Living Liminal with mxmtoon

mxmtoon has been sharing music with the world since she was a teen – her highly anticipated third album ‘liminal space’ sees her come into her own in a brand new way. Maia, now 24, worked with an all-female team to create her most personal and expansive work to date. She sat down with Ramona to talk first-draft lyrics, people-centered process and what it looks like to be radically honest in your art.

Ramona: Maia I’ve loved listening to this album; there’s a few tracks that I’ve just gotten stuck on and come back to again and again. 

mxmtoon: Thank you, that’s so sweet.

How do you feel now that it’s out?

So relieved. I mean I’ve been working on it for so long, so it’s definitely kind of surreal to have it be out in the world and have people interacting with it, but I’m just so proud of it, I’m really happy that it’s out.

I’m glad you’re proud of it, it’s great. What was the first song you wrote for you?

The very first one was ‘elevator’. It was the first one I had done with Carrie (one of the executive producers across the entire record). We’d never worked together so it was just “Let’s see how this goes” and we ended up after that session being like “Maybe we should keep doing this”. So we kept at it and made the whole thing.

In ‘elevator’ and in a lot of these songs there’s really complex emotional modes that you describe lyrically. Do you find that you finetune the lyrics a lot to say exactly what you mean? Or is it more like you’re instinctively expressing that?

I think a lot of it is instinctive, just because I don’t do a lot of second passes on lyrics actually – if I’ve come up with it, I usually stick with it. If anything we chop stuff off just because I write songs that are too long. The way I write songs is really similar to a journal entry, so I think a lot of it is in the way I would talk about it. It feels really fluid that way which is great.

This is album three so you’re probably more used to it at this point, but songs like ‘Number One Boy’ or even ‘God?’; do you have to make your own little personal peace with that before you give it to the world to listen to? 

Oh my god yes. That is such a big part of it. Especially with this record… I’ve never written songs that I felt so personally attached to in that way. I’ve gone through a bunch of different iterations of what it looks like to release an album and understanding the pros and cons of it. I think with this one specifically I knew that a lot of the music was going to be about things I was actively experiencing and thinking through, which added to the importance of finishing it from a writing perspective before figuring out when I was going to share it with the rest of the world. It really allowed me to have my own time with it, and show them to the people that these songs were about. To be able to show ‘Number One Boy’ to my dad, to show ‘Now’s Not The Time’ to my mum, just to be able to say “Hey, I made this thing that is really personal and about my relationship with you,” and allow them to have time with it before knowing that this is eventually going to be shared.

Giving the time that they need as well; the songs and the people. That’s beautiful. 

100%

I can’t imagine singing that lyric from ‘Now’s Not The Time’ about “our bodies keeping the score” about you and your mum in a room where you didn’t fully trust the team doing it. How did you go about finding the right people to do this recording?

I was so lucky to just immediately click with Carrie, both from a production and a writing stand point. And it’s wild like… now we’re neighbours, I moved to Nashville. Just to have built, at this point, three records in, relationships with these women I’ve worked with and feeling so empowered by each of them just to talk about the stories I wanted to talk about. Writing this record I did come in with a very clear intentionality of just wanting to be very honest with myself and with the people I was working with, leaving everything on the table, and to not go back to a song and listen to it and think “Ugh I wish I had been more in tune with how I was feeling that day”. I don’t feel that way about any of the songs, because I really did go in and make them exactly how I wanted them to be.

You’ve spoken pretty widely about how you’re really influenced by visual media; by TV, and by video games. With an album, do you write it song by song and then the visual identity becomes clear to you? Or do you write a song and then the album’s visual world is born and you’re writing towards that?

I definitely wrote a good chunk of the album before I figured out what the visual creative was going to be. This was such an outlier of how that process goes because normally I do have a very clear visual understanding of what I want something to be before I’ve made the songs. It was actually a great challenge this time around too because there are so many different ways that I could see these songs visually representing themselves. How do you find a visual medium that can encompass so many different kinds of sounds?

It sounds like quite a journey to find the visuals. Who’s the artist of the album cover? How much was that your vision, how much was it theirs?

I was so lucky – I had obviously been making pinterest board after pinterest board when talking about visual creative for this record, and a lot of the images I’d compiled were collage work. One of the people I had noticeably pinned a lot of work from was from was this photographer KangHee Kim, she’s an incredibly talented visual artist and photographer from Korea, now based in New York. I just loved her work, what she was encapsulating in her stories about her missing Korea and being stuck in New York, and I felt so much affinity with wanting something while you’re in some other place. So many of the songs are about that. She was so open to me explaining the concept. I also just really trust her – the way she thinks through things visually is so clear. She used her own photographs to compile this skyline that encompasses both of those places while also being in a space that feels so enclosed and kind of claustrophobic still. It looks almost like one of those empty corners in a museum that you haven’t been able to put art in. She did an incredible job, and I was so privileged to work with her, but that’s really all her. Her work speaks for itself.

Genre wise, do you go in with an aesthetic vision for songs like ‘the situation’, or ‘I Hate Texas’, or do the feelings just lend themselves to those genre spaces?

I think it’s definitely really song dependent. ‘I Hate Texas’ I did not go in that day going “I can’t wait to make a country song”. I was working with this producer and artist Underscores (April is her name) who is just an incredibly talented producer that specialises in very different music than what ‘I Hate Texas’ ended up being. April’s an incredibly talented instrumentalist and producer and she had never made a country song in her life haha.

What??

Yeah both of us were just asking like “Is this where it’s going??” and going ok, sure, and leaning in, and ‘I Hate Texas’ was born.  Genre was not something either one of us was thinking about, we just thought it would be fun to try this, and let’s just see how we would do it as people who’ve never done it before.

I feel like this pressure is more on women than men honestly, but that pressure to reinvent every album; do you feel that? It sounds like you just listen to yourself in your creative projects and find your way.

Definitely. I’m appreciative that you asked this; I think it’s obviously a lot of pressure for young women to feel like they need to be doing something new every single time they share anything. That’s something I’ve definitely felt in the past, like I have to constantly reinvent myself so people will stay interested. I think what’s been so refreshing about this record is that it just feels like I tried to block out a lot of that noise and make something that just felt really honest to where I’ve been at in the past two years, and get back in touch with like ‘no, I don’t need to be shiny and new every single time, I can just talk about where I am and that’s enough’.

Is there a lyric that people might miss that you really want them to hear?

The post chorus in ‘number one boy’ means a lot to me – ‘In another place/in another time/I could see your face through my brother’s eyes/When I’m meeting you even still you stand/holding out your hand”. I think it’s really easy to look at the lyrics of ‘number one boy’ and think that I just have this horrific relationship with my Dad, but I don’t! My Dad is one of my best friends and I’m really close with him. It felt important at the end to bring it back to that, that my Dad is such a core support system in my life, regardless of the feelings that I had when i was a younger kid. His support has always been there in different ways, and I hope that even in the songs that feel like they dissect the intricacies of my relationships with my parents, that there’s still so much empathy for them. Parents…. It’s their first time doing this thing too, and it is a really complex relationship, that requires a lot of vulnerability from both parties. For my parents I was their first kid, their first go around at being a parent. And for me they’re the only parents I have in my life, so it’s just about navigating it all. There are certain choices that you make and there are ones that you can’t, so how do you unpack all those and have empathy for both sides at all times.

I think that’s one of the things you do so deftly and kindly on this album; sitting in the complexity gives space for you to be human and for the people you’re singing about to be human too. 

That’s what we’re going for!

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‘Liminal space’ is out on all platforms now, and if you’re in the US or UK and Ireland, you can catch mxmtoon onstage in early 2025.