Maeve Is Uncompromised By Genre

I’m so pumped this is out. Because it’s the first song I wrote about a year ago, so I’ve been waiting for it to come out for quite a while now. I’m so excited that everything’s coming to life and going out to the world.

It is but at the same time, it sort of marks that kind of stage in your life that you were in at that time. So it’s almost like a memory, you still feel super emotionally connected to it as well. When you sing it, you’re kind of brought back into that emotion, or when you perform it or and you revisit the song, it all comes up again. Which is a good and a bad thing. It depends on what the song is about.

Maeve is actually my middle name. I felt like I still wanted it to be part of my personal identity, because I’m writing about my life with an honest lens and writing about all my experiences every day. This project is almost like a diary of my experiences in my life. I wanted it to be something that was personal for me. It was a natural thing to just use my middle name Maeve.

It’s hard to sum up, because it’s a lot of things. I take inspiration from a lot of different genres, and kind of put them together. And a lot of that happens subconsciously, I don’t realise that I’m doing it. Because I’m self-taught, I never really learnt any of the rules, like you shouldn’t put this genre or that sound together. I just do it because that’s all I’ve known and I think it just comes naturally. I think it’s just a mismatch of different genres. I listen to a lot of electronic music. I love the trip-hop era of the 90s hip-hop era. And I love pop music in general, I grew up listening to really good written pop. I love a great pop song. And I also listen to great lyricists like Patti Smith, Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits; I loved people who could just carve up stories. You’re almost transformed into their cinematic world when you listen to their music. I think I kind of just chaotically combine those aspects.

I mean, you can understand why people shy away from it, because I think pop used to to be a lot narrower, but now, everything is basically pop, even if you hear a hip-hop song, it’s such a broad thing. And it’s actually really, it like allows you to get as many people into the room, but also kind of steer them in whatever direction you want them to go in. I find that really empowering, it’s great to get messages across. I love pop.

This song kind of came out of a time where I fell out of love with social media and being online all the time. It’s draining seeing all of these perfect pictures everywhere. But also, I feel like even the relatable pictures are constructed too. I wanted to make a song that sort of pokes fun at that and also say, this is a bit fucked up. But also, I just want to laugh at it and make a dance-sounding track which was actually quite sinister underneath. I think that reflects the squeaky-clean images that we all kind of put up. But underneath, there’s always something a bit weird going on.

That’s really hard. It changes a lot. When I write a new song that I really, really love, I’m like, this is my favourite song – this is the best one yet! Then I write another one and I’m like actually no, this is it! It completely changes with how I’m feeling and the mood of it as well. And also, when I perform it live, the reaction and people connecting to it, that can change it as well. So, it’s just an ever-changing thing. But at the moment, it’s a song that I’ve recently just written, and it probably won’t be coming out for a while.

I’m working on a live idea at the moment which I’m really excited about. I’m just thinking of different ways to create something that’s totally immersive and breaks down the barriers of crowd and performer a little bit more and gets people involved. I almost think that this whole thing is a world or a collective of people getting involved rather than just a stage and a crowd. I’m definitely thinking about a lot of things through video, through light and through set design to make it as immersive and otherworldly as possible.

All the time. this basically takes over my whole life, writing songs, writing music, like I’m never not writing a lot of the time. I’m super inspired when someone might say something that I’m like, ‘Wow, that’s a really cool word’. Or I might read something on a sign and just have to write it down. I’m just constantly writing lyrics, mainly just on my phone. I could be walking and a song idea might come to me, and then I have to run home because I need to finish the song before I get out of that creative flow. It’s quite hectic, like it never really stops.

That lyric kind of just came from the frustrations of being from such a small place. The Cayman Islands are only 25 miles long, you know everyone. If you go through a massive breakup, or if something really personal happens in your life, you can’t really run away from it, you have to face it every single day, and that can be quite draining. Something that I really, really love about living in London now is that you have your group of friends and the people that stick by you, but also, there’s this sense of being unknown, and just being able to observe everything without constantly knowing everyone.

I have a really, really long list of achievements that I want to keep ticking off. And all of them try and go up to this one goal of creating this world of people who want to get their voice heard. People who might feel that we’re living in this unstable world and we don’t know the direction of where things are going but also have hope, and we want to keep our voices heard. I want to create a home but also make people think.

I think it would probably still be to do with music (laughs), because I don’t really have any other life apart from that! But I’d probably just want to go somewhere with a group of my friends somewhere – maybe in the mountains or in nature, something really away from the chaos and the crowds and just go out there and create art and create music. And maybe create films or whatever, just do something creative, but away from everything. I think that would be great to do right now. I’d love to do that.

I would have Prince, Grace Jones – because I feel like she would be like the best partier ever. I would have Leonard Cohen because I think it would be amazing to have a massive conversation about life with them. Probably Kanye because it will bring controversy. And who else? That’s so hard. There’s so many people. Oh, I know! Patti Smith.