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There’s a point in every Maya Hawke conversation where the interview stops feeling like press and starts sounding more like someone trying to diagram the emotional wiring of modern adulthood in real time. Speaking with Kyle Meredith about her new album Maitreya Corso, Hawke digs into ambition, intimacy, fear, creativity, and the strange art of figuring out how to actually let another person know you. Somewhere between finishing Stranger Things 5, marrying songwriting partner Christian Lee Hutson, and working on new music, Hawke ended up with an album that circles the question of whether happiness is something you arrive at or an unfinished thing you learn how to live inside. Listen above or wherever you get your podcasts.
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What started as an album about work and ambition slowly became something else entirely; Maitreya Corso became a document of learning how to accept intimacy after years of keeping herself at arm’s length. “I did not imagine this level of intimacy,” she says, describing the relationship that inspired songs like “Dreamhouse” and “Love of My Life.” Hawke talks openly about dating Hutson twice before finally making it work, admitting that the first breakup came because she “really didn’t know how to accept being seen so fully.” That realization became the connective tissue of the album, which she describes as “a little guidebook on how to give up and be loved.”
“What so often creates division and pain is the fear that someone will reject the authentic you,” she says. “So you present them an inauthentic self, then you get caught in the lie and then everything explodes because everyone feels betrayed.” Hawke jokes that nobody should get married “unless they’ll sing a harmony for you on a song about somebody else,” but underneath the joke is the album’s larger thesis about vulnerability, trust, and allowing yourself to be fully known.
This wrestling with the self even ties back to the end of Stranger Things. After wrapping Season 5, Hawke says she went into a year-long depression due to “fear of never working again, fear of not being a good actor — like just having been well cast in this one big thing that knew how to use me right and then I was going to lose [that]. And that I didn’t know anything else and that I just sucked. I was just really scarted and lonely and I was really worried about it all.” She continues, “And so to be now a year past that year of sad and feeling like there’s so much stuff in the cannon, I’m really grateful and feeling really proud and happy.”
Listen to Maya Hawke talk about Maitreya Corso, Stranger Things 5, and more in the new episode above or by watching the video below. You can also get Maitreya Corso on vinyl or CD here.
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