MAI6FAB

Interview -Steven Logan | Photos - Shea Petersen

From a small, rural town to the shining city of Chicago, mai6fab was soundtracking her own life with hyper-bedroom-pop creations for years. With a stellar EP and a new double single out, I sat down with Mai to talk about her search for boredom, being perceived as a '“pop girly”, and RuPaul edit videos.

Why don't you tell me about the two new songs that you just put out?
I have my song “great mistake”, which I’ve been sitting on for the longest time. Which is very ironic because the song is all about trying to release your own self-judgment and pressure. And yet I was sitting there being like, “Oh, the song is not good enough, I have to fix this, I gotta fix that.” So finally I was like, I have to just let it go. 

And then I didn’t plan on releasing the other song “waiting & waiting” with it, but I wrote it really quickly, maybe in a week. I thought it made sense as a B-side. I like that it was just a stream of consciousness thing that I made, because for the past year I've been very weird about making music and trying to get over a block.

What do you think that block is?  
I don’t know, it’s just so ironic that my last project the six mix was literally me trying to release music after another block I had while in college. It was me trying to make something fun and something that felt good to make, not too high stakes, a pop EP. And then I did that, and it was so well received, and it made me regret and be like, “Oh fuck I’m trapped again.” And also, it felt like I wanted to continue with that same pop era but I was finding myself getting kind of tripped up and resistant to it.

And the two new songs do have a different tone and sound to them, were you following that instinct to not stick with the same sound?
Totally. I mean, I definitely think it's more introspective and angsty, and the songs on the six mix were a little bit more introspective but hopeful. And on the new songs I was really going to let myself wallow for just a little bit.

And then pop out of it. But I don’t know, I’ve been trying to sort of navigate what a “pop star” means to me as far as like, being a female pop artist or like the connotations around pop music and the commercialism of it. There’s a sort of realm around that type of music that I don’t love and don’t want to be a part of.

It’s tricky when the imagery and perception is wrapped up in pop too, like can you really have pop without having some kind of spectacle?
Lately it's been a really a struggle for me. Like being like a “pop girly”, because I haven't really felt very girly lately. And it's something that I've been writing about lately. “waiting & waiting” was a little bit about that in a way.

Is there a pop girl or a pop femme or a pop star that you remember thinking like, “That's kind of who I’d want to be”?
Faye Wong is a big style icon for me, and also sort of a musical icon. I appreciated that there was still a level of gracefulness and femininity, but there was a little bit of play. Especially back then. I feel like for Asian women, it was not in the norm for her to be the way that she was, like very expressive. And also Bjork transcends everything

For the new songs, we talked about the difference in tone on the lyrics, but how did you approach the production to match that vibe when you were producing the songs? 
Typically when I'm writing, the production is like the part that I really love and lead with. I've been producing since I was like 15, in my room. And I love a lot of emo music as well, so it’s just a little bit of a regression. When I was in high school, I was writing a lot more of that style of music. So I think it was also a way of going back to that era of my life, when it was really a lot easier for me to write without a lot of expectations. 

It was a lot more of like, going home, sitting in my room and writing a song in a day and just churn things out. I’m trying to go back to that mindset. But yeah, back in high school I wrote two albums and an EP, and I look back at that like, “What the hell was I on?” 

So what did the mai6fab music sound like in high school? I mean, it was very angsty. I was really into The 1975 back in the day, so I loved a lot of looping, guitar indie sort of stuff. And it was a time when I was really into lo-fi hip-hop, so I was making like, lo-fi beats. 

And then I was like, making, like, RuPaul's Drag Race meme edits and creating crazy stuff

Tell me about the meme edits, what era of RuPaul are we talking here? 
Season ten and beyond. I remember specifically I made one called “Learn the ABCs with RuPaul's Drag Race” or something and I didn’t know that watermarking videos was a thing, and then it got super huge and Willam reposted it on her story or something. 

So no one knows that was me, if anybody is watching now: that was me.

Where did you grow up and go to high-school and when do you remember first getting into music?
I grew up in a really small town in Minnesota, called Lanesboro. My population was 675 people, my graduating class was like 22 people. Just a really small, really rural place which has pros and cons. 

But I feel like I grew up in a pretty musical house. My mom loved to, like, run around and sing and play her guitar. And I joined band really young, I was like a really big band kid. I don't know, I think a lot of it stemmed from boredom and escapism but I lived in the middle of nowhere and what else did I have to do?

Do you remember the first song you ever made? The first song was definitely a guitar song. I think I wrote it about a friend that I dated in high school. Then we broke up like four months later, and then I made this very sad song about it.

It felt really good to me, it was just like I wanted to memorialize it, I guess.

That diaristic view is a very kind of singer-songwriter point of view, do you feel that too when you are looking back at your production style do certain things remind you of a specific time in your life?
Definitely, I love to try a lot of different things, and it's hard for me to stay in one specific style. I think I get very bored really easily. Which is a good thing and a bad thing, because for branding it’s kind of awful to be like “What am I?” 

Between the EP and then these new songs at least, they’re different, but I think your personality comes through.
I think it's true. I mean, that's always what my girlfriend says. She says that the throughline is that it’s me, it’s from my mind.

So then, when did you move from that tiny town to Chicago?
First I moved to Fargo, North Dakota for college. And then in 2024, I moved here

I definitely do want to give props to a lot of small towns that people love to shit on, but the people that stay there and choose to make a community are so special. Especially in Fargo, there’s a very specific DIY queer community that’s really small but locked into itself, which was really nice in some ways. 

But then in other ways, it’s hard to expand and get out of it, and I didn’t really feel like my sound is necessarily in that space. Moving to Chicago was good because there’s a lot of people making pop music and electronic music, obviously, but also bad because there's so much going on and so much happening that it feels hard to be bored, and I think that when I first started making music, that's kind of like where it all stemmed from, was being bored. So I’m trying to find more ways to be bored in the city, which is proving to be really hard in a really awesome city.

How did you come up with the name mai6fab?
So that's my Snapchat username that I had when I was 12. Mai is my name and six is my favorite number. When I started making music I didn’t really have an artist name, so I just picked something very true, which is like an internet username.

So that explains the name of the six mix. What was the origin of that project being your first release?
I went to school for audio production, and during that time, I was not really writing any music and I always found myself a little bit pessimistic because it was the first time I was around other people that were doing musical things. I just was missing creating. 

At the same time, I was also a music director for my radio station and I was discovering all this crazy music, like Hannah Diamond and SOPHIE and all these really fun artists. And I was super drawn to that sound. I thought it was really cool that it took something that was seen as kind of lowbrow and created this whole renaissance. It was so simple but complicated.

So I decided I wanted to make something kind of simple and felt good in that way that could resonate with people. I made “leave ur bf” first, which was very of an era of hyperpop with ridiculous lyrics and kind of tongue-in-cheek, obnoxious drums.

Is there a true story behind that song? 
I think it's more just a feeling of when you hang out with your friends and they bring a man along,and it's like…a boyfriend can come along, but he has to be willing to participate, or at least, like, do something. 

I just asked because, like, the Dior Sauvage was specific.
I think I was writing the song and I googled fuckboy cologne, and Dior Sauvage was the first one that came up. And it also rhymed. I have smelled it since. 

“leave ur bf” was the single, so what about the rest of the songs? Did any of them specifically surprise you with how it was received. 
Totally. "wanna be like that (i guess)" is definitely one that people talk to me about the most. 

Which was funny because again, that one was me wanting to make something really simple with simple chords. When I approached the production, instead of thinking horizontally production-wise, I was thinking more vertically about the textures I could do on top of the chords. There’s a chord pattern, but a bunch of different things stacked up. I feel like that’s more of a traditional sound design approach to hyperpop, where it’s like thinking of sound design. All that to say, it was very much me starting with just wanting a basic kick, a snap and a clap and trying to keep it really straightforward. 

I wrote it really fast, in Chicago. It was one of the last ones I wrote for the project. And I always get a lot of good responses to it, and it’s the one that I honestly put the least amount of work into in a way. 

For me on that EP, in terms of production, “dreary” is definitely the most interesting - tell me about that one.
That one I wrote for a final for my studio class in college. It’s a class you have to take multiple times throughout your whole college career. And before that I was really doing covers that weren’t very good and I didn’t feel great about. And I felt like my professor was just like giving it a passing grade, but I wanted to make something really good. 

So then I wrote “dreary”. At the time, I wanted to make my “party 4 u”. I wanted to make something beautiful and haunting, but danceable.There’s a good subset of pop music I love that is devastating, but it’s like “God this beat is so good.” 

And I think the funny thing about that song is that I had done all the production and I had no lyrics for it, so I didn't know at the time what to write about. So I was doing the thing where you sort of sing like a mumble melody with it and try to come up with words from that. It ended up being a nonsense stream of consciousness.

Did you ever think about just putting it out there as an instrumental?  I think without the lyrics, it would be missing something, and in a way I’m happy it’s a nonsense stream of consciousness thing, because even though I came up with it on the fly there is something that resonates about it for me.

Are there any other production influences that might surprise people?
Maybe. I mean, I love Imogen Heap, and I don't know if that one really comes up in my music a lot.

Where do you think mainstream pop music is going as someone who follows it and also is endeavoring towards it in your own way?
I don't know. I do feel very lucky that there's a big renaissance of pop music right now, and I think that it's really beautiful that this era gets really focused on the producers because it’s not always the norm to know the name of someone that produced a song. 

So I'm really curious about what comes after the renaissance of what we have right now, because a lot of the pop right now is really into this EDM sort of festival sound. So maybe I would imagine that we're going a little backwards and hopefully to Imogen Heap, like trip-hop, sort of a quiet experimental sound.

We talked about how imagery is important in pop, and I know you’re interested in fashion as well. How does your fashion inspiration tie into your music and how do you choose what you’re going to wear when you’re performing?
I love early Japanese fashion, because I also love a lot of early J-pop. I was going to say his name was Yasutaka Nakata, and he did a lot of production for Perfume and CAPSULE and a lot of really early dancey J-pop music.

But for performing, I try to keep it a little more simple just because typically when I perform, I like to run around and jump and roll on the floor. I usually will just do a simple short and like a cute little top. Because I'm trying I'm trying to get my movement in there.

Is there anything new coming soon that you want to tease, or anything you feel pulled toward next?
I think I want to go really loud. I've been listening to a lot of industrial music and playing with those sounds. So I'm really curious about trying to find a way to merge a harder sound with a pop era.