You're listening to Song Exploder where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishikesh Herway.

Maya from MXM Tune released her first EP in 2018. She was 18 years old and recorded it in her bedroom and self-released it.

It went on to be streamed over a hundred million times.

This year she put out her second album, Rising. And in this episode she breaks down her song Mona Lisa. She told me about how different it is from the songs she used to write when she was a teenager.

And how she found something authentic and honest by connecting with a part of herself from even earlier in her life.

I'm MXM Tune, but my name is Maya. In the past it's been easier for me to kind of play this part of being MXM Tune rather than actually thinking about who I am as Maya.

A lot of my work has been about hiding in the background and not really sharing my experience and story proudly.

I don't think I was making music that felt representative of the type of songs that I really love to listen to in my free time.

And with this song specifically I think it was this really important quest to figure out how I could make something that felt empowering without trying to hide myself.

And so it was a challenge that I had posed for myself to make something that felt like a pop song that could be about celebrating myself.

When we were in quarantine I found myself going back to a lot of the music that I loved to listen to growing up.

And it's cheesy, but I had Mamma Mia on a CD that I would listen to constantly and I had Harris-Frey on CD. I was a big musical kid I guess growing up.

And I listened to all of these things and I just remembered the joy that I felt for the first time when I found those records when I was six years old.

And I remember thinking I need to make songs that make me feel this way.

I like it out. Yeah. That's cool.

I walked into the studio the day I was working on Mona Lisa knowing that I would be collaborating with two people that I really really look up to and love in both of them are incredible strong women in music.

Pompom is the producer of the song and the co-writer Rosie who has her own artist project as well.

And I feel like the excitement in the session room that day was just really palpable.

I was talking with them about how I wanted to make a song that could kind of just be about seeing yourself as beautiful and seeing yourself as art and just make it really playful and a fun way to reference a bunch of other art.

Pompom picked up a ukulele and she played the verse chords and it just felt like this really like happy and light strumming pattern.

And then from there we really worked on trying to figure out the chorus melody.

No, I like that. It's kind of strange, but like.

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