Maya Hawke “hates putting out music”: What happened to the joy of creating?
Maybe I’m naive, but even in the hellscape land of 2026, surely things haven’t become so bleak that we have to admit to hating music, our one crumb of mundane joy?
I truly do appreciate the nuances: not everything is sunshine and rainbows, and therefore neither should the songs that we listen to. The whole purpose of music, that we have been told for so long, is that it’s meant to help us process our whole arc of emotions, whether that be good, bad, or indeed, ugly.
So we’ve established: not everything needs to be pretty, but surely some level of respect for yourself and your audience still entails that putting out music is done through a genuine want and desire to be in the space, and not painted like a necessity that you must endure from the confines of your luxury, ivory tower?
Yes, there is someone I’m aiming towards with all of this. Recently, Maya Hawke – the Stranger Things actor turned singer, and daughter of Hollywood heavyweights Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman – admitted that despite offering up four albums in the span of the past six years, she “hates” putting out music.
I don’t wish to misconstrue Hawke’s comments, because she told People during the interview in question that she is also “thrilled” people are hearing her latest music, but that she ultimately has a complicated relationship with the release process as “There’s something that feels very yucky to me about it, and it’s painful and hard.”
When I reviewed her new album, Maitreya Corso, at the beginning of the month, the major overriding element that struck me through it all was that the power of the lyricism was the sword Hawke clearly lives and dies by. It was warbling, sometimes dizzying, and often deeply incisive: that can be considered as nothing but a strength.
In this sense, her stance that releasing this album in particular involves a “pointing at the self, where it feels so great to write all these personal songs, and to record them and make them with your friends, but then you have to promote it, and it feels like promoting your diary” is entirely understandable.
Yet I equally can’t shake the feeling that saying you “hate putting out music” is not only disingenuous but also just a step too far. After all, we’re living in a time where many people would love nothing more than to live out that kind of fantasy, yet through money, lack of opportunity, or a myriad of other factors, that will never become a reality.
By comparison, here is someone who has been granted that illustrious path through the virtue of the privilege of her own life. Hawke, having the circumstances that she does at her disposal, is, again, not a flaw on her part. However, she still speaks to a rising sense among artists that they are losing the passion for what they are meant to do.
Within this, there is also a slightly nauseating idea on the rise, that music has to be some form of trauma dump in this day and age, likely part of the reason that Hawke says that the release of her latest songs feels like “promoting [her] diary”, thus making it “painful and hard”.
It just seems to me like this is truly sucking the life out of what is meant to be one of the richest art forms in existence. Of course, the trials and tribulations of life can be extremely painful, which totally warrants expression through song if the musician sees fit, but to then voice this as something plainly unenjoyable and undesirable must be the antithesis of what the message should be.
Perhaps I’m just too much of an optimist, but I feel as though, even in the bleakest moments of life and music, there is still enough passion that should lie as a bedrock, so that it doesn’t become the unbearable and painstaking task that Hawke is somewhat painting it to be. That can’t be too much to ask.
Music should be powerful. It should be emotional. It should be stirring. But by the same token, it shouldn’t get dragged down in so much heartbreak that it makes an artist harbour an odd feeling of resentment to what is not only their job, but their life’s calling. If that is the case, then somewhere along the way, something has gone drastically, devastatingly wrong.
