“I deserve to be in the room”: mxmtoon on Agency, Family, and Womanhood in ‘liminal space’

A statement album from start to finish, mxmtoon’s ‘liminal space’ is a sparkling record where playful escape meets fearless introspection.

Stream: ‘liminal space’ – mxmtoon

No matter how close relationships are, they can still be infinitely complex.

How much of yourself do you give to those around you, if you just don’t have it in you at that moment? These are the questions that Maia, aka, mxmtoon, poses to herself in her latest record, liminal space (via AWAL). As the title suggests, liminality is a feeling that often arrives parallel to growing up – and, as Maia describes, it is agency that will teach you the balance between loving yourself and being a loved one.

liminal space is a record addressed to anyone “struggling to understand agency.” Permeating the record are themes of early adulthood, self-realization, familial ties and relationships. mxmtoon deals with the weight of these topics seamlessly, maintaining the decided playfulness in her lyricism that has garnered her loyal fanbase over the last seven years. Pushing the boundaries on everything she’s done thus far, Maia steps into herself and her storytelling with a full force of unwavering authenticity and unapologetic womanhood on this new record.

Maia’s journey through music has definitely been a unique one – in true Gen Z fashion, she began posting videos of her songs to YouTube in the late 2010s, building her own community within her own corner of the internet. Looking back from the standpoint of liminal space, Maia shares that she has come full circle in many ways. Returning to her roots of songwriting in open honesty, she shares that liminal space isn’t just a culmination of her music journey thus far, but is also a return to form in some ways. Creating an album with bold storytelling and introspective strength, mxmtoon arrives with clarity in this new phase of her artistry.

Beyond self-realization, this project also saw Maia intentionally take on an all-woman team on this record, expanding the scope of liminal space’s conception. From womanhood, to relationships, growing up and agency, mxmtoon makes new strides in her latest album, liminal space, and what arrives is a lush soundscape of glimmering productions and beautifully crafted lyricism. Maia sat down with Atwood Magazine to reflect more on her journey thus far, chats working with an all woman team, and coming to terms with power through vulnerability.

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:: stream/purchase liminal space here ::

:: connect with mxmtoon here ::

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Watch: “i hate texas” – mxmtoon

A CONVERSATION WITH MXMTOON

mxmtoon: I feel really good. and thank you for the kind words. I’m so glad you like it. I’m so over the moon that it’s out in the world. It feels like I’ve been working on it for a really long time and I think that the reception to it so far has been really positive, people are really enjoying it and empathizing with a lot of the stories that I’m telling. So it feels really good to have it out in the world.

mxmtoon: Personal agency is something I’ve really felt to be central to the last two years of my life. Whether it’s decisions in my family, thinking about how your participation in a relationship may look – whether it’s romantic, platonic – and then also determining how you separate obligations you feel like you have for others, versus what you need to do for yourself, and pursuing your own personal dreams.

So I think a lot of the conversations and songs are really directly about just figuring that out, you know. Maybe you wanna break up with an ex, that’s a decision that comes from personal agency. Maybe you need to have a harder conversation with your mom about how you show up for her, while also honoring the things that you need to do in your own life. So I think that’s kind of the best way to describe liminality, and liminal space, as this overarching theme of being in these harder moments while you’re also in the midst of making a lot of decisions that you realize have to come from you – and can’t be determined for you by others.

Personal agency is something I’ve really felt to be central to the last two years of my life, … determining how you separate obligations you feel like you have for others, versus what you need to do for yourself, and pursuing your own personal dreams.

mxmtoon: You’re 100% right. I was a teenager when I started, and I think it’s a really interesting position to begin in – when you’re a very half formed version of the person you hope to become. And so it’s definitely interesting to think about how my third album feels the most me that any project has ever felt – just by nature of the fact that I feel like I’ve grown into who I am in a larger capacity. It almost feels like an introduction, in a greater sense, to who I am – even though it’s my third record. This is who I, as an artist, hope to present going forward. liminal space feels the most settled in myself in comparison to my past projects, even though a lot of themes and subjects are about how I have no idea what’s going on. I think there’s a larger piece of it too. I feel grateful that at this point in my career, I can look at the project I’m currently releasing and feel myself reflected in it so heavily. It’s the first project where my adult identity is really cemented in the themes and topics in a very real way compared to how I began.

I think there’s an element of it where with every release you’re like, this is who I am, but I did feel the pressure when I was 19 and releasing my first record. Like, is this the beginning for me? Making a debut album at 19 years old? There was an enormous amount of pressure to try and grow up really fast and write songs that felt more mature than I maybe felt at that point in my life. And for the first few projects I did when I was 17, I think I was really chasing that feeling of, I have to prove to other people that I deserve to be here, and I have to age myself up, so that way my narratives and stories are acceptable to people. And what I found with liminal space is that I really needed to stop doing that and really needed to check in with myself, how do I maintain honesty in my storytelling and not worry about what other people are going to think when they receive it? And to just really tune in to where my truth was at the point in time that I was this record. I feel I did that in a real way, where I don’t feel detached from the project and I don’t look at it like, that’s a 19 year old trying to be way older than she actually is. I can look at this project and be like, that is just a woman in her 20s really figuring stuff out. That is absolutely how I feel and will feel for a very long time.

mxmtoon: I think it’s like, definitely, obviously just growing up. I’m 24 now and I feel like I’ve existed long enough in my adult identity to really feel tuned into it a little bit more. With rising, I think it was just such a different time. We were in the middle of a pandemic and there was so much uncertainty about how that record would be. Like would it even exist in a physical form? I wasn’t sure if I was gonna do shows for it, and there was a lot of stuff up in the air.

I think with this record, what made me really wanna take my time with it was like, I did feel so mentally checked out of the process. Whether it was because of the pandemic or because I was really tired from working on past projects, I just wanted so much to feel present in every aspect of creating something again, and I think that the last time that I had really felt that was very early on in mxmtoon. When I was writing for myself, not thinking anybody else was gonna listen to the music that I was making. So I tried to check in this time as I made this record, and just be like, ‘how do I get back to that and just really make these songs because I wanted to make them for myself and not because I wanted to make them for anybody else.’

mxmtoon: Totally, and it’s hard to get back there. I think there’s ways in which I got there and ways in which I didn’t. I always try to keep that in the back of my mind when I’m making stuff though.

What I found with ‘liminal space’ is that I really needed to check in with myself… and tune in to where my truth was at the point in time that I was this record.

mxmtoon: No literally! I’m so lost all the time, the first four years of my adult life were really defined by being indoors and figuring out what to do. Same for you I’m sure! It was just such an awful time. It just made sense for everyone to check out and I was like, existing in this brain fog for a few years at that point. Like I had to put my hat on and be like, all right, we gotta get going with this now, haha!

mxmtoon: I think it was so important, and I was really lucky last year when I did a re-release of my very first EP, plum blossom. I had kind of a trial run of this idea of only working with women. We had an incredible team of women: Merril Garbus, Maryam Qudus and Laura Sisk, on plum blossom (revisited). It was really fun. Once I did that, I was like, I really want to do this for a full record and just work with women. I knew that a lot of the stories I was gonna be talking about were really intricately related to my gender identity, and talking about stories that specifically related to my experience of being a woman. Working with women just made so much sense. I’ve written those stories in the past when I’ve been in sessions with men, who have been really supportive, and wanted to champion whatever I’m talking about. But they also have conversations with me where they’d be like, why do you feel that way?

And I’m like, dude, I can’t explain that to you. Like, I shouldn’t be having to explain why I’m depressed as a woman a lot of the time. It was hard to be in a teacher role every single time, so to take away the mental fatigue of doing that every single time I wanted to write a song, it just made so much sense to work with women. I think it became this extended thing where, if I’m telling my story as a woman, and I’m writing these stories with women, I want these songs to be produced by women, I want them to be mixed, mastered and visually directed by women. And so, it just became like a really great experience where I was surrounded by these incredibly talented female creatives every step of the way. So it was certainly something that was intentional.

mxmtoon: I mean, like again, you’re so right. There needs to be more active spaces for women to deploy their talent and skill, because there’s no shortage of talented women out in the world. We just have to make sure that there’s places for them to work, and showcase their best ability. I hope to be able to do that with mxmtoon continuing forward. I think it was so good, not just for me, but also for every person on my team to be consciously challenged to work with women. I think that that’s something the music industry is, unfortunately, not accustomed to. That’s a really sad state of being that we need to change as fast as possible. If I can do that with my own project I’d really like to, I’d like to be a greater change outside of it too.

mxmtoon: There’s a handful of songs on it that were kind of hard for me to write. So much of the songs are about relationships with family, and I’m really close with my parents. They are my number one fans, and I am so grateful, but even when you have close relationships with people in your life, they can still be really complex. Diving into the intricacies of my mother-daughter relationship or my father-daughter relationship was really important to me on this record, but it was also really scary because I knew that my parents would be listening to the songs, and having to hear me be dramatic or vulnerable in different instances. When I wrote “now’s not the time,” I remember being scared for the first time about my mom listening to a song that I had made. I hadn’t experienced that fear since I was like 17, and putting stuff on SoundCloud wondering if my parents were ever going to hear it.

I had that same kind of panic come up when I had written that song. But it was different too, because I had known that what I wrote was something I was really struggling with at the time, but I was also really scared of having my mom listen to it. Because I didn’t want her to feel like she had done anything wrong. And I think it was important for me to hold the back-and-forth feeling of complicated emotions towards a situation, especially involving my mom. I just remember sitting her down and being like, I made this song. Do you understand it’s not how I feel every step of the way, and it’s something I was feeling at a point in time, but I don’t want you to feel like it’s your fault. I think it’s just a human experience to feel, it’s complex to be close with someone. But she loves that song and it’s one of her favorite songs on the record, even though it’s about her. So you just have to trust the people that love you, love you. I’m really grateful that I trusted myself to be honest and trusted my mom to respect my honesty.

mxmtoon: If I had to choose a favorite right now it would probably be… I was listening to “elevator” the other day when I was doing a listen-along party for the record, and I was like, wow, this is so good. It was the very first song I made for the entire album and I had no idea that it would be on the record at that point, but I think it’s kind of perfect. I definitely have no notes on it and I’m really happy with it.

mxmtoon: In the beginning I started with a looser idea. I knew I was writing an album, but I didn’t know what it would be about. I actually have a physical notebook with me and I carry it with me all the time. So I was writing in that during the process of liminal space, but eventually it was coming in with a list of like, we’ve covered this thing, but we haven’t done this thing yet, like, trying to figure out an overarching narrative through that. Sometimes I’d come in with a meme I saw online and be like, this is so funny, we should write something based on this. So I think prioritizing fun and just really letting myself have the space to, like, talk about anything. I think there were maybe over 30 songs that I wrote over the course of working on liminal space, and obviously we landed on 12 to put on the record.

mxmtoon: Haha! More than I’d like to admit, I feel like maybe a good 80% of them were inspired by memes.

mxmtoon: Honestly! There’s so much merit in taking ideas from them!!!

mxmtoon: I’m really bad at keeping up to date with who is currently putting out music. Like I’m so behind on so many things. I really have only listened to BRAT and Charm this entire year, I have to admit. I’m obviously excited about both of those projects. I really love Charli, I love Claire. One of the artists I’ve had on repeat, she’s not by any means new, because the album is from 1966. Norma Tamega. She’s amazing, and she has one really popular song which I love because it’s the theme song to one of my favorite shows, called What We Do in The Shadows, but the record that song is from is incredible. She’s really great. If people like Charm, they’ll probably like Norma. She’s one of my favorite artists recently, even though the record’s from 1966.

mxmtoon: Oh man. liminal space to me really represents a new chapter for mxmtoon. I think so much of my project has been defined by the teenage years that I was active online, and it felt really important for me to feel like there’s almost like a blank slate waiting for me on the other end. And as a reintroduction to who I am, and the things that I like, and the music that I make. I really do feel like that is what I achieved, you know, I’m excited for people to keep listening to it and to keep kind of building the world around it. But, yeah, I would say it signifies a new beginning.

mxmtoon: I was in the driver’s seat more than I’ve ever been before, and I think that was really encouraging. When I was younger, I could feel the imposter syndrome permeate every single thing that I did every time I was in a session with another person. I was so aware of being 20 and working with someone who was a decade older than me, like, can I even be here right now? And thinking that whatever they say is what I should be writing or following. With this record I felt so empowered by the people that I was working with, and comfortable in my sense of self to the point that every decision I made really felt like I was in tune with what I wanted to do. Also recognizing like, yeah, this is my third album. I’ve been doing this for a while – seven years now – I definitely have my own developed experience. I see this in myself in sessions, just feeling way more empowered to be a leader. So, I think that it definitely just helped me step in with myself and view myself as a professional. And someone who deserves to be in the room a lot more than I had felt in the past.

So much of my project has been defined by the teenage years that I was active online, and it felt really important for me to feel like there’s almost like a blank slate waiting for me on the other end… I would say it signifies a new beginning.

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