It was nothing short of a cataclysm for a certain kind of roots music fan when The Stray Birds announced they were disbanding last summer. When Maya de Vitry recorded Adaptations in 2017, she imagined it as a creative outlet. Now that it’s being released (1/25), it’s her path forward. And what a beautiful path it is.
Nature and language ground de Vitry as she navigates personal growth, global politics, and her own emotions. As a result, Adaptations soars. De Vitry’s songwriting is at its finest on her solo debut. She’s able to share intimate glimpses into her relationship with the natural world around her, whether it’s through lyrics on “The Key” or a soundscape and humming on “Wilderness.”
“Anyone At All” will appeal to fans of de Vitry’s hard-driving vocals from her time with the Stray Birds. “This Side of a Dream” and “You” will introduce them to another, airier side of her singing talents. Most songs incorporate a little of both and do so well.
“Go Tell a Bird” is proof that de Vitry has absolutely mastered songwriting. The minimalist song describes as futile the attempts by America’s right to legislate harder borders or restrictions on gender expression or same-sex relationships. The forces that control nature, which includes human beings, do not tend to observe any hard rules set upon it by human actions. The song is an uplifting reminder that those who seek to control nature are fighting a losing battle.
But de Vitry admits her struggles with finding the right words on “What The Moon Said.” As I spoke to her for this article, I realized how much thought goes into each idea she wants to express. She stopped at some point in nearly every other sentence, stalling for time until she found the perfect word for the situation.
Archimedes once said in reference to the lever: “Give me a place to stand, and I shall move the Earth.” Maya, I mention that quote because you seem to suggest on “The Key” that you can turn something as large as the day or the sky upside down with just time spent with a friend.
I think the world turns upside down every time we make a connection. People wind up falling in love or becoming really good friends with people who were once complete strangers. I think our orbits of the people in our lives shift constantly and I try to keep my orbits flexible as to not shut anybody out. It’s less of a physical turning upside down. It’s that internally, there’s a lot of motion when that happens.
When I first heard that song I thought it was talking about something even more internal. Like just the shift in perspective that you make when you look at the reflection in that water instead of into the water itself.
Totally. I love reflections. I love the fish and the birds kind of meeting in there. The reflection of the birds in the sky, the actual fish. There’s this meeting on this thin line. It’s just a thin line but it feels real.
How emotionally important is nature to you?
Very. I’m always trying to get back to the place where I’m remembering I’m a part of nature. I’m just a living thing and I have a life cycle of my own and seasons and rhythm. Being out in nature and seeing leaves change color and little ecosystems and how things are interacting and communicating and seeing how slow growth is sometimes. With modern society, there’s such urgency and hope for exponential growth sometimes and well being in a material sense. I just like to be reminded by nature that I’m just an animal of a particular evolution.
On the album, you’re using nature to recharge on “Anyone At All,” but I think on every track you’re able to use nature to help understand and explain what you’re feeling.
It’s a shared space. The planet, the air, and the water. It’s a shared common space for all of us. We have our property lines and we have our countries and our borders, but I think there’s still a certain unity. Humans have our own organization of how things are divided up but the natural world is clearly not concerned or paying attention to what we’ve determined. I feel so much unity in nature so I think there’s a possibility to feel connected to each other by just experiencing it in its own way. It’s like sitting around a fire with people when everyone gets real quiet and we’re just gazing into a fire. It’s one of my favorite ways to be in company with people.
Along those lines, you wrote a song called “Go Tell A Bird” that is quite a statement. It’s reminding humans just how empty words and actions can are when going up against higher laws of nature and emotion.
That’s a great way to say it.
Obviously, we are living in a world full of people, particularly those in power, who are happily telling love what it’s allowed, what it’s not allowed to be. How do we make those ideas obsolete without depending on them to collapse under their sheer ridiculousness and impossibility?
I don’t know how we do anything except on a personal and immediate level. Any person that we encounter, if we can at an individual level. I’m just trying to make sense of being a human and being in relationships with other humans. I’m trying to reclaim the idea of love and paying attention and making space. I’m just trying to examine my own hierarchies and chose to open my heart. I want to stay curious to other people because I think a lot of us are in pain and feel shame and guilt and terror. We all know the feeling of being rejected and feeling like we don’t belong. Whether it’s walking into a party where we don’t know very many people or moving to a different place, there are so many common feelings. To deny what we have in common is just baffling to me. It’s a philosophy of life that just makes me want to live and be a member of humanity. I think we counter the narrative of the people in power who try to limit those definitions by remembering that our own definitions are the most important and we get to choose that.
You recorded these songs in mid-2017. Were you aware at that time that you’d no longer be a Stray Bird by the time the album was released?
I was not aware. I was realizing that I was encountering something that needed to find space in my life, but I couldn’t imagine my life without The Stray Birds in it. That was my only identity. I didn’t believe that I would wake up and the world would still be turning if The Stray Birds didn’t exist. It was so fully a part of my life. It just became clearer and clearer that that band, just like any living thing, was dying. It was at the end of its life cycle. Maybe not creatively, creatively I think we reached an absolute peak as a trio and we wrote an entire album collaboratively during the time that I was making Adaptations. The Stray Birds recorded our last album after I recorded this. There are so many layers to what makes a group of people want to work together that closely. Interpersonally, it wasn’t sustainable and healthy anymore. That just became clearer as I started to live inside Adaptations and started to live inside of this new voice that I wanted to express. There was this thin light that felt so strong to me that I just had to follow it until I was out in a wide open space again. At the time I was living inside of one reality and that’s just not my reality anymore. It’s really scary and disorienting. That band will never be replaced. I’ll never try to live those years and that life cycle over again. The unknown is okay. Summer comes and goes, winter comes and goes and we just keep growing.
You have a very distinct style of talking. Even in this conversation, you seem to be searching for the right words to say. And that’s something you express on the album with “What The Moon Said” and “Anybody’s Friend.” You’re exploring the limitations of words. Is that something that ever frustrates you?
I don’t think it frustrates me. I’m humbled by it. There are places where there just are no words. I think that humans are so beholden to our words, which are our own inventions. It’s the joy of my life to play with words. That was my first love before music. Before I wrote songs I would write stories when I was a little kid. I love music, I love reading, I love poetry, I love conversation. Sometimes when I’m talking to a person I’ll be like “wow. They are such an artist the way that they interpret the world. Did you what you just said? That was a beautiful sentence. What an amazing sentence. I’ve never heard that sentence spoken before in my life. Listen to yourself!” I’ll just be living in that sentence for a minute. I don’t get frustrated, it just makes me search. The world and nature are really beautiful. How can I bridge the gap between my mind and the color of this moss on this tree that I’m looking at?
I went to the huge cathedral in Barcelona. Gaudí knew that it would never be finished in his lifetime. The light that comes through the glass in that building, I think I remember reading or hearing that he was like “it’s great if you bask in this light. This is a beautiful structure and the light coming in is beautiful. I designed it this way. But I hope that was this really does for the person who walks through this light in this manmade building is that the next time they walk through a forest they notice the light coming through the trees in a slightly more aware state.” That they feel a different level of attention or gratitude for the light there. I think that is so beautiful. That’s what I love about language and poems and art. When I love a poem, it’s because then I go back out into the world with different attention. I guess that’s how I feel about language, it’s just the possibility to lead or inspire another person to have their own playground in the world.
Trevor Christian hosts the radio show Country Pocket on Long Island’s WUSB 90.1 FM, which can be streamed at wusb.fm
