PARTING SHOT
MAYA HAWKE WEARS MANY HATS: ACTOR, WRITER, SINGER. BUT FOR Hawke, everything comes down to words. “I just see myself as a person who likes to try to tell stories, who’s in love with language.” She’s doing that with several recent projects, including her third album Chaos Angel (May 31). “I don’t respond to vibes really,” she says, instead she focuses on the lyrics and how the words align with the melody. Speaking of those words, she says, “I don’t need anyone else to think that my lyrics are good, but I put a lot of work into them and they’re really important to me.” Another story she’s telling is that of the novelist Flannery O’Connor, who she portrays in the film Wildcat, directed by her father, Ethan Hawke. “He’s my biggest supporter and my toughest critic.” While she’s busy filming the highly anticipated fifth season of Netflix’s Stranger Things, you can next hear her voice the emotion Anxiety in Inside Out 2 (June 14). “I just am so honored to be a part of this project. My joke about it is that it’s the only audition I’ve ever had where I cried. That’s how powerful the story is.”
“I just see myself as a person who likes to try to tell stories, who’s in love with language.”
What inspired your album?
Over the process of making my last two records there have been a couple of little melodies—little pieces of songs that I wrote that I didn’t want to scrap in order to fit it into the style of songwriting that I used. I was kind of waiting for my own brain to finis
