Having played with the idea of a solo project under her own name, Maya Bon eventually decided to form a band named Babehoven. The journey from singer-songwriting to folk-pop mastery has not just been an artistic one, taking her from east coast to west by way of Philadelphia. That journey has led them to Hudson, New York and the recording of their upcoming LP I See Them, I See Me. We caught up with Maya and fellow Babehoven
mastermind Ryan Albert to discuss their songwriting partnership, the band’s origins and the new record.

IINAG: You’re from LA originally, Maya. How did you end up in Portland? 

Maya: People often think I’m from Portland because I started the band there when I was in college about ten years ago. 

I have a complicated view of Portland because I had a pretty bad time going to college there. The city is about 72 per cent white, and Oregon has a very intense history of racism. People of colour literally weren’t allowed into the state. 

While I was in college, it was the start of the Black Lives Matter movement. There were militias coming into Portland and clashing with leftist groups and antifascists. There was a lot of agitation on our campus and really intense police violence. It’s one of the most corrupt police forces in the country. 

It’s a beautiful place too, and there are a lot of great things about it, but I was ready to leave. I was shocked by the complications of the culture there. I feel like a bit of a downer when it comes to Portland. 

IINAG: Does that complexity reflect itself in the music scene there? 

Maya: I like the music scene. When I was in college, it was extremely male-dominated. It was before women and queer people really started taking over the creative scene, which happened around my senior year. I felt like I was part of that. 

It was a very white, male-dominated music scene while I was there. It wasn’t bad, and I liked a lot of the musicians, but if I played I would always be the opener by default because I was a singer-songwriter playing solo. 

Once I started a full band and named it Babehoven, things changed. More women, people of colour and queer people were coming to the front and saying, “We’re going to take over this scene right now. Everyone else, shut up for a little bit.” 

When I first started playing, I was using my own name. Then, in my senior year, I decided to form a band because I wanted more musicians involved. 

Our friends Elias Williamson and Skyler Apia played bass and drums. Then, once I moved to LA and met Ryan, he became involved the following year. 

IINAG: What took you to LA, Ryan? 

Ryan: An ex of mine moved out there and I was going to move out there too, but it didn’t work out. Then I thought, “What am I doing with my life?”

I randomly got an amazing job, and that job led me to meet Maya because I was working for Maya’s mom. 

IINAG: Was that job in music? 

Ryan: Kind of. It was more to do with composition, experimental sound, installation and archiving. It wasn’t indie music; it was the other part of the sound world. 

I don’t like labels. I don’t think about it. I’m just a guy who plays music. 

I’ve done a lot of things and love a lot of things. Sometimes I’m another dude with a beard playing acoustic guitar. Sometimes I’m another guy with a beard putting a screwdriver in a guitar. Sometimes I just like to clap my hands under a bridge and see what that sounds like. 

Maya: Ryan is the most varied music listener I know. He knows a lot about many different genres. When we met, he introduced me to a lot of experimental music. 

He researches things, goes to shows and is more invested in music than I was. He covers a lot of ground. He goes from extremely minimal music, like Alvin Lucier’s long-form experimental compositions, all the way to Blink-182, his favourite band. 

Ryan: I was really into Alan Lomax. He travelled around from about the 1920s through to the 1970s with an old lathe-cut recording machine and recorded in many places, particularly in Appalachia. 

He would basically show up on someone’s porch and say, “You like singing music, it seems.  What does your family sing?” 

I like that. With the internet, you can find so much amazing stuff. It’s fun to deep-dive and see what’s what. 

IINAG: What prompted the move from LA to the East Coast? 

Maya: Ryan’s from Vermont, and he wasn’t enjoying the LA heat. LA is amazing in so many ways, and it’s one of my favourite cities in the world, but it’s full of traffic and constant air pollution. It’s extremely hot, and there are fires, floods and landslides. It’s an intense place to live, especially for someone who doesn’t love it there. 

Ryan was ready to leave and was curious about Philly. I was curious about Philly too, so we moved there. Then, three months later, COVID hit. 

We decided to move to Vermont, where Ryan’s parents are from, to get out of the city, quarantine and spend time with his family and grandparents. 

We later visited Hudson to see a friend, really liked it and decided to try living here. Now it’s been five years, and we own the house we live in. 

For the most part, there’s no traffic, the air is good, the water is good and the community is amazing. We get winter, which we both love, so we can settle into a gentle, quiet period during the winter.

IINAG: Does Babehoven’s sound reflect a particular place, or a lack of place?

Maya: I would say both. Hudson and the Hudson Valley have definitely affected our music. 

This place is conducive to the kind of music we like to write. I also think winter comes out in our music a lot. 

We’re releasing an album called I See Them, I See Me. It’s the album we’ve recorded least in winter. It was mostly recorded in the summer.  

Generally, the band feels like internal, introspective work for me. 

That has happened in all the places we’ve lived, including Vermont and Hudson, but Hudson has been the most conducive to our music. 

We also play with people from all over. Depending on who’s available, we have what we call a “poly-bandmate” situation. Whoever wants to do the tour comes along. 

We have three drummers, two bassists and one keyboardist. We love our bandmates, and they all bring something special to each tour. 

IINAG: Does having different musicians involved affect the creative process? 

Maya: Ryan and I exclusively write together. I write the songs, or Ryan brings me a guitar part and I write lyrics over it. Then we co-write a chorus. The creative centre is really just the  two of us. 

For this album, we recorded part of it with Phil Weinrobe producing. He likes bringing musicians into the live experience and works with people he loves. 

We filled the studio with musicians we admire and wanted to work with, and played many of the songs live. We added little bits and pieces afterwards, but for the most part, we brought our existing work to the bandmates. 

They generally don’t change it much. If they do, we usually enjoy it. If we don’t, we let them know. We’re the final say. 

Ryan: Creatively speaking, it’s primarily Maya and me. But for this album, because we were playing with more musicians, we were able to hear the songs in a room first. 

Previously, I might spend eight hours recording a guitar part, then come up with a drum part and a bass part, building the track up piece by piece. We would then listen back and decide that something needed to change. 

This time, we could do something in a room and hear it come alive immediately. 

We made live arrangement decisions while recording. On previous albums, it might have taken two days of work before Maya and I realised that the acoustic guitar or drums should do something differently. We would then scrap the work.

The creative process was still primarily Maya and me, but having more people to play with helped us make those decisions alongside them. 

IINAG: How easy was it for you to allow Babehoven to expand and contract over the years? 

Maya: Babehoven initially started as just me in Portland. Then I asked Elias Williamson and Skyler Apia to play drums and bass. 

I wasn’t collaborating with them on the songwriting. I was asking them to play drums and bass, and they did collaborate in the sense that they wrote drum and bass parts that were great. 

That version of the band only lasted about nine months. I moved to LA, and it didn’t feel like we were deeply collaborating. 

When Ryan and I first started playing together, we were similarly just playing the songs I had written. Then we started recording together. That’s been an eight-year process of working on music and digging in. 

It took about four or five years before we really began collaborating on songwriting. That was difficult for me because songwriting has always been very personal. 

Some of the songs I write, I don’t play for anybody. I play them for Ryan now, but I’ll never release some of them. Some of my favourite songs will never be released because they’re so personal. 

I write very descriptive, diaristic things about what’s happened in my life. 

Songwriting has started to shift into dissecting a song, which has been fun and exciting to work on with Ryan. I feel like we have two types of songs. 

There are songs where I expel something emotional and need to get it out. That’s the song. 

Then there are songs where Ryan and I ask, “What kind of chorus could we put here? Should we explore this? Does it feel like too much? Should we rein it in?” 

That’s new for me, and I really enjoy it. But it’s completely different from a song like “Twenty Dried Chilies.” I wouldn’t want to dissect that song with Ryan to make it catchier, because that isn’t the point of the song. 

IINAG: What drives you to write songs that perhaps only Ryan will ever hear? 

Maya: Before we started working on songs in this different way, I’d spent most of my life writing songs that no one would ever hear. Often, I didn’t even record them as voice memos.  I just wanted to release something through stream of consciousness, and then that was it. 

I like that about songwriting. I told Ryan when we first started collaborating that I wanted some songs to be left as they were. I don’t care if they’re catchy, if people like them or if the lyrics are “good”. What matters more to me is that the song happened. That’s it, whether anyone ever hears it or not. It’s something that happened.

IINAG: What’s the difference between a song like that and something like “Lasagna”, which you were excited to release? 

Maya: The main difference is that “Lasagna” won’t hurt anybody if I release it. 

Some of my songwriting details people’s behaviour or moments from my life that I don’t want to discuss publicly. It can be like a book that comes out and makes me think, “Whoa, I didn’t want to talk about that publicly.” Someone else might not want me to talk about it either. 

It becomes an emotional choice. With “Twenty Dried Chilies,” I changed the names of the people I was talking about because I had previously left people’s names unchanged in some songs. That really hurt people, and I didn’t want to do that. 

Ryan: I don’t think there’s ever an exact decision about it. Large parts of “Lasagna” were written in 2018, and we just sat on it. 

I didn’t know it existed, apart from the one time Maya played it into a voice memo when we lived in LA. Then she revisited it, and I said, “That’s cool. Let me do this guitar part.” 

It became something we were addicted to playing and working on. 

Maya once wrote a song about me working in the garden. I loved it, but we were never like, “Let’s record it.” It wasn’t that we didn’t want to monetise a song about working in the garden. It was simply a song for Maya and me in our private life. 

IINAG: Was “Lasagna” originally one of those songs you kept private? 

Maya: The verses were written years ago, maybe the choruses too. It’s a six-or-eight-year old song. 

I wouldn’t classify it as one of those locked-away songs. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to share it; I just didn’t have the full idea yet. It wasn’t ready. 

I was having a hard time thinking of the next part, and Ryan and I weren’t collaborating on songwriting at that point. Ryan was the missing part, so it had to wait. 

IINAG: Does the rest of the new album sound like “Lasagna”? 

Maya: Yes.  

Ryan and I wrote a chorus that was catchy, along with that slow-pop vocal part in the background. That came directly after we toured with Slow Pulp. We thought, “Oh my God,  they’re so good at writing a pop song.” 

“Lasagna” is intentionally a pop song. If you listen only to the first part of the verse, the chords could have been slowed down into something sadder. 

It would have worked, but it was fun to make a pop song with “Lasagna.”

We also made a pop song with “Blue Around You”, the single that came out before it. I don’t know how pop-oriented the rest of the album is. 

Ryan: I think the album is poppy. 

Maya: There are definitely pop moments. 

Ryan: There are a lot more choruses on this album. 

Maya: That’s what we were drawn to. We hadn’t done much of it in the past, and we thought, “What would be fun? Let’s try to make a chorus.” Or, “What would be fun to play live? Let’s have a big chorus on this one.” 

“Pelorus,” the song that ends the album, definitely isn’t a pop song. 

“Three Reds” is probably my favourite song. It isn’t a pop song either, although it has a chorus, a bridge we like and something that’s almost a guitar solo. 

The album opener isn’t a pop song either, but it’s territory we’ve never explored before. It’s probably the most varied album we’ve made. 

We were concerned about whether it would be cohesive. We asked Phil Weinrobe how we could make it cohesive. We added some parts and removed others. 

We had 19 songs, which we narrowed down from more than 30 demos. I don’t know how people will hear this album or whether it will feel cohesive. I’m curious to see how it lands. 

IINAG: You have a tour coming up in October and November? 

Maya: We have a tour coming up in October and November across the whole country, with  dates here and there. It will be fun to play those songs live.

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