Maya de Vitry photo by Jay Strausser
Maya de Vitry Bottles Connectivity For The Only Moment
Singer/songwriter Maya de Vitry recently released her solo album, The Only Moment, which marks her fourth solo album in the six years since her departure from The Stray Birds. However, it consists of a cache of songs that she intentionally set to one side and allowed herself three years to write and sonically sharpen. This period also coincides with de Vitry starting down the road of producing albums by other artists in her home-base of Nashville and has been punctuated by her very consistent performance schedule which keeps her busy. She’s currently on tour for the new album and has many dates coming up this fall.
Several of the songs on the album show a fair amount of collaboration in the songwriting as well as the recording, and stem from de Vitry’s trend towards communal projects. Her current way of looking at music, which really is based upon her earliest experiences in roots music, is that there needs to be a connection made in the moment between musicians and between an audience. Her album title, The Only Moment, aptly reflects this idea of valuing the experience of creating music and of feeling connected to others. I spoke with Maya de Vitry about living in Nashville, collaboration, and the communal feelings that have shaped her production style and her life as a live performer.
Americana Highways: You do a lot of collaboration for songwriting. Does being in Nashville have value so that you can see people face-to-face and sit down together?
Maya de Vitry: Yes. There are a couple of songs, just on this latest record, that only came from living here and gathering here. There’s a song I wrote with Caitlin Canty. She just came over to my house one day, and we wrote “Odds of Getting Even.” Then, Phoebe Hunt, who is the harmony singer on this record, is just a good friend. We spend a lot of time together, and take walks, and talk about other, non-musical stuff. We also hang out and have a chance to make music together.
That song, “Nothing Else Matters,” comes from co-writing with her at her house. I went over to Oliver Wood’s house one day, and we wrote “Burning Building.” Also, that same day, we were working on a song, “Heart Is The Hero,” that ended up as the title track of the most recent Wood Brothers record. We didn’t finish it that day, and I forgot about it entirely. He took it to the other guys, and they finished it. I ran into him at a festival a couple of years later, and he told me, “We finished it and it’s on the new record!” I think the proximity of people here, and the common interest in making stuff, has been really great.
But it’s still often months and months that pass by before I’m in the groove of doing that with people, because maybe I’m away most of the time. I do have a date on the calendar in August to get together with someone to write. Then there are other people who I work with in other ways that make Nashville feel relevant to me, like working with other people on their projects, because I’ve started producing records for other people. There are just so many resources, of spaces, and different styles of studios. It’s a really deep, deep bench of fiddle players, for instance. [Laughs]
There are so many friends, heroes, and mentors who all live here. We can call on these people, and they just drive over. That still feels surreal to me. That is so different than where I grew up, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. That feels like a fairy tale, in a way, to be able to have all of these people gathered in one spot on a map, ready to make music. That’s pretty special.
AH: I heard that you allowed yourself to take three years over completing and recording this group of songs, and that’s pretty much unheard of, as a choice, these days. Does that come from your view of making music?
MdV: I just came from West Virginia, where I was camping at The Appalachian Stringband Music Festival, which everybody just calls “Clifftop.” I’ve been going there since I was four. I’ve been going for about 30 years. It’s a gathering of people playing mostly traditional music and music is part of their life and identity. People will just gather in circle and play these old time tunes on fiddle and banjo. It’s a real, person-to-person kind of thing. It’s not about being on stage. I’t just about being in a circle playing these old tunes. It’s basically like group music meditation. It’s so different from the idea of making a new album, with new songs, and taking it on tour. This is about playing music that makes us feel connected.
There’s so much of a demand to make yourself an individual thing that people can recognize and say, “This is your sound.” I think there’s some pressure in the music industry because people want to know what they are going to get when they listen to you. That can be really challenging for musicians to navigate. That’s a different rubric than what music was when we discovered it by ourselves. And that was not an individual experience, it was likely discovering things with other people, and the transformative quality of music.
That’s what music feels like, and it’s tough to package. I think I’m always toeing that line. There’s so much that I want to do, to put a cover on a record, to put a group of songs together, and take it seriously. I want to offer something that someone who might never be able to see me live can listen to, and might have a really good experience with a recording. I want them to feel connected, and to feel that kind of transfer, even just listening to that recording. I am trying to bottle that up in some way, but it’s hard to bottle up.
AH: Does this impact how you produce records, or does it depend on who you’re working with, and what they want?
MdV: The records that I’m producing are all in different stages of the process now. One is ready, but doesn’t have a release date, another is about to be mixed, and another one is one where we’re about to start the pre-production and sifting through the songs. It’s still new for me to be involved with people in this way, but one of the things that I try to bring to each of those is saying, “Let’s notice where we are and what we’re doing. Let’s not lose the opportunity to be in the moment with these musicians in the studio.” We should cherish the moment of music making and not give that away to what we can’t control. We can’t control what anyone thinks of what we make. We can’t control whether it’s successful by anybody else’s metric. But we can make sure that we pay attention to what we are doing in that moment.
I’ll remind artists in the studio, “Look around, and savor these people who are gathered, and this experience.” That’s coming from some of my own tough learning. Being in situations where it’s all so forward-looking, and so focused on outcomes, you get robbed of the actual music-making, I think. It’s really important to me that the actual experience of making music is really empowering to the people I’m working with, and restorative. I want them to feel lifted up by it.
AH: That’s really interesting because that’s a day in someone’s life, so why should it be a bad, stressful day for the musicians? It’s asking, “Can this please be a good day for you, also? Maybe even a great day?”
MdV: Yes! And, “How cool is this, for you, in the studio? How beautiful is this moment? What about the way that the instruments interact on this one?” It’s just noticing that it’s all coming from within, from the secret place within of making things. It should be fun, fulfilling, and beautiful. That’s just how my brain works, and what I have to offer. It would be really challenging, and I don’t think I’d be the right person for the job, if it didn’t matter what the experience was like, but the product had to be really tailored to some result.
AH: That’s an interesting ethical position to take, because you’re thinking about the impact of making music on other humans, even within your own band, presumably. You’re monitoring why you’re doing things and what you’re doing.
MdV: Yes, and I feel really lucky to play with the people who I play with. Joel, who’s not on this record, but has been a part of my live show for the past two years, is someone who I call a “professional bandmate.” He’s so good at supporting the whole in any way. He sees the whole and how he can lift the show, and the show is more than that hour on stage. It’s the whole day, and getting from place to place. Finding people who are compatible in that way has been very motivating for me. They have belief in the value of what we’re making. It’s really crucial to me being able to do it. I just played up at a festival with the band who played on The Infinite EP, my previous release, and I have been slowly shifting towards not using a setlist.
I had been opening for The Wood Brothers for two weeks, and my grandma had just passed. Me and my grandma were really close, so I was really having a hard time that month. I went from her funeral, to 48 hours later, getting on stage, to open for The Wood Brothers. I couldn’t write a setlist. I felt like I had no idea what to play or in what order. I thought, “I don’t know how this night is going to feel.” Joel was fully supportive of what I was doing, so I just made a “song bank,” putting a list of songs on a piece of paper. I think usually I would have been nervous to do an experiment like that in front of a big crowd. This was a lot bigger show than I usually do. I usually play very small shows. But we did this experiment because I felt like, “This is the best way that I’m going to be able to show up and be present in this moment.”
It was so fulfilling to be able to read the room and feel the energy of the people. I was able to think, “Oh, okay, let’s do this song now. And these two songs should be next.” We did that for the whole tour. I’m incorporating that more and more, and now we’re doing it with four people on stage. There is so much trust that you have to have with each other, only knowing the 20 songs that you might play. It keeps me on my toes! That’s been really fun, and has really made my show feel so, so different, from the band that I used to play in, The Stray Birds. Every other band I’ve been in, there’s been a setlist and song order that’s final before the show. But this has really helped me make a new culture on stage, and that kind of trust between people.
AH: Do you think the audience responds differently to this way of doing things?
MdV: I don’t know, because I don’t know if the audience realizes that we don’t have a plan. But I am feeling that the connection is there, and I’m able to shape and nurture the room. I feel like I’m able to guide and lead in a better way, since I’m able to read the room. If I seems like people want to get up and dance, we go in that direction. For me, my live shows have definitely been more interactive and feel more like an experience than they used to.
Thank you, Maya de Vitry, for chatting with us. Folks can find more details on her website here: https://www.mayadevitry.com/