Words by Sabrina Amoriello

Under the smoldering sun on the fairgrounds of Marshfield, Maya Manuela does more than just perform. She confesses— in the soft-spoken, thunder-hearted way that only someone who’s carried her truth across state lines can. We met amongst the summer hush of Marshfield’s Levitate Music Festival, where hay dust mingled with amplifier hum, and Maya’s voice had already floated across the fairgrounds, submerging early-comers in the multiverse that is her discography.

“I’ve been writing songs since, I think my first song I was eight,” she recalls, brushing off the memory with modest grace. “It’s generous to call it a song,” lighthearted, she introduces her world of melody. But her connection to songwriting was never accidental — it was gravitational. “I kind of stuck with it, and ended up creating a songwriting program in my middle school,” she reminisces, planting early roots for the artist she would grow into. By the time she reached college, she’d already made a quiet deal with herself: if she was going to gamble on anything, it wouldn’t be business. It would be music. So she dropped out and headed to Nashville. “I thought I was going to write country music. I was a country girlie at one point,” she laughs. “I was kind of like, what am I doing? Why am I writing so much country music, I miss just the freeform of kind of singer-songwriter or pop. There’s less of a formula.”

Even now, Maya exists in motion: sonically, geographically, emotionally. Her songs feel like letters stuck in transit, reflections glimpsed in car windows. Her recent single, “LAURA,” is self-described as “the perfect song for a main character that doesn’t know they are a main character.” And when asked to elaborate, she simply paints the character: “She’s just very in the flow of living… beautiful and captivating and doesn’t have the space to really self-reflect.”

And in many ways, neither does Maya – at least not in the traditional sense. “I stay away from that songwriting process,” she says, smiling. But her songs, even the most pop-tinged, are filled with an ache that suggests otherwise, like soft scars worn with pride. “There are certain songs that I write that I won’t put out … those songs are like secrets that you tell your therapist or that you tell your best friend. And then there are situations where you can talk about it casually with somebody that you’re just getting to know. And those are songs that I feel okay putting out, even if they are very vulnerable and very personal.”

Even so, her upcoming album unfolds like a journal in reverse: cathartic, lush, alive. She mentions “God Forbid” and “Devil Couldn’t Reach Me” as personal anchors. The latter was especially vital. “It was very cathartic, because it was about a situation that happened like six years ago … there’s something really satisfying about putting stuff down in a song and saying everything that you felt and maybe no longer feel, but this is a record of what happened. And I’m like, I can be gone. I can be done with it.”

Of course, not all her songs carry heartbreak. She accolades “Je ne sais” as her favorite. “It’s just a cute little love song,” she boasts. “Usually my love songs have some existential dread in them too… but ‘Je ne sais’ is just like: I want this man. This is my man.”

Maya works primarily with producers who build the instrumental world around her – worlds in which she can’t stretch, ache, flirt, and heal. “A bass line can really influence a melody,” she notes. “So if I’m just writing on guitar, I don’t have that kind of groovy feel of the bass to open up a different world or a different color palette for me … I’m kind of particular about who I work with, because I love lyrics and I love melody.”

Her next single, “Radio Station,” is due August 1, followed by a two-part fall tour: East Coast in September, West Coast in November. “It’s eight dates, eight to ten … and then West Coast about the same, maybe like eight days.” And in typical festival fashion, we had to ask who she’d dream of performing on big stages with. While she doesn’t have a title for her personally curated musical homage, she’d “love to have Remi Wolf, Del Water Gap” headline “somewhere in the mountains, maybe in Tennessee.”

When asked what she hopes people feel when listening through her discography, she resolves with sincerity. “I hope they feel hope. That’s a big thing for me… even in heartbreak or angst or anything, I just always want people to know that there’s hope. And things are mutable. Things change a lot.”

And perhaps that’s the truest thread that runs through Maya Manuela’s music: the belief that nothing stays stuck forever. That even in the wreckage, there’s motion. That pain, too, is a song – and singing it is how we let go.

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