Maia Hirasawa

We're heading for Glasgow, in October, to a noisy bar where everyone had a bit too much to drink, and the band on stage this particular evening, the Scottish band “the Poems” with members from the Bluebells, can’t really get the audience's attention.

A completely unknown Maia Hirasawa enters the stage, with a guitar, a crappy keyboard and pretty bad sound. Everyone becomes silent.

"Though I’m Just Me", is the name of Maia Hirasawa’s solo debut album.

It is a logical name for the album, originally a phrase from one of the songs that didn’t make the cut, because this album is Maia Hirasawa, all the way.

She didn’t just write all the songs by herself, she also produced, arranged and recorded them in a terrace house in Sollentuna and in a cottage in Skåne. Maia thought long and hard about with whom she wanted to record her debut album, before she realized that the most logical choice was to do it on her own. She had to teach herself how to record in the midst of the process of recording but already had a flair for arranging. Miss Li, Anders Göransson, Josefine Lindstrand from the Danish grammy winners “Sekten”, members from “Loney Dear” and “Vapnet” and the string duo Linnea Ohlsson and Hanna Ekstrand are friends of hers that helped out. And the Hirasawa family contributed with handclap.

The result is the finest of pop, but “with quite a lot of stage musical influences, perhaps a bit like Björn and Benny”, a vague feeling of classical music and melodies you love the first time you hear them and that you’ll never grow bored of. She’s “always” been writing, but:

– Earlier I always had too high demands on myself, to play well technically. But this year I realized that you don’t have to be best piano or guitar player in Sweden to be entitled to play it.

Maia plays most of the instruments on the album

Maia Hirasawa has been singing in a million different bands – we most recently recognize her as the backing vocalist and multi instrumentalist in Hello Saferide, but she also played support to HS the entire of last year and sold every copy of her demo that she had the energy to burn on her Macbook. She won the Roland/Sami price for the best un-signed act of 2006. She’s in fact a skilled jazz singer, has a background as a brit-popper and listens to Loney Dear and Rufus Wainright, but not to Regina Spektor, simply cause everyone says that they bear resemblance. She is half Japanese. You have to go and see her play live.

Though, I’m just me. Here it is, it’s yours to keep. It will hit you right in the heart. Highly Recommended!

Maia Hirasawa - Still June
Maia Hirasawa @ MySpace


Maia Hirasawa - And I Found This Boy



Maia Hirasawa - Gothenburg



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