Maya Hawke's 'Coverage' Captures Living Many Lives At The Same Time

On Maya Hawke’s new song “Coverage,” out today (April 22), she blows through like a gentle morning breeze, breathing into your ear a diary entry of a pending existential crisis. “If I were really here / Looking at you beamin’ / If I were really alive / Could I make it through day-to-day dreamin’?” She meditates, her ideology far from the nonchalance of Robin Buckley, the fan-favorite Stranger Things character she portrays.


In a little bit of irony, Hawke revealed to MTV News over the phone that the meaning of “Coverage” comes from playing this role and the handful of others she’s explored within the past few years, like Jo March in BBC’s Little Females miniseries and Linda “Flower Child” Kasabian in Once Upon a Time... In Hollywood. 


“As an actor, you navigate and spend so much of your life and energy living in other people’s stories,” Hawke, 21, explained. “Living in other people’s imaginations, love affairs, and the lives of the characters that you’re playing, it may become confusing to your own sense of reality. And if you’re comfortable with your own sense of self, like living in these dreams of fantasies, are you really ever totally alive in your own life? So that’s fundamentally the place that the song came out of.”


Hawke, who counts Fiona Apple and Lucinda Williams as inspirations, penned the song while working on a movie. “I wrote it on set in a little bit trailer about that sort of loneliness and confined sense you get as soon as you’re doing this collaborative art form.”


“Coverage” is the second song that Hawke has shared ahead of her debut album, Blush, that arrives on June 19. She says that her first excursion into music is inspired by her fascination with words. “Poetry has been my main love as well as a thread that has connected both acting and music to me while in my entire life,” she mentioned. “My greatest heroes are poets, and I love music as a form to transmit poetry because it could really add blood to the words. It could let the poet to have so much control over the way that the words are procured and the meaning in back of them.”


Blush’s title alone — which her mother, Uma Thurman, helped pick out — has two crucial meanings pertaining to its focus. The opening harkens back to “Coverage” and the idea of losing yourself in an acting role. “It’s very challenging to pretend to fall in love with someone without almost actually falling in love,” she mentioned. “It’s very complicated to keep your own organic instincts out of the equation so it’s about feeling. No matter if a situation is fake, your body has a real reaction to it. You could really blush.”


Its other definition is identically personalized, inspired by the performative nature of gender. “I exist in such a state of constant embarrassment and shame,” she mentioned. “And 'blush' is such an interesting word to me because it’s a feminized, romanticized version of shame. Once you’re blushing, everyone’s like, ‘Oh it’s so sweet, she’s blushing.’ Yet it’s really a reaction to shame and humiliation. It’s sort of seen in young females as being charming, sweet, and effeminate. I was interested in exploring the underbelly of that feminized feeling of shame.”


Blush began off as an individual teamwork with Grammy-winning guitarist, singer, and songwriter Jesse Harris, who previously worked on the soundtrack to her father Ethan Hawke’s directorial debut, The Hottest State, and has been a family member friend for decades. “As a teenager, I used to bring him all of the songs that I’d written so that he may listen and give me little notes and advice,” she mentioned. “When I was 19, I planned that we work on a song with each other. We wrote one song and, by the time we went to record that one, we had three. Any time we got around to record all three, we had five. It kept going up until we had an entire album.”


Hawke’s diaristic and cathartic fashion on previous standalone releases “To Love a Boy” and “Stay Open” preview the quiet intensity noticed on Blush. “A lot of those tracks are love songs and messages to people that I've had feelings for in one way or another,” she mentioned. “I had the hugest love affair of my life in the year that I wrote this record, and it’s right now over. Although a lot of these songs sort of track my journey through that relationship.”


Outside of Blush’s romantic trek, other relationships will be explored on album, like because the one that she has with her father. “You know whenever you have a really essential relationship in your life and also you keep on having the same fight over and over again?” She mentioned. “People can't get their words out in the correct ways so you can’t express the feelings you’re attempting to express exactly right, and you just keep tripping over the same feelings over and over again. There’s a song on the record about me finally being able to put into words a feeling that I’d been attempting to express to my dad for a long time.”


This feeling, as well as the others that exist on Blush, contributes to experiences that define Hawke. She wants Blush to open up these experiences for others to relate to. “With all art forms, you hope that someone hears a phrase, or a feeling, or a melody that makes them feel far less alone,” she mentioned. “That feeling is so cathartic and powerful. It’s why you cry at the theater. So if anyone could have that moment any time they’re listening to Blush, I would feel in back of vindicated.”