dawn is the latest exciting chapter for the California-raised and Brooklyn-based musician known as Maia, who started playing music at six years old and was trained classically on violin and cello. As her musical studies continued, Maia eventually gravitated towards the guitar and ukulele—the latter instrument shaping the very foundation of her musical career. "That's how I started doing covers of songs," she remembers. "I'd take home the ukulele from music class and try to learn how to play the songs that I loved."
Maia's transformation into mxmtoon further developed when she was being bitten by the songwriting bug after receiving a school assignment to write a song: "I wrote a song about not knowing what to write a song about," she laughs. Eventually, private toiling turned public as she began posting her music online as mxmtoon in 2017 with the hushed, loose-sounding “1-800-DATEME."
"At that point, I already used social media to express myself," she explains, "and making songs was something that felt like another aspect of expressing who I was." Although Maia cites kindred musical spirit Rex Orange County an influence, she stresses the personalness of her music above all else: "Writing music feels like a diary entry to me—a way to keep track of my thoughts. I'm too concerned with sounds or styles, just writing what makes sense to me."
Her first EP, plum blossom , was released in 2018 right around the time when she graduated high school and decided to focus on music full-time. The EP clocked more than 100 million streams on Spotify alone—not bad for songs recorded by herself in her parents’ guest room. Since then she’s sold out her US tour, is amassing millions of streams per day across DSP’s and gained millions of followers and subscribers across YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram, making a point of using her ever-growing platform to speak out on issues close to her heart. “As a young bisexual woman of color from a family of immigrants, a lot of current events directly affect who I am,” says maia, who’s mixed Chinese-American. “I firmly believe it’s my obligation and opportunity to speak on issues that affect us all.”
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