Name: Maita aka Maria Maita-Keppeler
Occupations: Singer, songwriter
Nationality: American
Current Release: Maita's Loneliness is out via Kill Rock Stars.

If you enjoyed this interview with MAITA, visit her official homepage. She is also on Instagram, Facebook, Soundcloud, and twitter.

In an insightful experiment, Maita answered this same set of question on the occasion of her previous album, allowing for an interesting comparison. You can find her responses here.



Where does the impulse to create something come from for you? What role do often-quoted sources of inspiration like dreams, other forms of art, personal relationships, politics etc play?

I find a lot of inspiration in emotional tension, whether it is within oneself, or with another person.

I’m very curious about what kind of factors lead to feelings of unhappiness or unrest, and trying to understand why conflict occurs. This is why I write so often about relationships, because this is where I most often find the deep wells of emotion that inspire my songwriting.

Desire is so fascinating. At times it feels to me like it is the fabric of life, and for me that is often the seed that starts a song.

For you to get started, do there need to be concrete ideas – or what some have called a 'visualisation' of the finished work? What does the balance between planning and chance look like for you?

I like to begin with a central idea or emotion that I’m trying to capture in music. This idea could be as simple as “the state of longing for loneliness,” which then might lead me to expand upon memories that accompany this feeling for me.

Such as my memories living in Kyoto, which is what lead to the writing of the song “Loneliness.”



Basically, I can’t begin a song without understand the emotional hook of it. Once I find that, I feel as if I have a purpose and can begin to unravel the rest.

Is there a preparation phase for your process? Do you require your tools to be laid out in a particular way, for example, do you need to do 'research' or create 'early versions'?

I have a difficult time with ‘early versions’. I tend to be a perfectionist, and don’t often write things that I wouldn’t feel comfortable putting out into the world. This sometimes means it takes me a long time to finish a song.

Instead of ‘early versions’ or ‘throw-away songs,’ I wait until I feel I have a clear idea of what I want to say. It’s something I’d like to get better at, actually: feeling free to write without the fear of rejection. Feeling free to experiment with half-baked ideas.

Do you have certain rituals to get you into the right mindset for creating? What role do certain foods or stimulants like coffee, lighting, scents, exercise or reading poetry play?

I need quiet, privacy, and above all, time. It can take me a long time to get into the groove of creating, especially with how fast-paced the world is today, and how much information we get bombarded with.

I write best when I can give myself a retreat, when I can start my mornings and end my nights in a tranquil place.

What do you start with? How difficult is that first line of text, the first note?

One of my favorite ways to get started is to write a chord progression and then start improvising words and melodies.

I find that through improvisation, simple emotional truths are often revealed. I might sing a line and realize: that’s what I want to write about.

When do the lyrics enter the picture? Where do they come from? Do lyrics need to grow together with the music or can they emerge from a place of their own?

I love it when lyrics and melody are woven together. I have a much harder time writing lyrics and then trying to put music to them, as the flow of the delivery is something I really value in a song. Still, songwriting is never a science for me.

I do get ideas for lyrics when I am in public, away from my guitar or the privacy I need to sing. I’ll often workshop these lyrics to massage them into place so they fit with the melody that feels right for them.

What makes lyrics good in your opinion? What are your own ambitions and challenges in this regard?

I love to tell stories with complex lyrics, but more and more have learned to see the value in economy. It’s so powerful to be able to speak a universal, and yet somehow unique truth in just one line. Still, I grew up listening to so many verbose songwriters and do often find myself with a lot to say.

“Someone’s Lost their Goddamn Wallet” is a good example of this.



That song is crammed full with words, sometimes too many, which is why I tried to keep the refrain as short and simple as possible. Nowadays, I do my best to make my songs more digestible. I am, after, trying to connect.

Often, while writing, new ideas and alternative roads will open themselves up, pulling and pushing the creator in a different direction. Does this happen to you, too, and how do you deal with it? What do you do with these ideas?

I follow new ideas when they come, or I try to anyways. Above all, I need to follow the emotion, so if something keeps coming up, I have to follow that path and see where it goes.

In fact, this is sometimes where my favorite songs come from, because there’s a sense of urgency, potency.

There are many descriptions of the creative state. How would you describe it for you personally? Is there an element of spirituality to what you do?

The creative state for me has two parts.

There’s the pure inspiration side, which can be so powerful, where the rest of the world falls away and you’re struck with an idea that seems to temporarily take over your world … and then there’s the side where you must workshop what you’ve created.

It can be difficult to get into the right mindset for the latter, because it requires patience, thought, care, effort. I’d love to say that I can write entire songs in the first state, but that’s not usually the case.

Especially in the digital age, the writing and production process tends towards the infinite. What marks the end of the process? How do you finish a work?

I think you just know when you know. I’m getting better at this now, which I think is a natural progression for songwriters. My early songs were always 5-6 minutes long, and now they hover more around the 3-4 minute mark.

I can’t really describe it, but I look out for that feeling that I’ve told a story that can resonate, that can be understood just enough to leave a little mystery.

Once a piece is finished, how important is it for you to let it lie and evaluate it later on? How much improvement and refinement do you personally allow until you're satisfied with a piece? What does this process look like in practise?

I’m usually pretty confident in a song once I deem it “finished,” but if not, I definitely step away from it and let some time pass.

I record everything on my phone, so often after a week or two I’ll play it back for myself once I’ve kind of forgotten what the song sounds like. I look out for words or structures that don’t feel right, or feel incomplete, and then work on fixing them.

What's your take on the role and importance of production, including mixing and mastering for you personally? How involved do you get in this?

As a band we all have a hand in the production of the music. “I Just Want to be Wild For You” was engineered by Matthew Zeltzer, who plays guitar in the project and manages the band with me.



Matthew Zeltzer and I co-produced the record, and had many ideas for it going into the process. We always work with Nevada Sowle and Cooper Trail for recording bass and drums, and between the four of us have come up with what I suppose I would call our “sound.”

Everyone in the band is also a songwriter and dabbles in many different music genres, and we all seek to serve the song above all else. That’s why our records tend to have a lot of dynamics and oscillate between soft folk moments and louder rock moments.

We take each song individually and say to ourselves, How should this one sound? What feels good for this particular song?

After finishing a piece or album and releasing something into the world, there can be a sense of emptiness. Can you relate to this – and how do you return to the state of creativity after experiencing it?

I just try to keep working on the next creative project before the album is even out.

It takes so long to release an album these days, that by the time we put something out we usually already have another batch of songs that we’re working on and are excited about.

Creativity can reach many different corners of our lives. Do you personally feel as though writing a piece of music is inherently different from something like making a great cup of coffee? What do you express through music that you couldn't or wouldn't in more 'mundane' tasks?

Maybe this ties into the privacy that I need to write songs, but I feel that songwriting is a space to speak upon feelings that I don’t convey in my mundane life. It’s like that conversation we all have throughout our days: How are you? Good, how are you? I’m good.

Those words are part of a social contract we enter when we go out into work, into the grocery store, into the bank. They don’t seek to go beneath the surface, which is exactly the goal of songwriting for me.

I’d love to find that kind of creativity in making a cup of coffee though—that would be fascinating and wonderful. I hope somebody is out there, doing that.