Maiya Blaney

Nora Cammann

Country is Black music. Rock is Black music. Punk is Black music. Grunge is Black Music.

After decades of erasure, Black artists are reclaiming what has always been theirs. Across every genre, there’s a reclamation of sound and a reexamination of what Black music truly is and can be. Black music is, and has always been expansive and unbound by the boxes it's been forced into by the white gatekeepers of the music industry. With A Room With A Door That Closes, Maiya Blaney steps into this lineage, defiantly adding her voice, her guitar, and her songwriting to punk.

The 11-track project marks the Brooklyn-based artist’s second release. Her debut, 2021’s 3, featured collaborations with Flwr, Chyld, Roswell, and D Dand, and stands as a dreamy neo-soul project that showcased her ability to weave jazz-inspired melodies with poetic lyricism. With A Room With A Door That Closes, Maiya delivers an artistic rebirth. There’s grit. There’s rage. There’s soul.  It’s vulnerable, expansive, and emotionally charged. For fans of her first album it’s a reintroduction. For new listeners, it’s a striking debut. 

Just a few days before A Room With A Door That Closes dropped, we caught up with Maiya over Zoom to talk about her new project.

I want to read to you what my friend Cierra said after she listened to ‘Recognize Me’: 

“I am loving this. Not it making me wanna get higher and go outside to lay down if it weren’t 1000 degrees. I love music that makes me feel melancholy. This is what Bella would listen to in New Moon after Edward left her if Bella were Black.”

That is the best review anyone could ever give that song. Thank you. I'm gonna carry that with me for the rest of the day, and beyond.

How did you decide on your album title, A Room With A Door That Closes? What does it mean?

 The title is a bit of a double entendre. In the literal sense, when I was writing the album, I was moving a lot, and there was a sense of consistency and stability, and safety that I really wanted, that I didn't have at the time. I think the album kind of became the space that I needed in order to process certain big, hard feelings. A Room With A Door That Closes is that desire for that privacy and that safe space and that secure space. And then the double entendre of it is that it's also kind of a metaphor for my brain. It's this place that I can go to—insert SpongeBob: “At least I’m safe inside my mind.” I get to be the gatekeeper of my own brain. There's this solace and camaraderie with myself about how much I get to share about what’s going on. 

As an artist, your personal life is a currency. People don't just want the music, and they don't just want you. They also want to know what you ate for breakfast and who you’re texting. Part of the formula for a new artist to “blow up” seems to be the artist’s willingness to give all of themselves to their fans. How do you reconcile with that, while also keeping some things for yourself?

It’s something I started doing a while ago. Even just having an Instagram. I remember there was this thing that happened in middle school/high school. I have a lot of pure joy in my heart, and I felt the need to share that with people. I felt like it was my duty to be a light being all the time. I was so depressed. It was really, really bad. It was dark. And having guidance counselors come up to me in the hallway and be like, "Babe, we should go talk." I had people being like, "What's wrong?"—all that sort of thing. And as much as I would like to say that those questions came from a place of genuine concern, it kind of felt like a backhanded way of saying, You're not doing your job of making me feel better, which is what you've been doing every day til’l this point, by being the light beam that you are. And I resented that so much. I was like, It's not my job to make you feel better. The fact that I have access to light and the fact that I have access to warmth doesn't mean that I am incapable of  having a bad day. I was immediately like, All right, fuck that. 180. I'm not going to do that anymore. I'm going to, very much for myself and for my loved ones, allow myself to have joy, but I don't ever want to feel like it is my job to put on a mask of joy for other people's entertainment, or to put on a mask of content in order to pacify. Because I think that's something that I was tasked with from a young age, and also I think something that's not foreign to any Black femme people who might be listening to this—they might be like, Yeah, I know exactly what you mean.

In a broader scheme, as far as gatekeeping with celebrity, or gatekeeping with fandom, or whatever you want to call it, I think I've been gearing up to do it for a while. Because it’s really just the idea of, How much of my joy is dependent on this other person performing it and reflecting it at me? And I think that I had to learn from a very young age that none of it is dependent on me solely, and that if I choose to, then that is something that I'm expediting, that is a labor that I'm serving. And I want to do that out of groundedness and out of true desire, rather than feeling like it's because I have to.

During the process of making the album, did you write on your iPhone or in a journal?

Both. I think what's nice with the phone is that there's a sense of immediacy—like, Oh, I just had an idea, let me just write it down really quick, put it back in my back pocket. But then there's also something really nice of, if I want to create and be not at all connected to anything, like, in a more analog way, then the notebook is very nice. One of the songs off the album was a journal entry that I was reading back, and then I was like, Oh, that kind of reads like lyrics, and then I, like, turned it into a song. 

Which song?

‘Left,’ the second song. That's a literal journal entry

How much has changed between the journal entry and what’s on the album? 

I think I've probably extended it—I made it longer. But, yeah, that's a journal entry. 

The best stuff is the most honest. But, it’s never easy to bare your soul. Did you have any apprehension about putting that journal entry on the album? 

We’re really in a period of just, fucking reach out and touch. I think that I’m most drawn to people who love very, very fearlessly, and love with a lot of courage and vulnerability. And when I think about the artists that inspire me so much—Jeff Buckley, Björk, York, Amy Winehouse—people who put their heart out onto the street and say, If you run it over, okay. I think that this might sound contradictory to what I was talking about before, as far as holding parts of myself to myself, but I think there’s this idea of meeting people where they’re at, you know? I just felt like it was really important for the first time you hear my voice, clear as day on the album, to be a moment that reaches out and actually meets people. I think it’s probably one of the more meeting places on the album—as far as genre, as far as just the way it sounds. It’s not mainstream, but there are parts of it that could be poppy, kind of. I just wanted a hand to reach out real quick, just so that people could be like, In case you want to be here, this is your chance, you know? Which definitely might maybe lose me a few cool points for the future. 

Nahhhhh!

Like, you know what? You don’t have to come to the party if you don’t want to. But, I gotta reach out. At this moment in my life, at least, I gotta reach out.

David Murray

You started learning how to play guitar while you were recording your first album, 3. A Room With A Door That Closes feels like you took 15,000 steps forward. 3 was more neo-soul and light, and this is grunge, punk—jungle at times—and in your face. I’m interested in how we arrived here. In your interviews for 3, all the influences you mentioned really show up on this album.  Does it feel like your skill set and your taste aligned, and this was the natural next step? 

Thank you so much. Learning how to play guitar provided me with a lot of agency. On the first album, it was kind of like a mixtape of sorts, and it was very reliant on other people. It was like, Can you send me a beat so I can write to it. There was one song on it that I was like, This is the hook, these are the chords, and then asked somebody to make a beat to that—basically sang them the beat, and then was like, Can you put instruments to it? And then that ended up being one of the more popular songs from the record. That was really affirming to me, to be like, Okay, I  can do this. I know how to make music. I know how to start a song and end a song. That coupled with my skills developing is the reason the album is able to be what it is. I think also the time of my life, and the fact that I was transient, and the fact that I stopped dating men—my eyes were going like [mimes eyes opening wide], in a deep way. It only made sense for the jump to happen. Listening to it, I was like, People who listened to 3 are gonna be like, What the fuck is—

But in a good way! You mentioned that you stopped dating men. Congrats on that! What other life experiences were happening that helped inform the angst and high emotion of the album?

So many things. There’s four years between albums now, so there's so much life going on, and I think it's less about what was going on and more about how much I talked about what was going on. I think that's really the difference, because in a lot of ways, I've been saying, like, while making this album, This is the album that I could have made and deserved as a 16-year-old. A lot of this album, I've been referring back to my teenager self—that self that was so depressed and getting pulled over in the high school hallway by a guidance counselor. In a lot of ways, it belongs to her. There's a lot of stuff that was on the first album that comes from a deep sense of mourning and grief, but I decided to frame it in such a way that made it nicer to listen to. And for that, I was like, I don't know—maybe it was for me. Maybe I needed a balm on my heart. Maybe I needed something to be sweeter. But for this one, I was like, Fuck it. I don't want to do that anymore. I really don't.

The Godmother of Grunge is a Black woman, Tina Bell. Black women are all over punk, grunge, and rock. The music industry likes to act like this isn’t the case. How do you feel looking back at all the Black women who have come before you and did what you’re trying to do?

There's so much reverence for Black women holding guitars. There's so many more of us than we get to see, and that sucks. I remember I looked up, “Black women guitarists” years ago, when I first started wanting to play guitar, and Erykah Badu came up. I love Erykah. I do. She played guitar, like, one time on stage, as far as I know. I could be wrong. Maybe she shreds. But it's not the sort of thing. Whereas if you were to search up "guitarist," you'd have a bunch of white dudes come up. There’s more of us than we get to see. I'm happy to add another drop of water into the bucket. That makes me happy.

In a 2021 interview, you said:  “I have these amazing visions of me doing shows after COVID, barefoot on stage, fro picked out to the max, and just shredding on the electric with an all Black femme band behind me. Can’t wait.” Are you still aiming for that?

Yes, that's so close. Like, this year. It’s funny that you found that quote. I've thought about that quote so much. I've had my hair in locks for a lot of the album because I didn't want to have to—I love her, but she takes a little bit more effort. There was this moment where I was like, Oh my god, the album’s gonna be out, and my afro is gonna be out, and I'm playing electric guitar, and I was like, My vision is coming true My vision is coming true.

You’re on album two, and you’re ultimate dream is going to happen this year. How does that feel?

It’s the most Virgo/Pisces Moon-coded thing; I’m a very strategic dreamer. I like to think about my dreams very vividly. I like to give them colors, places, feelings, and material.  I like to see them very well because then I can actually be like, Okay, what's step one? How do we get there? Rather than letting it be too nebulous. It's very nice to have things that I've hoped for be realized, but then also, I'm very much one who, as much as I hope for something, I also live for it, and I'm also moving towards it in any way that I can. There's also that feeling of, Well, of course, we're here. Because that's what we've been working towards. But then there's also that thing of being like, And also, nothing is guaranteed, and not everything is within my control. And how lucky are we that we got to get here? So, it's like a double-edged thing.

To go back to the album. How did you make ‘Fumbled’?

I was just like, What if we did a punk song with jungle music—that would be really awesome. There’s a lot of people who’ve kind of done that before as well. I was listening to this band lollirot a lot. When I was listening to that, I was like, Oh God, that’s so fucking sick. And obviously listening to Prodigy, Skunk Anansie. And I was like, We gotta do something here. And, so that was sort of where the premise came in, and then digging into more [of] the teenager, childlike, youthful thing. There’s two songs on the record where I really allowed myself to say stuff without thinking, which I never allowed myself to do, and it’s ‘Fumbled’ and ‘Carmen Electra,’ those two songs. Those two are robably the scariest for me to put out, because I hate saying things without thinking them through. But when you’re processing rage, you don’t have hindsight from the jump. There’s that first moment of just white heat where you’re just like, Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you. And I wanted to pay homage to that feeling—that unprocessed, unbridled anger that has no wherewithal, that has no hindsight, that has no feeling of grace, that’s just like, Yo, fuck you. It’s immediately to the defense. And like I said, I never, I never really do that. So that’s where ‘Fumble’ came from. It came from that place of like, Fuck you.

Punk is political, and has always been about resisting, being anti-establishment, and pushing forward radical ideas.  But many so-called 'punk' artists today seem more focused on the aesthetic than the politics. You’ve spoken out numerously about injustices going on around the world. Last year, your music was featured on a compilation album with 100% of sales being donated to organizations supporting Palestinian and Sudanese liberation. Why is it important for you to not only speak out but also use your art as a force for good?

That question feels so relevant even to this moment now. I don't think it would make sense to be an artist that didn't also allow my humanity to come through. I don't want a world in which my art doesn't fit into my protest, or in which it feels like I can't be angry in my music, or it feels like I can't be righteous in my music. I don't want it to be like, Oh, well, this, you know, image of people rioting in the streets because their families are being taken away, and these songs exist on totally different planes. I don't really want a world in which I have to pick one or the other, and I don't want a world in which people feel like they have to pick one or the other. It's very important, at least for me, to create music that can exist within multitudes of times and multitudes of feelings. Because to say, well, this is an album you can only listen to when everything's going okay, is to write a very tiny album. I think it's our duty to say, you don't have to choose between listening to me and listening to the world. You should be able to listen to both and I feel that now with everything that's going on everywhere in the country, with the ICE raids that are happening and seeing fucking curfews going on, however many miles away from where my family lives, and, obviously everything going on in Gaza and just multiple genocides happening around the world. And I don't want to have to feel like, Oh, you have to listen to one or the other. I want people to know that they can listen to both, and that my music is not exclusive of humanity and of life.

Your music videos have a specific look and feel; you’re really good at world-building in that way. What have some of your inspirations been as you’ve been putting together these visuals?

Tapping into high school, growing up in Montclair, there’s this music collective called Serendipity that’s very prominent in the DIY North Jersey scene. And I definitely came up on that and wanted to tap into this grittiness of going to a show at the Meat Locker, and driving around in, your one friend's car smoking weed—or not smoking weed if you were scared—and just being like, Nobody fucking understands, but it’s okay because we understand us. I wanted to tap into that sort of flannel teenager shit. I was also watching My So-Called Life at the time, so that tapped right in. I was like, there we are—90’s angist, suburbs, we get it. The video for “Recognize Me” is very much based in that. It's me in my own bedroom, just screaming into my hairbrush. And then it sort of goes more mystical after that. I was also getting into cyberpunk at the time. [I] was watching a lot of cyberpunk films. I watched Robocop, and I remember texting Fiona [Kanel] who directed the “Fumbled” video, and being like, we're making Robocop. Something about cyberpunk that felt very aligned with the album.  I think, just the cityscapes, but having them be all like neon and wet and dark and certain, light coming in, but only a little bit at certain areas.

A Room With A Door That Closes is coming out at the halfway point of the year. What are your plans for the rest of the year?

Definitely to do shows, so many shows. To make more music, to hopefully continue to build community, and not just online, but get to meet people, and for that community to have integrity and actual dialogue. I'm excited for the album to exist without me. I feel like it's in my body, and I'm excited for it to have legs and just for the freedom of newness and what can come from that. I'm excited for that.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.