Maya Libbey is a singer and songwriter who grew up in Luxembourg, born to an Austrian mother and a Canadian father. She recently completed a four-year college degree at Cork School of Music, where she honed her skills in performance and songwriting. She’s been compared to the likes of Amy Winehouse and Raye, with a vocal range that moves effortlessly between genres. Jazz, R&B, pop and soul music: Maya can do it all. 

Maya, first of all, congratulations on completing your degree! 

Thank you!

You grew up in Luxembourg, and attended the International School. What was that like and do you think it influenced you in your career?

Luxembourg is such a cool place because it’s such a unique blend of cultures. I really enjoyed growing up in Luxembourg. I think a lot of opportunities were available to me. There were a lot of after-school activities, like the Conservatoire. I was also part of [the choir] Voices International, so I was able to be a soprano soloist. As a child I really wanted to try everything and I did that. I just dipped my toes in whatever I could because I was always such a curious child. I still am quite curious. Yeah, I think Luxembourg just had a lot to offer and I was also very privileged to be able to go to such a cool school that has a lot of after-school activities. I was involved in musicals, in choirs – it kind of opened me up to that world.

How would you describe your music?

At the moment, my sound fuses R&B, jazz, pop and soul. I love emotionally expressive music with rich textures and grooves, but it definitely is very much genre-fluid. I’m the type of person that loves listening to all types of music so I’m always really open-minded and I’ve always wanted to try new things. My music lives between R&B, soul, jazz and that kind of raw singer-songwriter storytelling. It’s definitely genre-fluid and grounded in feeling. 

And you’ve also been writing your own songs.

Yes, I am a songwriter as well. I’ve been in Ireland for the past four years studying music and one of my modules was songwriting. We were encouraged to write songs for different scenarios where we were writing for someone else and we were encouraged to collaborate a lot. The music I write at the moment is all by me and I might collaborate with some friends or other musicians and then work on the arrangements, so the musical arrangements are done by me or with someone else.

Can you tell us more about your writing process? What inspires you? 

Usually it starts either with a chord progression, a melody or with a feeling and a lyric. Often I try to tap into that vulnerability and then try to draw my lyrics out from there. We’re all musicians in my apartment – so I’ll just be in the living room or on the kitchen floor and we’ll just jam out something. I like having something that’s emotionally expressive. I think a lot of my songs can be very sassy. I often say it’s from real life experiences but it can sometimes just be written from a different perspective. I get inspired by day-to-day life. For example, I was at the beach with my friends and we were drawing a face in the sand. We drew the eyes and the lips when suddenly a wave came crashing over it and wiped the face away. One of my friends goes ‘oh we’re all just faces in the sand,’ like, one minute you’re here and then we’re gone the next. She said it almost as a joke, but I thought that was such beautiful imagery and that moment on the beach in Ireland just inspired a song lyric. So I have one song that I wrote for my final college performance called ‘Faces in the Sand’. It’s about platonic love, how much I’ve loved being in Cork and how grateful I am for my friends and the memories we’ve made. 

You’re currently in Cork. Do you plan on staying there? 

I am planning on staying another year. When I first came to Ireland I didn’t know anyone and I’m quite proud of the network and the team that I’ve built. I always find that being a musician is almost like running a small business because you have to network, build your own team and really hustle. So I think I’ve established myself well in Cork and I want to make use of the resources that I’ve built. So I will definitely stay another year and then probably take it internationally outside of Luxembourg and Cork – somewhere new, which will be exciting!

You’ve played at Screaming Fields Festival and you’ve also done several gigs in Ireland now. Do you find that there are differences in those audiences?

In Ireland, I’ve played a lot of different venues, which brought me to a more widespread crowd. For example, I’ve done the Cork Jazz Festival, that’s a festival where people come from all over the world to watch artists. So that’s a very different audience, where you get the perspective from someone who’s never seen you play before. And then in Luxembourg for the Screaming Fields there were a lot of friends and family. I’m blessed to have an amazing support system, my family and friends have always believed in me and that’s something very beautiful because the people that I grew up with are all in Luxembourg. They have known me since I was 5 years old and then they get to see me on stage. So it was very different because the types of audiences that you get – it goes from people that don’t know you at all, that see you more from an artist perspective, to the people who know you your whole life. 

Speaking about live performances, I can imagine it can be quite nerve-wrecking to step in front of a crowd as a new artist. Is that something your course prepared you for?

The course that I did was performance-based so we are given a lot of opportunities to perform and the environment that we’re in offers so much room for collaboration and booking gigs outside of the university. There’s so much time to practice actually performing and I really believe that you can’t really practice performing unless you actually perform. Of course there’s a lot of nerves and we have a lot of exams that are performance-based, where an examiner is in the audience. That’s also a strange feeling, to take a performance exam where you have to do a show for examiners. But I think it really prepares you well for the real world, as there will always be nerves. Everyone has different experiences; some people have more performance anxiety than others, other people love it. We definitely cover it a little bit, but I think most of the preparation comes from actually performing. 

Social media plays an important part in how artists promote themselves these days. Do you use social media and what are your feelings about that type of promotion?

I think social media is such a great tool. We’re very lucky that we can post a TikTok and it can be seen by hundreds of thousands of people, it can easily reach a wide audience. But the thing is that everyone has access to it so it makes it a little bit more difficult if you want to really be successful with social media. It’s like a job in itself and it’s hard to create content, but then that’s also another dilemma. I want to make art. I want to make music and create connections. I don’t want to be making content. So I think in that sense it can also kind of diminish from the art that we’re trying to create, but it can also be something beautiful. I think it’s how you approach it. It’s definitely a skill that I’m trying to get better at. I don’t really have anyone who’s doing my promotion. Maybe in the future I’d like to have some support with that, but at the moment it’s just me. Social media is probably the main tool that I use to promote myself. It has its benefits: I have gotten a lot of gig offers through social media. But of course there’s that thing about wanting to make art versus content. 

And there’s the question about privacy and how much musicians want to reveal about their private lives to promote their art.

Yeah, that’s the thing, too. And it can be embarrassing to promote, for example, a single coming out and you go ‘listen to my new single!’ to all your friends who are following you and to be constantly plugging that, because that’s something you have to do. Being a musician in itself is not the conventional path one would take and I think there is a degree of bravery that you have to have and not being afraid to be cringe. Branding and marketing is hard to do for yourself because promoting yourself, branding yourself, it’s such a strange thing and it’s hard without a team. 

As an audience member, you see so many people filming and taking photos of the artists during concerts. How do you, as an artist, deal with that? Does it bother you?

Well, that comes with a lot of mixed feelings. I think it’s something to get used to for sure, because it is kind of unnatural being filmed all the time or having photos taken if you’re not used to it. Of course there’s always room for your comparison. If you get a bad angle – I think everyone knows what it’s like to have a bad picture taken of them – then that can be posted anywhere and you kind of have to get over the fact that there might be some horrible images out there. But then again, I’m also grateful for whoever is taking photos and videos of me in a sense that it means they’re probably enjoying it and want to share it. So yeah, it’s a bittersweet feeling because of course sometimes you can get the worst angle of your life but sometimes it’s also the fact that people are enjoying what you’re doing.

You’ve just graduated. What are your future plans?

I want to record a single and eventually an EP or a full album, so I’m working on a lot of new original material. I’m also preparing for live shows, some of them are more intimate and emotionally connected and some are with a bigger band. I’d love to collaborate more in Luxembourg as well. I’m developing plans in Ireland and internationally but Luxembourg at the end of the day is my home so I always want to root it back there as well.