At the very beginning of Maya Hawke’s new album, Chaos Angel, a crackling, ever-so-slightly eerie voice emerges from the silence to intone: “You’ve become an angel in human form—does it make sense when you put it that way?” The voice does not belong to the musician herself, it turns out, but to a therapist an 11-year-old Hawke was taken to see while dealing with bouts of depression. “It was this kind of psychic spiritual doctor,” says Hawke over Zoom one morning from Atlanta, where she’s currently filming the next (and final) season of Stranger Things. After she discovered a recording of one of those therapy sessions on her mother Uma Thurman’s computer, it became the start of a thread that eventually unspooled into an entire album. “I couldn’t believe this person told me I was an angel in human form as a kid,” she says, breaking out into laughter. “That’s so much pressure!”
Hawke, far from her troubled 11-year-old self, is as sunny as the springtime Georgia weather, buzzing with a gentle star power that somehow radiates through the computer screen. As she explains, though, this disposition is one that she only achieved through a long process of self-discovery—much of which is charted on the record. It included a stint crashing with her brother at college after worrying that diving headfirst into her career had made her miss out on the golden days of youth, as well as some serious self-scrutiny about how she’s conducted herself in past relationships. The main through line, though, is the figure of the “chaos angel” herself, a kind of alter-ego character that at first seems to bring destruction, but ultimately teaches Hawke how to be kinder to herself—and to grow.
On top of that, Chaos Angel is smart, stylish, and often very funny. (The lyric “I was born with a foot in the door / And my mind in the gutter / And my guts on the floor,” sung sweetly over jangling guitars on the lead single “Missing Out,” is both a nod to her illustrious upbringing as the daughter of Hollywood A-listers and a reflection of Hawke’s knowing sense of humor.) So too does it serve as an ambitious expression of Hawke’s world-building instincts: the accompanying music videos—two of which are directed by Alex Ross Perry, returning a favor of sorts after Hawke provided voiceover for the award-winning filmmaker’s latest documentary—carry the kind of goofy, DIY charm that has become Hawke’s signature as much as the soulfulness and confidence of her songwriting. “For the first time, I started building the visual world around this album while I was writing, and I’m so glad I did,” Hawke says.
Here, Hawke explains the offbeat backstory behind the Chaos Angel figure, how her acting work and songwriting have come to sit in dialogue with each other, and what she’ll be channeling on the fashion front once she goes on tour.
Vogue: I’m talking to you a few days before Chaos Angel drops—how are you feeling at this point in the process? Is it nice to have a distraction in filming the show right now?
Maya Hawke: To be honest, I feel extremely nervous. I think I’m the most me in this record, and I’m being more honest than I have before, so if it’s rejected I think it would feel more personal. When I’m creating something, I toggle between this feeling of… I don’t care what anyone thinks, I want to be wild and rebellious! I want to make art for the one person who will understand it, and I feel it so purely. If anyone’s like, “This needs more of a hook,” or, “Pick up the tempo”—I’m like, Screw that. I don’t care what people like. I want to make whatever this is! But then I finish it, and I go to put it out, and I do actually want people to like it. [Laughs.] So I had to kind of have a talk with myself, and be like, if you’re going to be this vulnerable to criticism, you need to make less weird art. And I don’t want to do that. I’m not going to change my own tastes in order to be more liked by other people, so I have to be able to deal with that criticism. I’m working on it. I’m still nervous though. I think having the rehearsals this week with my band, who I made the record with, and then the shows this weekend will help keep me distracted. If I was just sitting around looking at my phone, that would be bad.
That makes a lot of sense. Do you think you have healthier methods of processing the conversations or criticisms, being a creative person in the public eye now?
Maybe not yet. I’m working on it. [Laughs.] I’ve tried doing the whole just don’t look at it thing, but it’s just guaranteed that at the very worst moment, when I m the most vulnerable, or the most looking for someone to tell me that I’m as much of a loser as I sometimes think I am, that’s the moment when I’m going to look at it. Although one thing I do sometimes is to google a picture of the journalist, because it then reminds you that they’re just a person. Sometimes it can feel like this judgment is coming down from God when you see it attached to the name of a big publication, but when you think about it differently, you realize, Oh, it’s just a person. They’re an educated person, a smart person, and they’re probably right about a lot of stuff. But it is also just a person, and there are other people who might feel differently.
Totally. I love the title of the album, too. Where did that come from? Were you thinking about the “chaos angel” as a kind of archetype or character that runs through the album?
Well, I was working on the film Wildcat about the life of Flannery O’Connor. And there’s a letter from Flannery O’Connor that we steal from—with permission—as dialogue in the film. It’s about how she used to punch at her guardian angel, and whirl around, and try to fight it off. And that really struck me. And I thought about how we all do that. Whether you want to call it your guardian angel, or your instincts, or your true self, your best self, your soul, your spirit, whatever… There’s a voice in all of our heads that is trying to give us good advice, that says, “Don’t read the reviews,” that says, “I think you should go home, nothing good happens after 2 a.m.,” that says, “Tell the truth.” And sometimes we really resist it, and fight it off. And even worse than that, sometimes the voice itself is sick, and instead of delivering you good advice, it’s been injured or hurt or confused, or something bad has happened to you, and your voice isn’t giving you good advice anymore. It’s saying, “Don’t eat that burger, no one will love you if you gain weight.” It’s saying, “Don’t tell the truth, no one will love you if they know who you really are.” I was thinking about that a lot, because I wanted to heal my own inner voice and make sure I could trust it. You want to feel like you can trust your own instincts, right? And so the record is kind of personifying that inner voice, and I gave her the name of the chaos angel, which is inspired by Christian imagery, but injected with a lot of my exposure to Buddhist and Hindu gods and goddesses from my maternal grandfather. So I thought about this character of the chaos angel who was raised to be an angel of love, and then she goes down to earth and tries to be one—but it’s really hard. Instead of love, there’s craziness and chaos and destruction, and then she hates herself, because she feels like that wasn’t what she came to do. But after a while, she realizes that chaos is the necessary ingredient for change, which is the necessary ingredient for love. Sometimes she’ll bring chaos or stress, but that’s okay, because it’s a necessary thing to get to the part where there’s love, you know? That’s the very long and convoluted story of the chaos angel!
You mentioned these different spiritual traditions that fed into the record—are you a particularly spiritual person?
I’d probably say I’m spiritual-curious. I was in no way indoctrinated into any kind of religious system as a kid, which I think for a lot of people, especially in America, can lead to this intense trauma around religion and makes them shut out the good as well as the bad, because I do think there’s a lot to be gained from it. But there’s a lot that can be controlling about it, and a lot it can take from you, too. I feel lucky that I can appreciate the good parts of it. I love the David Foster Wallace essay “This Is Water”—it’s a very famous one—but he talks about the human tendency to worship, and how, as destructive as religion can be, in many ways God is a better thing to worship than the other things we might put in its place, like money or youth or beauty, or just yourself. I think I heard that for the first time when I was 15 or 16 and it really spoke to me. It was also around the same time I started reading Flannery O’Connor, which started that journey for me.
Tell me more about your relationship with Flannery O’Connor’s work, especially given you were working on Wildcat around the same time you were writing this album. Do you find that the characters you’re playing in your acting career end up bleeding into your songwriting more generally?
They do bleed, and I m so grateful for the bleed. One of the coolest things about my life is the bleed. I get so inspired by the characters I play, and by the worlds I get to step into by playing that character. The movies you watch to help build the world for that character, and the books you read, it opens your mind up and expands your metaphoric language and helps you grow and encourages you to see the world differently. One of my favorite things in the world is sitting on set and writing a song on the back of my script, because I was inspired by something that happened in the moment I was acting. The kind of emotional openness that’s required to be an actor is a great catalyst for songwriting.
One of the aspects of your music that seems to shine on this album is your sense of humor. Was it always your intent to inject this project with a little bit of black comedy?
Yeah, I mean, I want them to be funny. I’m often making actual jokes in the songs. I feel like sometimes people take me very seriously for some reason, but the lyric on “Missing Out” about being born with my foot in the door, which a lot of people have asked me about, that’s very much a joke. The whole two verses of “Missing Out” are really about what I imagine other people might say about me. This is how I sometimes feel I look to other people. But maybe my jokes just don’t land. [Laughs.] They’re for a particular audience, I guess.
Were you thinking more deeply about how to use fashion as part of the storytelling around this album? What are you going to wear on tour to get into Chaos Angel mode?
I think about it all the time. The outfit on the cover—the red skirt with the red painter’s jacket—I had in my mind from the very beginning of working on this record. I knew that was the Chaos Angel uniform, like a Catholic schoolgirl with a rebellious side. And then it was about bringing some of my own personal style into the character, especially as I get further away from the moment when that idea first arrived—I don’t want to feel like I’m dressing up in a costume of me from a year ago. I designed the original Chaos Angel outfit with this incredible seamstress Wendy, and more recently I’ve been working with Harry Lambert on styling looks for the shows and performances. It helps me stay in the spirit of the record—to stay true to my inner chaos angel.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
