Maya Hawke: “I was listening back through the audio of the witch therapy session…”

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From witch therapy to musical mantras, Maya Hawke’s ‘Chaos Angel’ is a journey of self-discovery, breaking patterns, and learning in front of everyone.

Words: Abigail Firth.
Photos: Andrew Lyman.

As a child, Maya Hawke paid a visit to a witch therapist, who was supposed to help her work through some early depression. The series of sessions concluded with a self-actualisation ceremony that set out to remove the shield that had hardened across young Maya’s chest and then replace it with a golden bubble.

“Just to be clear, I’m not entirely that woo-woo,” says Maya. “It was an experiment to see how to make a kid not depressed. It was a lot of talking and mythologising, and you’re talking to your spirit animals and your spiritual guides. It was really quite intense, actually.”

The hour-long session was recorded, the audio of which was unearthed to be used on Maya’s second album, 2022’s ‘Moss’, but she couldn’t find a place for it. It did, however, sit perfectly at the start of her upcoming third album ‘Chaos Angel’.

“I knew that this record was going to be called ‘Chaos Angel’ from the time we started recording it, and I was listening back through the audio of the witch therapy session, and I found her say, ‘You become an angel in human form, does that make sense?’ I was like, oh, that’s how I’m gonna open my record. And there’s a little voice that goes, ‘Yes’. That’s me as a little tiny kid.”

It opens ‘Black Ice’, the delicate folk number that encapsulates much of ‘Chaos Angel”s ethos. While the start draws directly from her past, it winds up firmly in her present, where, inspired by the ‘Wise Up’ scene in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia, her various close friends repeat “Give up, be loved” to close it. Its central lyric pulls from an old Hawke family expression – “Why do it right when you can do it yourself?” – bringing in her mission statement for the album, that of learning to break out of your usual patterns.

“I wanted to make a record really intentionally, and rather than it being one random, full throttle gush of a particular emotion, to zero in on a lot of different kinds of relationships and point out the weak spots in them, or the mistakes that I felt that I’ve made. In order to carry myself through that with a little bit of a narrative structure, I created this myth of the Chaos Angel, which was kind of reverse-engineered from the song, which is the final track on the record, of this Amelia Bedelia-esque guardian angel, who was always coming around trying to do the right thing, trying to be the angel of love and ends up screwing everything up.”

“All of my relationships go in this order: I want you, I love you, I promise, I’m sorry”

Maya hawke

That theme of recognising your own mistakes and patterns is cleverly represented sonically, with literal repetition throughout the record. From “Give up, be loved” in the opener, through the self-soothing “If you’re okay, then I’m okay” that forms most of the middle track ‘Okay’, to the title-track at the end, which picks up on her most prominently destructive pattern, breaking it as the song goes on and switching around the order of “I want you, I love you, I promise, I’m sorry” as it swirls out.

“I play a lot with mantra in the record, like repeating phrases over and over again. I had this realisation where I was like, I think all of my relationships go in this order. They go: I want you, I love you, I promise, I’m sorry, as these individual chapters. You lust after somebody, fall in love with them, make them all these promises, and then you have to apologise to them because it doesn’t work out. And I was like, how do I break that pattern? How do I be more responsible with the first two steps of that cycle so that I don’t end up in the last two, over and over again? I think it’s by understanding our own personal patterns that we can learn to break them, at least the ones we want to break. So I think my record might be more about change than acceptance.”

Maya’s Zooming in today from Atlanta, where she’s currently filming the final season of Stranger Things (ICYMI, she’s been a mainstay on the supernatural Netflix smash since 2016), and seems to have no problem juggling her multiple acting and musical projects (“I’m better doing things when I’m doing other things,” she shrugs). 

If anything, one project informs the other. Noticing the differences between making a film or series – where the actors end up knowing their characters better than the director by the end of shooting – and making an album – where each person involved in its creation plays their small part and little else – she wanted to experiment with a different approach, combining the two processes.

“Almost every person who played on the record wrote a little piece of it and had a piece of themselves inside of it – a piece of their creativity, their spark. I wanted everyone to hang out together. For actors, it seems like they’re always going off to summer camp and diving in as deeply as possible into the assignment at hand. I wanted to experiment with that, to bring everyone together and separate them from their lives a little bit and give them a space that was just purely creative, and where they only had one thing to focus on.”

“I realised that I was out of touch with my generation; that was sort of heartbreaking”

maya hawke

Additionally, each person who worked on ‘Chaos Angel’ had worked on a Maya Hawke record, either ‘Moss’ or debut album ‘Blush’, in some capacity before. Jesse Harris produced ‘Blush’, with Will Graefe and Benjamin Lazar Davis lending a hand to play on it. Then Benjamin took the production reigns on ‘Blush’, Will playing on it and being joined by Christian Lee Hutson, who’d go on to produce ‘Chaos Angel’, the others joining to play on it too.

Christian’s involvement, in particular, can be heard across the album, which, although Maya cites James Blake, Arctic Monkeys and Liz Phair as influences here, ends up evoking a similar feeling to Phoebe Bridgers’ last solo effort ‘Punisher’; and yep, Christian was credited on that.

While finishing up writing ‘Chaos Angel’, Maya was working on the upcoming film Wildcat, where she portrays American author Flannery O’Connor, whose work often reflected her Catholic beliefs. Flannery’s immersion in religion may have been a far cry from Maya’s evidently more holistic approach, but the project left a unique impression on her. 

“When I was working on Wildcat, I was kind of marinating myself in Catholicism and religious imagery,” says Maya. “There’s this one Flannery O’Connor quote; it’s something along the lines of, ‘I used to wrestle with my guardian angel, and I would sock at him from my dorm room and try to drive him away’, and that image really stuck with me. This idea that we have all these good instincts in ourselves, whatever you want to call them, if it’s like an angel or instincts or soul, but we have these instincts, and they drive us toward our best self, but sometimes we want to fight against our best instincts, so we sock at our guardian angel. I think that ended up really being what I wanted the record to be about.”

Perhaps a place where Maya and Flannery didn’t align was in their views on suffering. Where the author penned many essays, letters and a collection of prayers that often referenced how necessary suffering was to achieving religious enlightenment, Maya simply couldn’t relate. Instead, her approach as an artist is to better herself, in turn bettering her work.

“What I want to believe in is that suffering is not required for the making of art, that it’s often an unfortunate byproduct because so many of the people who make art are vibrating in the wind and are so sensitive to the world around them, that they end up suffering a lot. A lot of the time, it’s something that can be overcome rather than leaned into, you know? Nothing drives me crazier than artists being like, ‘Yeah, I had to do that horrible thing because I had to get to that dark place in myself and hit rock bottom, so I could write the book I was always meant to write’. I think that if you were always meant to write something, you were probably always meant to write it at your best.”

“Even though the world is probably ending, it’s also pretty definitively the best time possible to be a human being ever”

maya hawke

‘Chaos Angel’ finds Maya lingering on small moments in her life, analysing old feelings and figuring out how to express them properly. That was evident from the record’s first offering, ‘Missing Out’, which actually came long before the album’s announcement as it was previewed on her last tour. It’s a reflective track that unpacks her decision not to go into higher education, growing up too quickly, and learning to live without regret. 

“There was this thing that everyone said to me when I was deciding whether or not to go to college, and it was, ‘You don’t want to fall out of touch with your generation’, and I didn’t really know what that meant. I seemed much more interested in people who were older than me and much more interested in being an adult myself. And then I made all these decisions that led to that, and I realised that I was out of touch with my generation; that was sort of heartbreaking. What the song was more about to me is touching back in with your generation and starting to really have love for your choices and for the life you’ve built for yourself.”

The track features the particularly tongue-in-cheek lyric, “I was born with my foot in the door”, for anyone who might’ve missed that her parents are A-listers Uma Thurman and Ethan Hawke. With a certain discourse reaching fever pitch in the last year, does Maya want to challenge any preconceived notions about her art anyone may hold?

“I’ve heard everything. I’ve heard people think that I had a dream life; I’ve heard people think that I was destined to grow up and become a crackhead,” she says bluntly. 

“It’s a bummer that the internet has created this environment where all the people who people have opinions about can read what they write about them. That’s not mentally healthy for anyone to do. It used to be that when you’d go to see a movie, and you’d go out to dinner afterwards, and you talk to your friends and be like, I hated that! I thought so-and-so was so bad! But now, all of those dinner table conversations are accessible. And if you have one too many beers and a self-hating night and decide to type your name into Google, you can pretty much read a transcript of your worst possible nightmare of what people think about you. But I’m not interested in really challenging anything; I just want to keep trying to do what I see as good work.”

Funnily enough, she is challenging herself on ‘Chaos Angel’. The striking track ‘Big Idea’ in the album’s second half takes on a Bob Dylan-esque philosophical approach to songwriting, a new foray for Maya as she notes she usually tries to make small moments seem huge. On ‘Big Idea’, she’s making a single song about a long unanswered question: Is the world ending?

“We’re in this moment in time where everyone thinks the world is ending,” she explains, jumping off from our last chat about the impact of the internet (an equally applicable topic for this song), “and it very well might be. There are a lot of scientific, statistical points that are showing that the world is ending, and that democracy is collapsing. 

“But it’s also true that if you date back into any point in history, it’s the classic line, every generation thinks it’s the last. So, trying to differentiate in your mind, what of my doomsday thinking is the same doomsday thinking that every single human being has ever had on Earth? Because are we actually so egomaniacal to think that our moment in time is that important? Or what of my doomsday thinking is backed up by science and supported and real? I’m trying to separate that out from, how do I go on living my life in a world that appears to be ending? How am I supposed to decide and figure out what matters? That’s what I’m trying to have that song be about, but it can be about whatever you want it to be.”

For all of the expansive thinking, Maya does clarify she’s no golden age thinker. “Even though the world is probably ending, it’s also pretty definitively the best time possible to be a human being ever. I mean, maybe the 90s was a little better, but not by much” – but who is the Chaos Angel to her, personally?  

Drawing again from Balthus’ painting Therese Dreaming, a piece of artwork so controversial it was once petitioned to be removed from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but it’s been a constant source of inspiration for Maya. She played its subject in her video for ‘Blue Hippo’, penned a track about Therese on ‘Moss’, and now she’s dressed up as her on the album cover for ‘Chaos Angel’, prompting questions of self-perception and wondering, is Therese Maya’s Chaos Angel? 

“I was trying to look through my past work and music for themes, [asking] how I make this record where it honours the work I’ve done in the past and pushes me forward. And what I found was a lot of themes of magic, girlhood, and breaking out of confinement. I also found two experimentations of the Therese painting and the feeling that I got from her, which was this feeling of confidence and liberation, versus the feeling that other people seem to get from the painting, which was that she had been taken advantage of. I started to see those themes of your self-perception and your exterior perception, and I started to imagine Therese as this Amelia Bedelia angel. In many ways, she is an alter ego in that I’ve continually dressed up like her, and in many ways, she’s just a character that I’ve been impersonating and experimenting with.”

With ‘Chaos Angel’ being the thread that stitches together patches of Maya’s previous projects – sonically, topically, visually – there’s no doubting her journey as an artist has been an unusual one. Her approach to making music is always evolving, perhaps thanks to her insistence on questioning everything (intentionally or not) and her ability to accept change. It’s sort of ironic how, in trying to break her usual patterns on this record, she ends up repeating others, but it leaves us with the clearest picture of Maya Hawke we’ve seen so far. 

She’s confronting her own mistakes, is honest about the ways in which she’s imperfect (something drilled into her as a child, she says the biggest rule in her house was that you can do whatever you want, as long as you don’t lie about it), but she’s also giving us a better insight into how she thinks, what led her to that thinking, and her unique perception of the world.

“When I was leaving drama school, I had a conversation with my acting teacher, and he said, ‘You can totally leave, you probably should, but just know that what we’re offering you here is the opportunity to learn in private, and what exists out in the world is the opportunity to learn in public, and it’s your decision whether or not you want to learn in front of everyone, or whether or not you want to learn in private’. And I decided to learn in front of everyone. That’s how I feel about my records; I’ve been learning in front of people.”

Taken from the June 2024 issue of Dork. Maya Hawke’s album ‘Chaos Angel’ is out 31st May.

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