Mayda: Small singer, big sound

Standing just 4 feet 10 inches tall, with a glam-punk look and heavily inked arms, St. Paul-bred Mayda Miller doesn’t look like anyone else on the local indie-rock scene—and doesn’t sound like anyone else, either. In fact, the most logical comparison might be another diminutive character: Prince. It’s a lofty comparison at this early stage in her career, but Mayda’s off to a plenty promising start. Her full-length debut album, The Interrogation, is a sassy splash of electro-pop that's equally endearing for its moments of raw rock fervor as for Mayda's breathless hip-hop rhyming. Before headlining tonight at the Uptown Bar, Mayda talked to The A. V. Club about swimming in a mostly-white sea and working with her mentor, former New Power Generation drummer Michael Bland.

The A.V. Club: By dint of your ethnic background, you automatically stand out in the independent local music scene, which is largely dominated by white males. How has it been so far finding your place in the scene?

Mayda: It’s been really hard for me to find my niche. The Twin Cities has so much good music, but as a fan and a listener I tend to hear a lot of the same genres dominating. Don’t get me wrong—it’s great music, but I want to create something different. I think depending on the audience sometimes it’s hard for people to understand what I’m trying to do with my music, but I’m optimistic that’s changing.
AVC: The sheer number of vital local musicians who can trace their roots back to St. Paul Central High School is pretty staggering, including Martin Devaney and Heiruspecs, and you count among their number. How did attending Central affect your musical life?

M: Going to Central influenced me greatly. I met all of the Heiruspecs guys there and played shows with them when they were still an eight-piece band. They became my musical role models, because I was a freshman and they were the older cooler guys I looked up to. Seeing them keep having success and sticking with what they're doing has kept me inspired and they’ve been great in helping me along the way.

AVC: You don’t have to look very far for role models considering that Michael Bland, who's played with everyone from Prince to Paul Westerberg to Soul Asylum, took you under his wing and produced The Interrogation. What’s your musical relationship like?

M: I write songs in two different ways, either setting lyrics to a guitar part or finding samples with my beat maker. I love building the foundations of a song from samples when I can. Once I’ve got the core melody and lyrics I bring the song to Michael, and we slowly add layers and build it together. Usually, he already understands where I want to go with it before I even say anything.

AVC: There’s a nice tension on The Interrogation between rocking, band-oriented numbers and songs with a more synthetic hip-hop feel. How did you straddle genre lines while keeping a cohesive sound?

M: My songwriting is so pop that it’s hard for me to go too far to one side or the other in terms of the songs sounding too rock or rap. They’re going to be pop no matter what—the song's going to have a chorus, I’m trying to have catchy hooks. If I went too far trying to be a rocker or a rapper, it wouldn’t be convincing because that’s just not me.

AVC: Do you think the emotional world you create on The Interrogation is an accurate reflection of your non-musical life?

M: I don’t want to come off as somebody who’s angry all the time. A lot of artists, especially female musicians, have all this angst in their work. I have issues and problems like everybody else, but I like to mix it up emotionally in my songwriting. I write pop music, and there’s a certain level of playfulness inherent to that. Music primarily for me is an escape and a form of self-expression.

AVC: You deal directly with issues of identity politics in your song “Dirty Pie Crew,” but broaden the scope of the song so it still connects with listeners who have dissimilar ethnic backgrounds. Is it a priority for you to make the specifics of your experience have a more universal impact?

M: That song came from the way I feel about myself as an adoptee and a Korean female who does music and doesn’t conform to the expected stereotype. In the scene I’m in, the sea of indie-rockers and hip-hop heads, it’s far from normal to even see an adopted Asian woman. The point of the song isn’t that specific though, it’s about the general feeling of not fitting in. Even if I lived in a city made up entirely of Korean adoptees I would still feel out of place; it’s about a feeling of aloneness that I think everyone can relate to.