Playing her new song “Bring Home My Man” during a recent show in Pasadena, New York singer-songwriter Maya Hawke cited one of its guiding inspirations: Leonard Cohen’s “How to Speak Poetry.” There’s only one explicit reference to Cohen’s poem in her song—his “You look good when you’re tired” becomes her “You look so good when you’re spent”—but the poem’s influence on her fourth record, MAITREYA CORSO, goes far deeper than that.
In his poem, Cohen commands that an artist offer radical honesty: no performance, all vulnerability. That’s a core goal of MAITREYA CORSO, Hawke’s hybrid folk/pop record—she wrestles with both overzealous ambition and crushing self-doubt in order to figure out who she really is. She faces several setbacks on that journey; these transformations are never linear. But her optimism is contagious. She beckons to the meek: Come, learn how to fill your shoes without getting too big for them. Move forward with me, and grow into yourself; let’s find happiness together.
Three questions posed in the hopeful opener “Love of My Life” anchor the record: “What if I got what I wanted? What if I was who I wanna be?” and “What if I knew how to be?” The bright-eyed queries encompass love, identity, and success, but even accented with a buzzy guitar line, they’re cautious, hyper-aware that wanting too much can be a curse.
Ambition is frightening. As an actor and child of actors, Hawke’s likely seen her share of big rises and huge falls; she surely knows that the desire to strive and succeed is terrifying because of how quickly it consumes. “Devil You Know” starts distorted and spare, like Sylvan Esso’s “Make It Easy,” then cracks into a fast-paced lyrical unscrolling as Hawke confronts the face of greed in the mirror. The verses are dense and slick, and sensual (an homage to the Beats, specifically album namesake Gregory Corso). In contrast, her paced, crackling chorus serves as a recognition and reckoning. She taps into speak-singing on her most anxious songs, stumbling to explain herself; her thrown high notes are a gasp, thin and vulnerable.
It doesn’t matter if she gets baptized in “heavy rain”; self-consciousness hovers over MAITREYA CORSO like a cloud. She’s comfortable when she can hide—fit neatly inside a shadow, as on the twinkling, toy-piano-poppy “Great Minds”—but recognizes it’s time to outgrow that.
She tries to break through on “Lioness,” which rotates between folkish fiddle and spacey, oscillating synth. Hawke’s amenable, then feigns strength (“Fuck with me and you’re gonna find out”) only to crumble into a splintered “that I will back down.” Trapped in an echo chamber of expectations—“Tell me where to stand/Tell me what to say/Tell me who I am/I can do it different”—she ascends, layering herself over those group vocals with a sole, insistent voice: “I’m not doing it wrong, I’m just doing it differently.”
She’s most direct in moments like that, where she’s assuring herself (and the listener) of a truth. But across the rest of the record, whether retelling or daydreaming, Hawke maintains a writerly attention to assonance and rhyme. When she’s singing quickly, each short line slips into the next, cascading. Her refrains center the desires underpinning MAITREYA CORSO. And the endlessly assured lullaby “Bring Home My Man” is neatly buttoned by its persistent rhymes, which makes the future feel clear, easy, and impenetrable. Only her intentionally crass lyrics (“I was all eyes, tits, and teeth”) feel unmoored, heavy-handed in retellings. That’s one thing that can’t fit just right; it doesn’t feel as honest.
But nothing’s truer or more open than sunshiney closer “Dream House,” where the manifestation in “Love of My Life” is realized. The jaunty, optimistic fingerpicking uplifts short, often rhyming lyrics; the final line of each stanza tumbles, like a laugh’s bottled inside. Singing with co-producer, co-writer, and now-husband Christian Lee Hutson, Hawke imagines a comfortable, settled future, and recognizes that it’s in part arrived: “It’s all in my mind/But as real as your touch.”
That line alone could collapse Hawke’s “magical misfit in a fantasy world” album conceit—there’s no longer a need to build a world, because this one’s just fine. By MAITREYA CORSO’s end, Hawke’s positioned herself like a big sister, not unlike the titular Maitreya itself: enlightened, fully realized, and ready to guide others to a loving, hopeful future.
