You're listening to Song Exploder,
where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made.
I'm Rishikesh Hirway.
Maya from MXM Tune released her first EP in 2018.
She was 18 years old and recorded it in her bedroom and self-released it.
It went on to be streamed over 100 million times.
This year, she put out her second album, Rising.
And in this episode, she breaks down her song, Mona Lisa.
She told me about how different it is from the songs she used to write when she was a teenager,
and how she found something authentic and honest by connecting with a part of herself from even earlier in her life.
I'm MXMtoon, but my name is actually Maya.
In the past,
it's been easier for me to kind of play this part of being MXMtoon rather than actually thinking about who I am as Maya.
A lot of my work has really been about kind of hiding in the background and not really sharing my experience and story proudly.
And I don't think I was making music that felt representative of the type of songs that I really love to listen to in my free time.
And with this song specifically,
I think it was this really important quest to figure out how I could make something that felt empowering without trying to hide myself.
And so it was a challenge that I had posed for myself to make something that felt like a pop song that could be about celebrating myself.
When we were in quarantine,
I found myself going back to a lot of the music that I loved to listen to growing up.