insideunwrittenthings

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ahh excited for my place to look like this again.. as opposed to it's current state 🙈 . . #movingday #pianistsofinstagram #homeinterior #home #francoisehardy #musiccorner https://www.instagram.com/p/CJAoCycBxnf/?igshid=heqylh8pvdrr

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and it's here 💛 my little homemade ep "strawhouse". A handwritten love letter filled with some of the first few songs I wrote and knew I wanted to keep forever. I kept it very minimal and recorded and mixed it all at my own little home. Thank you to some of my fave peeps who lent their gifts: the gorgeously quirky @mini.minibus and the ethereal @brendonmoon. Bloody legends✨ and now it is time to take off my paint splattered boots cause I thought i was so clever bundling up 2 big events on one day (ty @katrinalfrost!) 😆 love you all to bits 💛🧡 photo by the ever so lovely @karjiayu who patiently stood by me pulling faces at the camera 🙈 (oh yeah, link in bio!) #strawhouse . . https://www.instagram.com/p/CJDosiZheJU/?igshid=2qsr7rnq0vpd

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twenty twenty

i’ll spare you the wtf it’s a new year, decade.. (though i really don’t want to because honestly wtf.. uh whoops *sheepish grin*) but hello, here we are.

today i just felt really quietly happy and grateful for where i am right now. no i’m not a touring artist or someone with a viral track in hand, but i love my work with a client base that feels like family, beautiful peeps in my life, time to spend quietly creating things with love and in a space that’s all mine. 

... and it’ll always start here. whittling at my craft, heart cheesily full.

if this is how this decade started then holy cow. i’m one lucky little homo sapien on this planet.

love, maia

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24/08

oof. 17 years ago i sang for the first time. ever. i sat my high school best friend down and had the biggest heart to heart of my life. looking back, that was the first time i started to “unhide”. 

i was weeks away from turning 16, the year britney had her first no.1 single and i was like right, gotta get moving on this singing thing. while i don’t entirely agree with that logic now, sometimes a good kick up the ass is what a maia needs.

i will always remember that day. we sat on the grass, in the cottage area after school and i sang “back at one” by brian mcknight. my girl jen has the ears of a fox and so singing to her was scary on its own let alone, for the first time. luckily she was my best mate for a reason and her kindness showed up in a way i’ll never forget. bless.

i don’t have drunken high school stories, how doped up i got this one night or a schaloom of bad boys to my name. i have stories like these. the tiny moments where i started to show what my quiet heart was made of. the secrets i never thought i’d say that would show up in songs i’d write. the moments i decided to be brave even when i was never asked or told not to. and to me, they’re everything. 

and this was the first of them.

love, maia.

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LA JOIE

About a year ago I got these two little words tattooed on my right arm. I had wanted it for awhile and thought I'd wait for my birthday to get it. And then I thought, why am I waiting? What am I constantly waiting for? The words literally mean joy. Am I really going to wait for that? Today I realised I'm learning this all over again. I thought once I hit my financial goal I could move onto my next goal straight away. Hello ego, how are you? (Been watching Jeffrey star lately, 🤭) now goals are good and all, until you forget why you're doing it. And this tattoo was a reminder to never forget. I do it from love. I do it for joy. Not “success”. As a former teacher's pet, I constantly have to remind myself this. So I'm putting these goals away for a minute and going to enjoie where I am right now. Create because I love to not because I'm gunning for a career goal. No no, that's not how I live anymore. And as scary as that sounds, life isn't worth it if you're miserable as hell and slaving away for your ego that hunts for external success. That isn't success to me anymore. I know I'll forget this again. But I know I'll remember it again, again. xx maia 

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"LOSING ROUTINE”// the backstory.

this was a song i didn’t think i would want to repost as it was one of my old demos i thought i would leave buried. and then i pressed play on it again and thought, huh..! not that bad.. as much as this song sounds like a relationship-is-over song, for me it actually was a friendship-is-over song. friendship breakups can be as hard if not harder than the romantic kind especially since we don’t talk about them as much and as such there are less remedies for them. i think what makes them harder is that we don’t ever see it coming.  we know we could break up with bfs, gfs, hubs and wubs really but friendships? our vulnerability isn’t as obviously on the line and maybe that’s why these breakups can spike us so deeply. and this one was mine. me. holding onto something that wasn’t being held onto on the other end. fixing something with sorrys that at some point i couldn’t add another. and slowly, very slowly, seeing what the cracks really meant. and that they were needed.

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Maybe they were called foolish for being and believing in themselves and their art. Maybe we all are. And maybe I'm okay with that now 🖤 . . . #lifelessons #thoughts #writer #songwriter #lyrics #newmusic #ozmusic #singersongwriter https://www.instagram.com/p/B1LK947A2sK/?igshid=5f4inqehigug

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imperfect

there's something about this word that has really resonated with me lately. maybe because this virgo earthling searched for its opposite her whole life and failed miserably. and so there is so much freedom in this word that i feel now and it's a value i want to keep remembering and keep in my full sized aortic pumps. one of my favourite books last year was "the gifts of imperfection" by queen brene brown and it's one of those books that make you take a deep breather before moving on to the next chapter. even for someone with a brain that likes to rush like a mofo like my own loose cannon.  why do we try so hard to put up a front and act like we're always okay and that we've got our shit on tight? as much as i want to say i'm done with this sort of thinking, i know it's a journey and making huge mic-dropping proclamations about it is going to lead me to disappointment. so imperfect journey it is. um.. win.  (*hand UP!*) so here i am, back on the old skool blog scene and giving myself grace that this hasn't been consistent or done perfectly but i think i kinda love it more this way. i'm not 100% sure about what i'll be posting or how often, but i know that it'll be as reflective of my truth as much it can be at that point. and how i'm feeling and thinking about my life and life in general.  just writings and scrappy maia style photos really. ahh, bliss. no more doing it perfectly. thank bloody goodness. all love, maia.

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change is in the air

is it just me, or is everybody moving lately? i have a few mates moving, thinking of moving, knowing people moving and i just watched a moving vlog by one of my fave vloggers alice catherine. something is in the air and i love it. oh yeah, i’m moving too!

i had an amazing start to autumn 2 weeks ago and inside me the buzz hasn’t worn off. i spent 5 nights with 18 beautiful souls at a songwriting retreat in copacabana run by the amazing team behind “grow my music” and it’s shifted so much in me i still can’t believe it. i’ve never done anything like that before and i really hope there are so many more of them in my life. whatever you want in life, if you can stick yourself in an oven and immerse yourself in it, you really must. because boy am i glad i did.

the retreat was equal parts terrifying and amazing for me. being amongst such ridiculous amounts of talent was both confronting and uplifting. to be honest, it took me till the 4th day to really settle in and feel like i deserved my place there. i was stocked full of awkwardness and fears till the amazing session that day which was therapy. my session was with the annoyingly, super talented and warm hearted Tauese Tofa as producer (who i’m adopting as my big brother), the there’s-something-so-earnest-about-him Imagine the Rapper and he’s-bloody-good-at-everything Johnieepee as topliners with me as the artist. i’d write with this crew again in a heartbeat. T-dawg let us talk and develop the song’s story and meaning and for me personally, really uncovered exactly what i was feeling. i had come into the session with about 1/4 of a song written not sure where it was going but knowing i had to leave it or else i’d intellectually screw it up. the boys dug into the beginning pieces and T’s philosophical and kind nature opened me right up. it wasn’t just the song that was uncovered, but something deeper about myself that i didn’t realise. *cries*. alongside that aha (which i will delve into when i write about the song’s back story) right there i knew exactly what kind of co-writer i wanted to be. thank you T. the adoption papers are in the mail.

i definitely came into the camp thinking i’d just be serving as a writer and somehow i was one of the lucky ones who got 2 tracks to their name. i love them both dearly but this track (okay, it’s called “my darling, my darling”. eep) is the one that is so close to my heart and has helped me find my own sound. and now i want to do something about it. fuh realsies. 

prior to the camp, i thought i’d get to gain experience and learn from the experts but it did so much more. i found myself as a songwriter AND as an artist. and that’s like 90% of the who-i-am package. and something else i didn’t expect, a music family #copacabangers. we all definitely walked away feeling all loved up, supported and full of belief in ourselves and each other. love ya legends.

as soon as i got home i knew life had to change. i wrote out a list and the first one was to move to a better locale. 5 days later, i found the perfect place to live and i’m now 9 days away from moving day. funnily enough i’m actually near the water again, just like the retreat in copacabana. and i can’t bloody wait.  i’m so ready for the rest of the things on the list to be planted and to fruit when it’s time. 

i’m moving with you autumn, letting the change come in. 

all love, mai-anne.

[insideunwrittenthings]

i was chasing kites

for a really long time i sat on my hopes. i have a wild imagination and escaping with them has been much easier than manifesting them. even just writing that sentence feels like a wake up call. not to say that i haven’t been driven and everything, it was just this thought somewhere in the back of my mind that somehow "everything would just work itself out”.

waiting for that moment is a pain in the arse. and at least for me, it ironically doesn’t work (itself out). and in the past year it’s hit me how ingrained this thought has been in me - it’s kinda hard to admit it. while it was definitely a frypan-to-the-head-type-lesson, uncovering the layers of this thought in all the parts of my life has been a much slower process. even while typing this out now, i’m questioning if i’ve done it enough.

i think we’ve heralded the cinderella stories for so long. things like effort seem so damn uncool whilst floating along with birds singing back to us is so oft deemed as the ideal way to live. the weird thing is, it’s not that i’ve idolised the latter path but that i did so much out of hope, rather than out of grit.  and wishing and trusting are two very different things. one takes very little effort, the other takes the wheel. 

my dad once said to me that the wildly successful ones are “lucky” and while i vehemently disagreed at the time, i must’ve swallowed that pill without realising. somehow, this is the additive many of us take unknowingly, including my sweet papa. but i’ll take the red pill now, thanks Morpheus. i’ll stop jumping and chasing kites now and build my own. and run.

love, maia

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“better” // the back story

i started writing this song back in 2013. i was sitting the car on a random street, not yet ready to head home. still clinging to my pencil and paper days, the first verse and chorus spilled out words i didn’t know i felt.  

strangely, these first parts were written when said person was still prevalent in my life. since i couldn’t seem to finish the next verse, i ended up forgetting about it and left it tucked away in the scrappy sheets i found in my bag. i found it again many months later and saw how foretelling it was. eerie. 

space really tells you a lot. you really don’t know how much you can’t hear your own voice until the voices of others begin to disappear. and that’s when you see how happy you are now, in seeing how unhappy you were then. 

the song didn’t have a bridge until i rediscovered this song yet again a few months ago. the final lines “was this ever enough..” made question my old (and current) self and how i really felt. and helped me to finally feel finished with this piece. it only took me 5 years to get there *sheepish grin*. this song now has definitely turned from one i felt almost nonchalant about to one that is important to me. *nods head*

love, maia.

photo taken in cesky krumlov, oct 2016

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talking to the moon.. . . . #musiclife #songwriter #moonlight #pondering #sunset #wanderer #crescentmoon #thinkingoutloud #latergram #brunomars #hooligans

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when no one else is around. #newdiscovery #fridaymorning #peace #wanderer (at Oatley Park Beach)

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photo by chrissy wong

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THE STREETS OF NY #2, BROOKLYN

found this in my drafts folder and wondered why the hell i never posted it. so here were a few my (measly) snaps i mustered of dat famous borough from my trip in october 2014. gawd what terrible tourist i am.