Tee Tolmar
Budapest born, Edinburgh based. Cultural journalist & photographer, with a passion for music and fashion.
Following their new album and 10-year anniversary, we chat to Babehoven’s Maya Bon about the importance of bad art and her changing relationship with her voice
When Babehoven’s Maya Bon joins our Zoom call, she is tucked into a room full of sunlight, life and the kind of details that make somewhere immediately feel lived in. There is something warm about it. We laugh a lot. We occasionally talk over each other. At one point, Maya pulls up a question she has written for a science podcast and reads it to me because, as she explains, it is something she has been thinking about anyway. The conversation keeps doing this: one question opens into another, then another, until we are talking about songwriting, ceramics, dancing, the subconscious, day-to-day activism and whether a song even needs to survive after it has been written.
New album ‘I See Them, I See Me’ was made across four studios, including the house Maya shares with collaborator and partner Ryan Albert, alongside new collaborators, different recording environments and a decision to loosen their usual grip on the process. They tracked live and tried not to get quite so caught up in making everything perfect.
“We normally get really intense about recording,” Maya tells me. “We get very focused on things being perfect, and this time we wanted to try to enjoy the process more and see what happened.” They still went back to things that did not feel right, but there was less picking apart, less starting over. Maya can listen to the finished record without immediately hearing everything she might change.
She has been thinking about this elsewhere, too. Ceramics, knitting and cooking have all given her the chance to be bad at something, and to get better slowly. She tells me she has never felt naturally good at very many things. Music, singing and songwriting were the exceptions, but even there, she has realised that thinking too hard can make the process harder.
“What does it mean to be bad at something when it’s creative?” she asks. A mug can look like it was made by a toddler and still be meaningful because you made it. When I mention the strange comfort of deliberately making something imperfect in a world increasingly obsessed with efficiency, optimisation and AI, Maya immediately understands. “I love a shitty mug,” she says. The more perfect ceramics become, she points out, the closer they get to an IKEA mug. She likes being able to see the hand behind an object. Music is no different. A DIY recording, with all its little imperfections intact, can hold more appeal than something polished until there is nothing left to catch on.
Maya writes songs in much the same way. Usually she plays guitar, turns on a voice memo and sings whatever comes out. Afterwards, she goes back and writes down the bits she wants to keep. She has never written lyrics first and then built a song around them. The words and melody arrive together. Sometimes, she says, a song simply appears. ‘Often’ was essentially written in one go. Other songs need to be cut apart and rebuilt. She describes the process as feeling “almost cosmic”, like being “pregnant with a song” and needing to get it out.
“I’d rather make something than not. Write a shitty song. I think that’s braver than writing a good song.”
Not every song makes it further than that initial moment. Some are never recorded. Some are never played again. Occasionally, Maya remembers one and wishes she had captured it. But she also likes the idea that a song can simply happen. “It’s a temporal experience. Like, it happened.”
For years, Maya had been able to trust that process. Then, in 2024, she lost her voice after she developed laryngitis while on tour, then contracted COVID a couple of weeks later. She believes the illness re-damaged the nerves around her vocal cords, leaving her right vocal cord partially paralysed. During a soundcheck with Washed Out, she tried to sing and no sound came out. The rest of the tour, and upcoming tours, were cancelled. For around three months, even speaking was difficult. She did not know whether she would sing again.
“I completely stopped writing,” she tells me.
Two years later, she is still retraining her voice. She works with a vocal teacher and sings classical Italian arias, something far removed from Babehoven’s indie-rock world. Her voice does not feel exactly like it did before, but Maya is beginning to appreciate that it does not have to. She has more breath support now. She understands her voice better. She no longer feels the same need to “wow everybody” when she performs.
“Sometimes I just sing the song,” she says. “I’m on key, I have a good tone, and I’m not trying to impress anybody.” She still misses belting. She is still cautious about pushing her voice. But the experience has changed what singing means to her. It is not about getting back to what she could do before. It is about discovering what she can do now.
When we get onto the album title, Maya describes a way of thinking that is difficult to pin down without making it sound much more deliberate than it is. In ‘Three Reds’, there is green inside green, red inside the self, blood inside the body. She says she does not consciously use small details to explain enormous ideas. She just thinks that way. Rather than trying to explain existence directly, she “dances around the thought”. Clay comes out of the earth and becomes a bowl. There are shapes in its folds. You fill them with something. A small, tangible image can be easier to hold than the question of what any of it means.
That becomes more complicated when the things she is looking at are impossible to make small. Maya talks about witnessing suffering in Palestine while carrying on with ordinary life, watching climate change intensify while the day around you can still feel completely normal, and seeing other musicians succeed online and wondering whether you are doing enough yourself. She has responded by getting involved: she helped put together a compilation with around 75 artists raising funds for Palestine, volunteers with environmental organisations and is involved in immigration rights organising.
Then there is Babehoven itself. Ten years ago, Maya says, nobody listened except her mum. She did not begin making music with the expectation that people would hear it. Now, people do. “What making it looks like for me is that people care,” she says. She has no interest in spending her life reaching for some constantly moving version of success. There will always be a bigger show, a better record, another milestone. She would rather look at the decade behind her and recognise what happened: “What a fucking awesome decade. I did not expect any of this, and it’s awesome.”
There is one last thing she wants people to notice. At the end of ‘I See Them, I See Me’, after a twenty-second silence on ‘Pelorus’, there is a recording Ryan found buried in his voice memos. It was made almost eight years ago, secretly capturing Maya in her LA practice space, playing guitar and singing a song she never used. Ryan found it years later and thought it was beautiful. For Maya, it feels like the perfect way to close the album: a song that was never written to be heard, preserved simply because it happened. After everything we have talked about, it feels less like an archival curiosity and more like a quiet statement of intent.
Sometimes you make something because you want other people to hear it.
Sometimes you just make a shitty mug.
Listen to ‘I see them, I see me’ here: