NeoL

――Welcome to Japan! I heard this is your first time here. How do you like it?


Mae Stephens: I love it. I want to move here! Can I just live here? Or just throw my passport out the window? [laughs]　


――We would like to start asking you a bit about your background. Growing up in England, when did you start playing music?


Mae Stephens: We have this heirloom piano that’s about 110 years old. It’s been passed down through generations in my family, and it got passed to me when I was 12. But from I think it was about four years old, I would sit on the piano and just play. I never learned how to read music, but I just listened to something and then tried to figure it out. I did that all the way up until 12 years old. Then I decided I was going to write my first song, and I wrote a song about a mother wolf and her cubs. And I went downstairs, I played it to my parents. They were like, “Okay, I think this is what you’re good at.”


――You started so young. That’s amazing. What motivated you to write songs?


Mae Stephens: I had a really rough time in school. I was bullied quite badly for almost everything about me and music almost became quite a therapy for me. Like I’d come home I had a really bad day and I’d go and play. For example, on my 13th birthday, I got bullied so mercilessly because it was my birthday. And I came home and played for six hours straight. So it became therapy, and then that turned into a reliance. I just I relied on that to make my day so much better. From that grew a passion to write and it almost turned from playing into writing and releasing all my energy into lyrics and songs.





――How did you learn songwriting?


Mae Stephens: I didn’t want to take piano lessons because I spent so many years learning it myself that I was worried that it might take away from some of the stuff I taught myself. So I taught myself how to also create home demos, so I can record my songs. I taught myself guitar. I spent a long time looking at other songwriters and what they did and the tools they used. It was like an obsession. I’d come home and I’d go straight onto YouTube and look up how to write about this. It was like a little girl to a Barbie that was me to songwriting.


――When did you decide that this is what you want to do with your life?


Mae Stephens: I grew such a passion for it that when I left school, I kind of went to college. I knew I wanted to be the musician or at least as far as I could get in the industry. And my dad spent eight years learning everything you could about the industry, analytics, social media, everything to try and help me. He’s really supportive and he’s lived every moment with me. He’s cheering me on from the sidelines now. He’s done his job and now he’s hung his hat with the label.


――So he started this journey with you.


Mae Stephens: He was my manager before I met my manager now. We called him “Dadager” [laughs.] Both of my parents are really, really supportive. My dad carried my keyboard everywhere, took me to gigs, paid for my equipment.





――What kind of music did you grew up listening to?


Mae Stephens: Absolutely everything!


――Who inspired you the most?


Mae Stephens: As a kid, every family member had different styles. I was brought up mainly around classical music from my grandparents. But then my mum loves rock and my dad was into trance and electro pop, R&B, Jazz… I was brought up on such a broad spectrum of music that I learned to take inspiration from everything around me. But if we’re talking like idolizing, it’s probably Freddie Mercury. Either him or I was brought up around the period where Adele was on every billboard, so definitely, I think Adele as well. They are my two big ones.


――When you started writing music, was it always the same style as “If We Ever Broke Up”?


Mae Stephens: I was a ballad artist before, so I wrote a lot of heartbreak music. It was based on emotional trauma. “If We Ever Broke Up” was the first funk song I ever wrote. This is a completely new genre of music for me.








――Once you listen to “If We Ever Broke Up,” you can’t get it out of your head! How did you make that song?


Mae Stephens: It was based off a real experience. I had a very terrible boyfriend. He just wasn’t a good person, but I was quite scared to leave him for a while, you know, I was intimidated. I eventually plucked up the courage to leave him, and he was very, very harsh and very horrible during that situation, especially to me. He’d make comments about everything, he got friends to turn against me and all of this stuff. And during the time we were together, he’d commented on my body size on the phone. He was like, “We need to take you to the gym and get you skinnier.” And the song was a way of me releasing that and forgetting it and moving on and healing, kind of like how I did as a kid. And it’s basically all the things I wanted to do when I was with him.


It’s also about me healing as well with my self-confidence, and reminding people that when you come out of a relationship, especially one like that, you don’t want to feel deflated. You don’t want to feel like you’ve lost the battle. You want to feel empowered that you pulled yourself out of that situation.

――I read that you posted that song on TikTok on New Year’s Eve, and when you woke up the next morning it went viral? What was your initial reaction like?


Mae Stephens: It was the last video I was going to do. I’ve done TikTok for so long. I tried and played doing stuff on Instagram, nothing works. So I was just going to post it on New Year’s Eve and if it didn’t work, I had a brand new year to figure out what I was going to do with the rest of my life. I posted the video and then in retaliation, because it was New Year’s Eve, I went to go get very, very, very drunk [laughs.] I woke up the next morning with a headache, and I just I opened my phone because it was dinging. And I was like, either something’s happened, like there’s been an accident. I had no idea. I picked up my phone, and there were all of these TikTok notifications. And I opened it and screamed, and I turned to my boyfriend like “Look at this!!!” It was just like 11 billion! And he screamed and I started crying.


Because I don’t ever have like 10,000 views. I thought I was going to wake up from a coma, I thought maybe I was still drunk dreaming [laughs.] There was a couple of days where I just couldn’t speak to anyone, because I was so in shock that this had happened at the beginning of a brand-new year. And this year so far has been the greatest year of my life. My entire life is turned upside down in six months. It’s insane [laughs.] And to be able to have signed to a label and a publishing deal, being able to travel to countries… I played Glastonbury for goodness sake! It’s been the weirdest year of my life, but the best year of my life as well. I wouldn’t change it for the world.


――Your dad must have been thrilled.


Mae Stephens: Oh my goodness. I opened for Anne Marie a couple of weeks ago and it was a massive crowd, a huge stage. We were doing a soundcheck and I was playing a song I wrote about my mental health as a kid and my imposter syndrome and all the stuff I went through. It’s a really emotional song. And my mum and dad were on the field checking the sound, and I saw my dad fall to his knees. He started crying. It’s been his dream for me to stand on the stage like that. And to watch my dad like fall over and start crying, which he never does, it was like, one of the moments of my life. There are so many moments this year that I can’t forget but that one. That was a really emotional day. I think he’s really proud.





――Your song is very popular here in Japan as well. Many people post a little dance clip on TikTok. How do you feel that your music is accepted all the way across the globe?


Mae Stephens: The moment I found out it was popular in Japan, I did scream. I never expected it to get that far. Maybe you know, a couple of countries like Germany, Sweden, maybe France, but for it to branch out this far across the globe is absolutely insane. I’m really, really thankful.


――A lot of your fans here are empowered and inspired by you already. How would you like to evolve as an artist in the future?


Mae Stephens: I’ve always found that music is the soundtrack to people’s lives. Like if you watch a movie with the sound off, it’s never as good, right? I feel like every memory I’ve ever had in my life has had a song. And I’m the kind of person that wants to give people those memories and allow them to remember them through music.


I want to bring out the weird kids as well. I mean, I was a weird kid. I was someone who was taken aback for everything. So I support people who are a little bit rough around the edges, and the kids who aspire to be musicians, actors, artists, because it’s chasing an impossible dream, but it’s still a dream that’s achievable.





photography Marisa Suda（https://www.instagram.com/marisatakesokphotos/）
text nao machida