Into The Music
Maya Hawke is not supposed to be this interesting. That is not a slight. It is a statement about expectations. She came up through Stranger Things, a show that consumed its young cast members inside a cultural phenomenon that often had little to do with their actual abilities as artists. When that show ended, the conventional wisdom was that most of them would struggle to find purchase on the other side of it.
Hawke, daughter of Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman, has spent the years since Stranger Things building a music career that deserves to be taken seriously on its own terms. Her fourth album, Maitreya Corso, due May 1, is being described by people who have heard it as her best work yet, a collection of pop songs that lands somewhere in the tradition of Aimee Mann and early Shawn Colvin, melodically rich and lyrically specific in a way that rewards repeated listening.
The title is a collision of two worlds she carries with her. Gregory Corso, the Beat poet. Maitreya, the Bodhisattva of new beginnings in Buddhist tradition. Hawke has talked about looking for a name that captured the feeling of the record, something that bridged the earthly and the spiritual, the literary and the transcendent. The combination is very much in the spirit of an artist who grew up surrounded by books and movies and got a worldview to match.
One song on the album, “Lioness,” is about watching her Stranger Things costar Sadie Sink work. “I was actually talking about working on Stranger Things,” Hawke explained in a recent interview. “There was a day where I was really grumpy and not feeling inspired. And I came into set as a background player in a scene she was in, and I remembered how magical acting is.” It is a small story, but the fact that she made it into a song speaks to how she works, finding the particular detail that opens up something larger.
She is openly influenced by Taylor Swift in a way that no longer requires a disclaimer. A generation of songwriters learned from Swift that specificity is not a liability. The more you zoom in on a detail, the more universally it lands. Hawke has taken that lesson and applied it with her own sensibility, one that is quieter and more literary and less interested in the blockbuster.
Before Maitreya Corso arrives, Hawke also has a romantic comedy called Wishful Thinking premiering at SXSW alongside Lewis Pullman, and she has already been cast in the next Hunger Games film, Sunrise on the Reaping. She is busy. She is building something. The album, by all accounts, is worth waiting for.