The four songwriters who inspired Maya Hawke
Best known for her role as Robin Buckley in the hit Netflix series Stranger Things, in her short time in the limelight, Maya Hawke has shown that she is not one to be pigeonholed. After all, she has learned from the best, with her mother, Uma Thurman, and father, Ethan Hawke, two of Hollywood’s most respected actors.
As well as being an actor outside of the Stranger Things universe who has shown her talent in titles ranging from Asteroid City to The Kill Room, Hawke is also an accomplished singer-songwriter. She’s released two studio albums to date, 2020’s Blush and 2022’s Moss, with both receiving critical acclaim. Her most recent offering produced the singles ‘Thérèse’ and ‘Sweet Tooth’, which display the broad reach of her creative capacity as a composer and aesthetic visionary.
Unsurprisingly, as a musician, Maya Hawke cites many artists as influences. Whilst she notes prominent acts such as Taylor Swift and Arctic Monkeys amongst her favourites, she’s also a fan of stellar songwriters without the same level of fame, including Lemonheads frontman Evan Dando’s solo work, Wilco and Peach Fuzz.
When speaking to The Line of Best Fit in 2022 to list her favourite songs, Hawke gave fans an enlightening peek into her inner workings as a musician. After she chose the Bright Eyes track ‘At the Bottom of Everything’ from 2005’s I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning, she revealed how the band, as well as three other artists, inspired her music with their general approach.
She said: “Bright Eyes were a huge band for me. Fiona Apple and Bright Eyes were two artists who deeply inspired my lyrical ambition. In my head, there are two lanes that I try to focus on when I’m writing: the first is, ‘How simply can I put this thought?’ – and that comes from my Willie Nelson line of thinking, you know: ‘It’s not something you get over / It’s something you get through’ – and that’s such a beautiful, original thought about a breakup that he puts in such a clear way. It’s so unpretentious, so original.”
Continuing, Hawke added: “And then there’s the Bright Eyes and Fiona Apple way, which is: ‘How originally can I put this original feeling?’, which is a totally different thing. She’s like, ‘Kick me under the table all you want / I won’t shut up’. Or with Bright Eyes, it’s like, ‘But if you take that train under water, then we could talk it through’ – it’s more detailed.”
Maya Hawke concluded: “There’s this ambition to it, and Dylan has this too: this deep feeling of being well-read, putting your vocabulary and historical references into your songs and building these little memory palaces of thoughts and construction. Father John Misty does this too. When I was a teenager, I got really into picking them apart and writing down every lyric to a song, and being like, ‘What does this mean? What’s this a reference to? What is that called?’ They felt like little essays that I could pick apart and understand.”
Listen to ‘At the Bottom of Everything’ below.
