If so, which song and why?
It changes from time to time, but I think currently, ‘Ex-Wife’. It’s a classic MAITA ‘let’s imagine what the other perspective is’ scenario. I had this co-worker at the time who could come into work and complain about his wife, and in fleshing out her perspective, I began to explore into the idea of what it means to be a ‘wife’ in our society and then an ‘ex-wife.’ This then morphed into thoughts about my own mother, who was an ‘ex-wife’ for much of my childhood, with little hues of what it means to be an Asian woman in a marriage today. And of course, there’s always going to be bits and pieces of my own story involved. It just feels like a very emotionally taut song for me. The first act holds so much weary weight and the second feels like such a release, complete with the anti-climax at the end (you’ll understand when you hear it).
