Maya Hawke appears on the cover of the Summer 2024 Issue — head to the AP Shop to grab a copy.
American Buddhist author and activist Robert A.F. Thurman once said, “When all is lost, when all is let go of, when all is abandoned, what you are left with is an ocean of bliss.”
These days, Thurman’s granddaughter and creative polymath Maya Hawke is shining her own unique light on the idea of letting go. Through 10 tracks, her transcendent new album, Chaos Angel, comes to terms with acceptance and surrender, all within the realm most relatable — relationships. On the LP’s delicate, tender first track, “Black Ice,” Hawke, between breathy gulps, the slight whistle of air against teeth, and a fuzzy blanket of distortion, coaxes the listener into an angelic world, her own proverbial “ocean of bliss,” by weaving through writerly verses and landing on the track’s charged refrain, “Give up, be loved, give up, be loved, give up, be loved…”
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At just 25 years old, Hawke has proven to be a shape-shifting artist in her own right. Her musical prowess makes its case with a self-assured shrug and a doe-eyed wink across three albums, 2020’s Blush, 2022’s Moss, and now Chaos Angel. Simultaneously, she’s followed the suit of her parents, Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman, and become a celebrated actor, who garnered acclaim for roles in Netflix’s Stranger Things, Greta Gerwig’s Little Women, and most recently Wildcat, a biopic about the late American novelist Flannery O’Connor.
On the day of our cover shoot, Hawke showed up on set in a drop-waist vintage dress, flats, and her hair pinned back — she’d just come from filming a morning show in midtown. In an immediate sense, something about the artist appeared jarringly proper, mature, serious. However, while we made a few breezy introductions to the crew, Hawke’s eyes had begun to stray elsewhere, and as the last handshake had wrapped — she beelined to the gymnastics rings hanging from the studio ceiling, kicked off her ballet flats one by one, grabbed ahold of the wooden circles, and leaped into a full frontal flip, skirt flying up, hair pins making tinny noises as they hit and bounced against the floor. Regaining her (bare) footing, she promptly sat down in the makeup chair, hands in her lap as she pulled a paperback novel from her purse. Maya Hawke, I could tell, had not only shown up a seasoned pro — she had also absolutely, without a doubt, shown up as Maya Hawke.
As the day went on, I observed Hawke from a slight distance, admiring and envying her seeming self-knowledge and authenticity. I watched as she requested Counting Crows and Miley Cyrus’ Plastic Hearts to be played over the speakers, singing along to herself while posing before the camera, in an element that was staked and claimed as solely her own. Though those musical suggestions, she later told me with a cheeky giggle, were said just as much to inspire annoyance, shock value, and relieve pressure from everyone else on set — a slew of trendy downtown creatives in vintage T-shirts likely as obscure and hard to source as the music they’d preferred to listen to. Hawke’s attitude is one of bare-bones vulnerability. Through her presence, personality, and Chaos Angel, she’s exposing herself to the world in one hand, and holding a mirror up for us in the other.
Speaking with Hawke a week later on Zoom, understanding and unraveling more of this spirited, whip-smart woman, she gives me a full introduction to Chaos Angel, the album — and the flawed protagonist, a heavenly who lives in the eye of the storm, weighed and broken down by expectations of perfection and goodness. Hawke’s work is an ode to humanness, ultimately — the mess we all contain, and inflame through connection. And it’s an attempt to understand, get honest, and let go, wade into the ocean of bliss. As we retrace her steps through this album process, another reference comes to mind for me — the St. Francis prayer, which says, “It is in dying that we are born to eternal life.”
When did you start playing music?
7 or 8. I was really a creative kid. There’s just no two ways about it. I wrote and hand-printed a book of my poems with illustrations and wrote a short novel. It was a sequel to The Spiderwick Chronicles. I was writing these songs, and they were both a memorization tool and a communication tool where I would have all these ideas and thoughts I would want to practice for emotional conversations that I was trying to have, but I would forget what I was going to say.
So instead of just memorizing it, I would try to put it to melody so that I could remember what I wanted to say. It’s like I was trying to explain to my dad that I was really unhappy, and I did it by writing new lyrics to a song from the TV show Hannah Montana. And her song was like, “Life’s what you make it, so let’s make it rock.” And I was like, “Life’s not so easy when you are feeling rough.” I wasn’t a genius or anything, but I was 9… Then I had this great guitar teacher who realized that I was never going to learn in a normal way. So instead of teaching me music theory and teaching me other people’s songs, he helped me write my own songs. Ten years later, I played a show at Caffe Vivaldi.
What kind of music was being played around the house when you were growing up? What are those very first interactions with music that you felt connected to?
Free To Be… You And Me is one of the first ones I remember feeling connected to, and Liz Mitchell children’s albums. The first song that ever made me cry was “My Pony Boy.” I also loved Raffi’s “Baby Beluga” — it was the first music I remember being connected to, and I still love that type of music. The level up from that was Woody Guthrie’s Songs to Grow on for Mother and Child. That led me to other Woody Guthrie songs, which got me into Lead Belly and Kristofferson and Willie Nelson and Johnny Cash. I was really in the folk vibe — the Seegers, Lucinda Williams, Elizabeth Cotten’s finger-picking style, and the song “Freight Train,” which flies under the radar as everyone’s first song they learn on guitar.
I don’t often hear young artists talking about that age of folk music. It’s refreshing, because so much of the indie music we hear coming out today, whether consciously or otherwise, is rooted in works by people like Lead Belly. One could trace a line without much effort from Pete Seeger to Phoebe Bridgers, Elizabeth Cotten to Joni, Joni to Brandi Carlile, ad infinitum. I love how deep your understanding of indie music’s roots is. It’s hopeful.
It’s not very hard to figure out where I got my introduction to folk music if you look at anything my dad has ever done in his life — he definitely indoctrinated me into a love of folk and an understanding that “this is where the Beatles come from — that that’s where all of this stuff comes from.” Songs are stories at their core. They can also be vibes, but if the story’s not there, it’s nothing. You can’t just coast on vibes.
Did you still play music as you were starting to get serious about an acting career while you were in high school?
I played a ton of music before I went to Saint Ann’s, the high school I attended. Up until eighth grade, I was just writing songs and playing music all the time, going to acting and art summer camps every year, and always doing school plays at the other schools I was at. Then the summer before I started at Saint Ann’s, I did a show at Caffe Vivaldi, of 12 of my written songs. But something about that experience spooked me, and I didn’t really want to perform music again. I stopped practicing guitar and didn’t get any better after that. I only used it as a tool to sometimes put my poems to music — and sometimes tell someone that I had a crush on them — but I wasn’t focused on it. I really focused and committed to concentrating my efforts on acting throughout the rest of my time in high school and then didn’t really get into music again until after I’d left drama school.
What do you think about the experience at Caffe Vivaldi “spooked” you?
Partly, playing my songs live made me feel like they weren’t as good as I thought they were, and I was just so nervous. I didn’t do another show for eight years or something like that. But it also felt like a completion. I was going into high school, new things were happening — I’d finished this project that I’d been working on with this particular guitar teacher and done the performance. It felt more like a finishing than a beginning.
The transition into high school is so formative, and a lot of things can get left aside while new things get adopted — regardless of who you are or what you’re doing. When you came back around to music, after those eight years, what had happened?
I either dropped out or was kicked out of drama school, depending on your point of view. I was doing Little Women in Ireland, and I hadn’t brought an instrument with me because that’s how out of the loop I was. But when my brother and my mom came to visit me, they brought me a guitar. I was by myself for the first time in a long time in a hotel room in Ireland — I started to play again, and I started to write songs again. I came back from that experience and didn’t get another job for six months. So I played a lot.
When I was at drama school, I used to say, “Oh, our day is like 20% magic and 80% bullshit.” Then I got out into the world, and I was like, “Whoa, 20% magic is a lot.” Now, I’m coasting on sometimes 1% magic on a good day. At that time, I really started to use music as a way to keep myself creatively inspired while I was auditioning and waiting for the right thing to happen. I brought a couple of my songs to Jesse Harris, who I’d known growing up, and asked, “Hey, can you give me some feedback on this? How can I make these better?” And he said, “If you ever have a poem or something and you want me to write music for it, let me know.” It was something I hadn’t tried. So I did, and I got addicted to it. That’s really where my first two albums came from. It wasn’t until Chaos Angel that I began writing my own music again.
Tell me more about the process for this album.
Benjamin Lazar Davis, who produced my second album, got Christian Lee Hutson involved. He’d sent him the words to “Backup Plan,” which is the first track from my second album, Moss. That was the first time I ever got sent back a song from a poem that I wrote where I was like, “Oh, that’s the music that I would’ve written if I could have. That’s how I heard it in my heart.”
I started to show Christian music while I was making Moss, because I felt like he had the same taste as me. Christian is a genius who really outwardly values simple melodies, folk music, and traditional melodies. He made me feel like I could believe in myself and that the music that I was writing was of value and not just remedial trash. It was really his encouragement to cultivate my own writing that I think is why he produced this new record, Chaos Angel, and was really a big part of the writing process.
Based on the fact that you said that you began songwriting as a child to be able to express yourself emotionally and interpersonally, I would assume many of the tracks are based on personal experience?
They’re not fiction, but they are collage work. They can all be personal. There’s quilting — not necessarily all from the same story, but I found a way to fit them together into one story.
That fits with the description you’ve given of Chaos Angel as a character — or as some composite character being.
The common thread between all these songs is that each one was about a different relationship — which I noticed retroactively. To me, they’re all a photograph of a different kind of relationship — casual or committed, familial, friendship, siblings, romantic. And each one in the photograph is a mistake — something I did wrong, something that went wrong. While I was making it, I became obsessed with this idea of the Chaos Angel. At the time, I was making this movie Wildcat about Flannery O’Connor and reading a bunch of her letters — many about Catholicism — and I was trying to understand and relate to the idea of religion as a force that impacted how one feels and writes. For O’Connor, it was about, “Does this short story serve God?” I was trying to douse myself in that way of thinking, and read this one line about how O’Connor used to fight with her guardian angel, and she would physically punch at him to try to get him to leave her alone.
I really related to that, the idea of this instinct, this soul, this guardian angel, which sometimes we really don’t want to listen to, we really want to fight, and become a different person than we are. From there, for the record, I came up with this angel character that thought she was an angel of love, and came down to Earth to try to be one, to find that everywhere where she was trying to create love, she created chaos. First hated herself and then hated her maker, and then retraced her steps to go back and give her maker a piece of her mind and realized that in all the places that she thought that she’d created chaos, beauty was growing back up from that.
That had a real parallel to me from my experience of having a couple-year period where I really felt like I wasn’t doing well in my relationships. I wasn’t being a good friend, a good partner, a good kid, and I just felt like I was fucking everything up. But, all of a sudden, I looked around, and I was like, “Wait, everything is healed back stronger. The relationships that have ended are stronger friendships than they ever were romances. My familial relationships are healthier than they’ve ever been. I guess this chaos has actually been the necessary ingredient for change, and change is the necessary ingredient for love, which is really what an angel of love is.” So I had this philosophy, and I retroactively tried to string it back through the rest of my record, and I found that it fit, at least for me.
Do you consider yourself a spiritual or religious person?
I’m going through my version of that phase. I don’t know how long it will last. I definitely believe in dark matter. For lack of a better word, there are tremendous unknowables. I’m not an avid atheist. My grandfather who’s a Buddhist philosopher calls them “the nothing people” and talks about how, “The only thing we know doesn’t exist is nothing. That’s actually even categorically, scientifically [true]. The only thing that we’re certain is bullshit is the concept of nothing. There’s nothing. There’s nothing in my hands right now. There’s something.” To have this vehement belief in nothingness is so weird.
They do say atheists are the strongest believers of anyone out there. Say I’m someone who’s listened to your albums that are already out and wanted a quick verbal trailer of the new one. What would you say?
It’s a record about codependency, self-actualization, and self-forgiveness. It is sonically explorative while keeping you in an indie-rock comfort zone. And more than my other records, it has more drums and real moments of pace but remains as a whole dreamy and confessional. To me, it’s a folk-rock record that will be labeled as alternative.
That last line is perfect. Even more so because I can appreciate how much substantial folk history and terminology you’ve got under your belt. That being said, what is your process for writing?
I have thoughts, and I write them down. I listen to things other people say and write them down. I listen to things I say, and I write them down. Then I try to find pieces that go together, almost like you’re walking around the world picking up puzzle pieces, and then you bring them back home and you’re like, “Oh shit. I got a corner.” I also think about how similar my writing process is to a kid trying to write a five-paragraph essay. The chorus is my thesis statement, and the verses are my supporting paragraphs, and the intro and outro are an introductory and a conclusion paragraph. I’m really collecting all these little lines and ideas I like, and then I have to figure out a thesis like, “Well, what am I actually trying to say?” Then occasionally, there’s a flood. Everything comes at once, and it all makes sense, and, all of a sudden, it’s finished, but that’s a rare occurrence.
Well, building an essay just goes back to what we started out talking about — the structure of a ballad. It’s a story with a beginning and an ending.
It’s nice when someone puts in the work to give you an emotional conclusion. You go from one place to another, and you understand all the stops you took along the way.
Photography by Dani Aphrodite
Styling by Ashley Abtahie
Hair by Peter Butler
Makeup by Mary Wiles
Set design by Michael Newton
Set design assistance by Vivian Swift
Photo assistant by Alonso Ayala
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