Maya Keren is a songwriter, improviser, and educator from Philly living in Brooklyn. They play piano, guitar, and sing. They are interested in music as a practice of attention, touch, and deep listening that can reveal a more spiritually attuned way of living.
I caught up with Maya to talk about their early musical experiences, how they started writing songs and the making of their upcoming album “Slow Burn” which you can pre-order here.
CMM-What was the first music that really made an impact on you as a kid and what artist or band did you enjoy the most?
Maya-As a kid, I first started listening to music through the albums that my parents would play while cooking, which were mostly classical and jazz records. I remember listening to Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter and Duke Ellington songbooks, Miles Davis’s Birth of the Cool, some Bill Evans, Lester Young, Thelonious Monk. In the classical vein – I remember listening to Horowitz, Murray Perahia, Glenn Gould, playing Bach/Schumann/Chopin. It’s funny – as a kid, I felt very comforted by jazz and classical music, and felt very alienated by pop music my friends were listening to or that I heard on the radio. To this day, I have big gaps in my knowledge of popular music and I feel a little embarrassed by it… but it checks out because for most of my adolescence I was listening to classical and jazz music! I think my favorite artist as a kid was Glenn Gould for his beautiful second rendition of the Goldberg Variations that he made later in his life. (I was a nerd if you couldn’t tell already.)
CMM-When did you start writing songs and developing your own sound?
Maya-Although I was mainly listening to these old classical and jazz records, I will admit that I was also into the classic 2000’s girly songwriters – Sara Bareilles, Taylor Swift, Adele. I also was really into singing with my friends, trying to do three part harmonies to ornate Mariah Carey runs. I think it was around 11 or 12 that I started writing songs, by myself and with my friends, mostly singing and overdubbing harmonies on Garageband on my mom’s laptop. I think I started playing some piano chords underneath the singing, too.
I had been learning piano since I was a youngster, mostly basic classical pieces. I absolutely hated it. I remember my parents telling me that I was not allowed to quit until I was 13 (which as a 9 year old was tragically far away.) I was on the verge of abandoning piano, until by chance I joined my middle school jazz band in seventh grade (nerd life continues…) Playing jazz changed my life and my whole relationship to the piano/to music. It opened up music to me as a world that could be highly emotionally and spiritually charged as well as both technically and intellectually rigorous.\
Throughout middle and high school I got very deep into the history and tradition of jazz piano, but I also kept on singing and listening to more varied artists. I remember Daniel Caesar, Frank Ocean, Noname, and Lianne LaHavas all having strong influences on me as they were releasing their early albums in my teenage years. I think this is when I started to develop a sound.
I was still obsessed with jazz and jazz piano, but I also really loved to sing and write songs. I never really felt like singing over jazz standards felt quite right. The first interesting stuff I started to make came from trying to figure out how I could sing and play the pianistic language I loved, in a way that felt genuine. I think that tension is still a defining element of my sound now.
CMM-You have a record coming out this Spring called “Slow Burn”. What was the writing and recording process like and were there any particular pieces of gear you used to get the sound you were looking for?
Maya-The process of writing and recording Slow Burn felt like a creative breakthrough. As the songs were emerging I was figuring out a way of writing I had never really tried in the past; I was writing the song at the same time that I was recording it, as opposed to generally knowing the form and body of the song before opening a DAW. I think starting out as a live performer, I always assumed that songs needed to have a full live arrangement before they could be recorded.
During the process, I was inspired by the artist Saya Grey, who uses the DAW as a generative compositional tool. She talks about recording songs in a stream-of-consciousness flow, recording one section and adding a slew of overdubs which might then inspire the next section, overlapping or threading different stems and sections together. One pattern I noticed during this writing process is that my Logic sessions looked like messy stairs, rather than long stacks of rectangles. I was rarely recording full horizontal takes of individual instruments – rather, I started from a seed and worked vertically in bits and pieces, letting the song unfold naturally.
I work with pretty basic gear, both because I’m cheap and because I am curious to really get to know a piece of gear and push it to its limit before investing in a “nicer” version. I essentially used four mics for this album, an SM58 (which I heard Field Medic used for Floral Prince for micing both guitar and voice,) a Zoom H4, my apple wired earbuds, and my phone mic. The biggest challenges that I faced were figuring out ways to put bass and percussion/drums on the songs. I ended up making a lot of haphazard percussion setups in my kitchen, using tupperware and silverware. I would also use the SM58 as a percussion instrument by hitting/tapping/scratching it. For bass, I would often pitch my guitar down in different ways, or try to find unconventional built-in instruments (bell sounds/organ sounds) that I could mess with enough to turn them into interesting, unique bass sounds.
CMM-If you could do a score for any film director, who would it be and what would the film be about?
Maya-It’s interesting that you ask this question because for most of my life, I have been notorious for not being a movie person. But about three months ago I suddenly started to love movies and have watched more movies in the past few months than I have in my whole life! So I truly cannot make an informed judgement on who I’d like to score a film for. A couple weeks ago I watched a beautiful movie called Silvia Prieto by the Argentine filmmaker Martín Rejtman, that really spoke to me. I feel like writing music for a film like that would be really aligned. I also love the work that I’ve seen of Cheryl Dunye. I’d definitely want to work with someone who gets the DIY aesthetic and is interested in slow and subtle pacing, and who’s a bit of a freak.
CMM-Anything coming up?
Maya-I’m gearing up for a short East Coast release tour in March to celebrate the Slow Burn release (which comes out March 20!) Otherwise, I have some plans on the back burner for my band, Careful In The Sun. That’s pretty much all for now.
