Inside Maita’s devastating new album and the challenges facing artists in 2024

On July 26, Maria Maita-Keppeler, the chief creative architect of her band Maita, releases her third album Want, a deeply personal record that explores themes of desire within the context of a long-term relationship. Headliner caught up with her to discuss the art of writing about relationships, the challenges facing artists today, and why devastating moments delivered softly often hit hardest…

“I’ve been progressing towards this place of being able to say whatever it is I need to say, and with every album I feel I get a bit more courageous,” a contemplative Maria Maita-Keppeler shares as she joins Headlinervia Zoom from the garden of her Portland, Oregon home. Perched upon a wall, she is clutching a mug of coffee as the morning sun creeps gradually into view on the Pacific Northwest.

At the time of our conversation, she is a little over a month away from the release of her band Maita’s third album Want. A quietly devastating piece of work, its 12 songs present an intimate exploration of themes of longing and desire within the framework of a long-term relationship. It’s also an expertly executed demonstration of musical restraint. The personal, at times heartbreaking nature of these songs is expressed with a whisper rather than a scream. It may take more than one listen for some of these moments to register, but when they do, the result is breathtaking: the most delicate of touches landing like a hammer blow.

Despite the early hour, Maita-Keppeler is in talkative mood, discussing at length the concepts that form the core of the record, as well as the conscious decision she has taken not to shy away from writing about more personal subject matter.

“I wrote most of these songs during the pandemic,” she says, explaining the origins of Want. “What the pandemic did, which was really interesting, was create this opportunity for a blank slate of experiences. I was in the house just doing nothing for a long time and there were no new experiences coming in. That allowed for a lot of old memories to resurface and ask to be told. There was a lot of thinking and ruminating on past things and how those come into the present.

“A lot of these songs allowed really subtle memories to grow in intensity and become songs,” she continues. “They all circle this idea of desire. It’s about having desires or wants that you haven’t been able to express before or were too strange or subtle or nuanced to express. And a lot of these exist within the context of a relationship and how desire manifests itself in a relationship. Particularly a long-term relationship, which is something I haven’t heard a lot of in music.”

A defining feature of every Maita record so far has been Maita-Keppeler’s uncanny ability to say a lot with very little. And with Want she has chiselled away at and refined this aspect of her writing to produce her most affecting collection of songs yet.

“Any song I write comes from a place where there is a sucker punch in there,” she says. “That’s usually the reason I feel compelled to write something. Those feelings will happen in a quiet way sometimes, where you feel vulnerable and a little bit small, and whether I’m writing a song that’s angry or louder or release driven and cathartic, that core has to exist for me. I’m growing to love subtlety more and more. There’s always been quiet songs on our records and I’m finding more and more that those devastating moments delivered softly pack a much harder punch. It’s something you may not notice at first but the more you listen the more it reveals itself. I think life can be like that, too.”

Another familiar trait pulled into sharper focus on Want is the exploration of relationships. Much of Maita’s previous records, particularly 2022’s I Just Want To Be Wild For You, has seen different aspects of different relationships placed under the microscope and examined from all angles. It’s unsurprising then that the spark that ignited the process of making want came on the form of a song called Break Up Song x 3.

“That was one I wrote early on,” Maita-Keppeler recalls, explaining the origins of the record. “And it’s not about a current breakup, it’s all about the past. I love writing about relationships, I think it’s really fascinating. It’s where a lot of life’s experiences come from. But when you are in a long-term relationship sometimes you run out of things to say. It can be like, I want to write about those juicy moments, but if you are in a stable relationship you generally don’t have those. And Break Up Song x 3 was about this realisation that there was still a lot of ground to be covered in the past that I hadn’t fully processed yet. So that was a really cool opportunity. And then I realised all of these songs don’t have to be about the present. Some are and some aren’t, but they all fit into this scope of want and desire.”

The recording of the album can be traced back to the tail end of Covid, in the period between the most stringent lockdown measures and the complete lifting of social distancing restrictions. This enabled Maita-Keppeler and her bandmates to enter back into a tried and tested production process.

“I love having a recording process that feels very in-house, working with people who understand me and the band and the music,” she elaborates. “Matthew Zeltzer plays in the band and co-manages it with me, and Matt Thompson, who sometimes plays bass with us, engineered the record. It felt like a really easy experience.

“We tracked everything in Portland and Matt [Zeltzer] and I worked on the overdubs after that to get everything just right. Then we sent them to Matt Thompson for mixing and ended up very recently, like January of this year, adding one more song, which was Waking Up At Night. I wrote it more recently and I was playing it at songwriter rounds and people kept asking me when that was coming out, and I felt bad saying it’s a few albums from now. Also, I felt like the album was a little intense and this felt like a more soft, accessible song that we could use to round out the record and make it a little easier to process. So, we got back together again in January and recorded the song in one day. I was sick but we were able to get some vocals out, and we made it work.”

At this juncture, our focus shifts from the writing and recording of an album to the process of releasing it. It’s a pertinent subject, given that 24 hours prior to our conversation Maita-Keppeler announced the launch of a crowdfunding campaign to help support the release. The campaign involved Maita-Keppeler producing exclusive lines of merch and special releases that fans could purchase directly from the band.

“Releasing a record, depending on how involved you want to get in it, is a very expensive process,” she says. “Paying for PR, marketing, radio campaigns, and then having any money left to tour and cover all those costs, is incredibly expensive. I’ve gotten really lucky in the past. The first EP, I had a job that paid well enough to support my music. Then we were on a label for two album cycles where we had a lot of that support taken care of, and now we have partnered with a lovely little label in Portland called Fluff & Gravy Records who are pressing the record and covering some of the costs, but the amount we have to pay for is beyond their resources for us.

“We really want to be able to release this record properly and give it everything we’ve got because we really believe in it. We want to get on the road and play these songs live and the reality is that if you can’t properly release a record and make sure people know the shows are happening, we won’t be able to afford to go on the road. Our main goal is to make sure the release goes successfully enough for us to continue being a band. Because every year it gets harder and harder to continue being a band. We have to do so much more than just the music part; we are essentially running a small business.”

While the economic constraints being faced across the independent music sector show no signs of loosening, Maita-Keppeler is already assembling a batch of new material for the band’s next project. She tells us she recently emerged from a sustained period of writer’s block, with a renewed determination to continue to explore new artistic avenues.

“I had a big period of writer’s block after writing these songs,” she reveals as the clock winds down on our time together. “I felt like I needed a little pause so that I wasn’t just writing a continuation of this record. I let a couple of years pass with only writing a song here or there. But at the beginning of this year, I started this 52-song club, which is where you get a prompt every week and are supposed to write a song every week. I made it to week eight, but I felt very proud of that. It was a good start, and it uncovered this new batch of emotions and subjects that I’m really excited to write about.”

Want is released on July 26^th via Fluff & Gravy Records. You can listen to this interview in full below.

PHOTOS: Tristan Paiige