Across the visuals accompanying True Blue’s first mixtape, Star Witness, we see musician Maya Laner in a variety of guises. In the video for lead single “Truest of Blues,” she struts through the city streets in a leopard-print minidress and wraparound shades, the clip’s eerie blue grade inspired by the early-2000s Japanese erotic thriller A Snake of June. In the photos accompanying this story, she wears a series of eye-popping looks—a slinky, bias-cut dress in powder pink and a polka-dot top with a giant bow, knee-high socks, and frilly stilettos—by the Copenhagen designer Natascha Domino, with a spirit of off-kilter glamour. Meanwhile, the cover of Star Witness features a tightly cropped black-and-white image of the singer gazing at the camera from under a peaked cap, like the lead singer of a forgotten punk band from decades ago.
It’s exactly that shape-shifting quality that makes True Blue so intriguing—though it also meant that before Laner and I met over Zoom (she dialing in from her home in Copenhagen), I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. If the images online of her playing her signature instrument, the bass guitar, make her look forbiddingly cool—Laner first made her name as part of indie band Porches, before going on to play bass with Caroline Polachek across multiple tours—it turns out she has the wide-eyed charm and effusiveness of a true geek. More than anything, it seems, she’s just happy to be here. “It’s been such a long time coming for me,” she says of releasing her first full-length project after eight years of sporadic singles. “But I think it’s coming at the exact right time. It feels really good.”
Laner’s long and winding road to the spotlight as a solo musician can be traced all the way back to her childhood—specifically, a formative moment in Oakland, California, when she witnessed an older student cover Jimi Hendrix at her elementary school talent show. “I remember it so extremely vividly,” she says. “I just thought it was so cool and so glamorous and so raw to be rocking the guitar.” Laner quickly switched from studying to “playing the most extra guitars. One of my first guitars was a sparkly purple Flying V—just all the way to the most dramatic, glam-rock vibe.”
It wasn’t until she joined Porches at the age of 20 that she picked up a bass guitar, and she remembers realizing immediately: “Whoa, this is my instrument.” As Laner points out, if you close the door of the bar or venue where a band is playing, all you can hear is the bass line and it’s really the glue that holds any live act together. “I’ve always felt comfortable inhabiting a very rhythmic role in music, so being able to control the rhythm and the melody at the same time, that was just like a brain explosion,” she says. “You have to be so tapped in.”
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While Laner worked on her own music in fits and starts throughout that period, balancing the two wasn’t easy. “There’s been a big learning curve for me—not only in knowing how to manage burnout and losing energy, but also negotiating feeling fulfilled by being a part of other people’s projects while also having the motivation to make myself the center of attention,” she says, after a pause. “I used to feel like I had to choose between being an instrumentalist and being a solo artist. I felt like it didn’t make sense to other people that I was oscillating between the two, and I did a lot of inner work to just be like, I’m allowed to be both things.”
A major turning point for Laner, she explains, was when Polachek reached out to express her admiration for her music and asked her not only to play bass in her live band but also to be her support act. “I was at a moment where I wasn’t really sure how much fight I had for that,” Laner says. “I just thought, Wow, if someone who I respect and admire so much believes in me this much, then there’s no question that how I feel inside is right and that I should honor that and keep going.”
Star Witness came together across a few bursts of productivity over the past two years, with some songs written at the end of her time with Porches (she left the band amicably just before the pandemic) and others crafted in Copenhagen, where she moved from New York a year ago. “This record took me a long time to finish for a lot of reasons,” she says. “It was really a full spiritual battle, and now it signifies me being ready to go off on my own.”
Another important part of the transition was relinquishing her need to control every tiny detail of the music; she made a handful of trips to Amsterdam to collaborate with her friend Raven Artson. “A lot of female musicians accidentally got poisoned by this mentality that you have to produce everything,” she says. “I lost a lot of time really punishing myself with this idea that I wasn’t talented or my work wasn’t valuable if I couldn’t do everything myself.” She describes her new approach as being a “creative director or executive producer of the project, inviting different people to contribute their sauce into your universe.”
It’s a testament to Laner’s strength of vision, then, that the end product still feels distinctly, unmistakably her, with the record capturing the same balance of sincerity and impish humor she emits in conversation. There’s the fluttering woodwind and Disney-princess plucked strings of album opener “I Get the Feeling,” or the icy swoop of her vocals as she sings the surrealist lyrics of Cocteau Twins’ “Cherry-Coloured Funk” in a perfectly judged cover, or the disarmingly catchy chorus of “Knives Out,” with its strange but effective culinary metaphors for love. (“If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen,” she sings wryly.) Or there’s the epic album closer “Get Real,” with its lightly syncopated, trip-hop-inflected beats and swirling, cloudlike synths, over which she seems to reference her mercurial self-image: “Through the screen, you can be anyone you wanna be,” she sings. Eclectic as it may be, there’s a sophisticated and self-assured through line to it all. Laner even coined her own mini genre: “I decided that I was making evoca-pop—evocative pop music,” she says.
You can also hear the influence of her new home base of Copenhagen, where she moved after falling in love with a musician by the stage name of Nature Boy. (He’s a product of the city’s Rhythmic Music Conservatory, along with the likes of Erika de Casier, Smerz, and ML Buch.) Laner notes that she felt increasingly out of step with the indie-sleaze movement dominating the music scene in New York, despite “respecting everyone who was a part of that and enjoying watching it happen.”
It’s in the Danish capital that she’s found her fashion tribe too. While touring with Polachek a few years ago, Laner reached out to the cult-favorite designer Nicklas Skovgaard, who immediately offered to lend her an outfit for the show. The pair have gone on to become close friends, with Laner walking in his spring 2026 show. (When I connect with Laner, she’s wearing a hot pink top by the designer with asymmetrical snap buttons, as well as a hair tie she refashioned into a ring with bobble-like spheres the size of ping-pong balls.)
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As a hard-core tourer and troubadour, she’s also looking forward to bringing the record to life through future live dates—and to introducing a few additional theatrical flourishes. “I always have at least one fan going—it just adds so much to have wind in your wig,” she says. “It automatically creates so much drama and movement, even if you’re standing perfectly still. So yeah, I’m stanning the fan.”
A fan, it turns out, is just one of many items she likes to carry around with her when she hits the road. “I’m always thinking about spirit charms—things that just mean a lot to me sentimentally.” What other things does she like to collect? “Rocks and shells,” she says, with a grin. “I was also obsessed with this plastic blue water bottle. It had a funny shape, so I held onto it for ages, and I would bring it to every show with me. Multiple people tried to throw it away, and I had to fish it out of a few trash cans. It was a really big moment for me when I finally threw it away myself. It lived a very juicy life as a spiritual object.” There’s probably a parallel to be drawn between the talismanic meaning she came to assign to that water bottle and her ability, as a lyricist, to make the smallest observations feel somehow epic.
Which leads me on to my final question for Laner: What does that title, Star Witness, speak to, exactly? There’s something incredibly evocative about its suggestion of a wallflower figure who could also prove a little dangerous. “To be a witness to someone else’s journey is such a beautiful thing,” she says. “It’s about being on the sidelines and watching other people be in the spotlight, but also being in close proximity to it.”
In typical Laner fashion, however, it’s a title that operates on both a micro and macro level. “I also like thinking about it in the sense of a star as a celestial body—a more cosmic, zoomed-out thing—and not just the more literal being on the stage,” she continues. “It just felt super right for me and my journey that I’ve been on as a supporting person in two people’s careers, which has been so fulfilling and so exciting and so rewarding for me, and also just getting to be in proximity to the challenges and the spiritual battles of show business. I love show business, and this is my love letter to show business.” Now, it’s Laner’s turn to take center stage.
