Musician Tkay Maidza on Carving Space for Herself in Australian Hip-Hop

Women Who Travel | Condé Nast Traveler

Condé Nast Traveler

Society & Culture, Places & Travel

4.4 • 636 Ratings

🗓️ 26 May 2021

⏱️ 26 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Try to define 24-year-old Australian-Zimbabwean musician Tkay Maidza's songs by a single genre and you may come up at a loss for words. But then again, so does she, telling us that her music is simply “alternative of anything.”

“It's alternative pop, alternative, rap, alternative R&B,” she says from her new home in L.A. “It's left of center of anything because I'm always looking for something that's new and different and trying to make it my own.”

This week, we sat down with the prolific singer to chat about how moving around as a kid prepared her for touring, how her family's musical interests have influenced her sound, and how she's stayed creative over the last year and a half. It's all part of our guide to new music around the world—and you can find Tkay and other incredible female artists on our Spotify playlist.

Read a full transcription and find links to the artists Tkay mentioned here: https://www.cntraveler.com/story/tkay-maidza-women-who-travel-podcast

Follow Tkay: @tkaymaidza

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, everyone, and welcome to Women Who Travel, a podcast from Condinas Traveler.
0:09.2	I'm Lale Aricoglu, and with me, as always, is my co-host Meredith Carey.
0:13.8	Hello!
0:14.7	Last week, we published The Women Who Travel Guide to New Music Around the World,
0:18.7	which featured stories about everything from a female
0:21.2	collective in Nigeria honoring the legacy of Afrobeats to a Cambodian singer working to bring
0:26.3	back a vibrant music scene. In honor of the guide, we're talking all things music this week
0:31.1	with an extra special guest, TK. Mizer, a rapper, pop artist, R&B singer and so much more.
0:39.6	TK is a prolific musician and her latest single, Syrup, was released in April. Usually based in Australia, she's joining us
0:44.5	from her brand new home in L.A. Thanks for chatting with us today. Thanks for having me. How are you doing?
0:50.8	We're good. So good. It's suddenly summer. Yeah, it's really hot. I'm sweating. I'm actually
0:57.4	like sweating right now, but at least no one's around me, so it doesn't matter. Yeah, it's same here,
1:02.9	and I just closed my window and I'm feeling very sticky. Well, to start off in the very beginning for you, you were born in zimbabwe and grew up kind of
1:15.3	all over australia um how do you feel like moving around and traveling as much as you did growing up
1:22.3	has impacted your music or just how you've approached being creative over the years.
1:28.3	Yeah, I think the lesson that I learned from like traveling around a lot was to just never
1:34.5	get too attached to anything.
1:36.2	And I think the way I approach just my everyday life, I'm always just looking for something
1:42.3	else to do.
1:43.1	And if I'm in the same place too long, then I feel stagnant and stuck. So I think I've just learned to embrace the movement and not fight it kind of thing. Like I think the way I make music as well is very like eclectic and I'm always moving around. I think when you're a kid as well like you wonder
2:02.0	if the fact that you're traveling a lot and you don't have enough time to like get to know
2:06.7	friends and have like that strong base of friendships you're kind of like oh is there something
	...

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