During high school, the now-24-year-old indie pop musician would wait until everyone in her house was asleep, usually about 10 p.m., then take out her ukulele, log on to her computer, turn up the gain on the microphone that her friends gave her for her 14th birthday, and play as quietly as possible.
These ukulele confessional ditties were crafted with a desktop recording app and Mxmtoon’s teenage turmoil.
“It felt like I had a space outside of school, or my friends or my family, that was entirely my own and entirely up to me to curate. I don’t know if I felt like I had many places like that when I was a kid, so it felt really important when I found it as a teenager,” Mxmtoon said in a Zoom interview from her Philadelphia hotel room. “I grew too big eventually. You can’t really become a pop star without telling your parents, I guess.”
After Mxmtoon revealed in late high school that she had over 10,000 SoundCloud followers and articles were being written about her, the first thing her mom asked was whether the people online knew her last name. They did not, and she still likes to keep her surname under wraps — preferring to go by just Maia.
In the years since that admission about her late-night recording sessions, Mxmtoon has released two studio albums (with a third on the way). And on Friday, she’ll perform for an audience in the tens of thousands as she opens for sibling pop trio AJR at Capital One Arena.
Her latest single, “I Hate Texas,” came about thanks to “Dune: Part Two.” The self-described cinephile spent the first half of her recent recording session with hyper-pop collaborator Underscores discussing the film and how its tone would change if the score had been that of a Western.
That is how Mxmtoon wrote her first country song. In the breakup song bedazzled with country twang and led by her melodic voice, she sings: “I’m turning every corner with exceeded caution/ Hoping, praying, begging that you’re not in Austin/ I hate Texas, but the exits have more room/ To run away from you.”
The rest of the album is an ode to the sincerity of her youth. “The whole record itself is vulnerable in a way that I feel like is reminiscent of the earlier Mxmtoon songs,” she says. She’s worked to figure out how to get back in touch with the vulnerability of her 17-year-old self and carry that into this new record.
For an artist not originally meant to be online, she has made the internet her playground, with accounts on Instagram, Facebook, X, TikTok, Twitch and YouTube. Oh, and she has published two graphic novels.
For a full-time musician, whose debut studio album peaked at 45 on the U.S. indie albums chart in 2019, that is a mountain of work. But Mxmtoon is a product of the golden age of internet influencers: “I just don’t know how not to,” she explains. “The people that I looked up to and admired when I was on the internet as a young kid were these like multi-hyphenate YouTubers that were doing everything under the sun.”
Plus, she adds, “I so much enjoy every side of everything creative that being able to dip my toes into each pond is super fulfilling.”
As she enters her mid-20s, Mxmtoon is trying to look back at her younger self with empathy. It’s easy to hear her adolescent songs today and feel a twinge of embarrassment, but those tracks have become motifs in the lives of so many fans that Mxmtoon wanted to reclaim them for her present self.
“Maybe I deserve to rewrite what I was doing when I was 17 so that way I can see it in the context of where I am now in my 20s,” she says.
Enter: the revised songs — songs for which Mxmtoon has changed the lyrics to better represent her current life. In the new version of her ukulele-led track “1-800-DATEME,” Mxmtoon switched out lyrics that previously only referenced having crushes on men to include crushing on women to represent her bisexuality.
“How often do we really get to sit with ourselves at the weirdest, most hormonally emotional moment of our lives and reassess how that makes us feel later on?” she asks. “I think it was really helpful to me to get back in touch with where I was when I was writing songs when I was 17 and reestablish that relationship.”
Because no matter where the fame and fans take her, the person she wants to be most loyal to is that ukulele-playing teenager back in California.
Aug. 2 at 7 p.m. at Capital One Arena, 601 F St. NW. capitalonearena.com. $89-$130.
