Victoria and Vancouver Island have a lot of musical talent, and Victoria Buzz wants to highlight some of the best and brightest local artists and bands.
Every Monday, there will be a fresh ‘New Music Monday’ article to help people find and support local artists and bands that are up-and-coming, well established or hidden gems!
For this endeavour, Victoria Buzz has partnered with our good friends at CFUV 101.9 FM, UVic’s campus radio station, to find and select the musicians and bands for this regular column.
This week, Maita Waters is the New Music Monday highlight!
Maita Waters is a pillar of the Victoria music scene, having played in bands such as Maitarra and the still-active Waters (formerly HopeCity Waters), as well as being the organizer of Folk Night at the Mint.
In addition to these endeavours, she has also been performing and recording music solo for years now and has just put out a brand new EP, Ruthless and Tender.
This new offering from Waters came serendipitously, when she decided to make the best of a bad situation.
While off working a tree planting job near Midway, BC for the summer, Waters says she accidentally hurt her ribs and had to take three weeks off in the middle of her planting contract.
“It was really brutal, because when you’re planting, your whole life is based around going to work every day,” Waters told Victoria Buzz.
“It’s not like you can say, ‘oh, I have all this time off, I’ll just hang out with friends, or go off and do my own stuff,’ because you’re just in the middle of nowhere living in a tent.”
However, there was a nearby arena facility the tree planters had access to for meals and meetings. In that arena, Waters found a room off to the side that had really good acoustics for singing.
“Both of the cooks at the camp were amazing musicians, and they would go in their off-time and sing songs in this room,” she explained.
“So I would just go and spend a lot of my time in this arena. It got me thinking I should do something with this and I had just finished writing these three songs before tree planting that I was really excited about.”
Waters says she went into the small town of Midway and bought the only microphone she could find, downloaded a trial version of Ableton, a digital audio workstation (DAW), and got to work figuring out how to record.
“Then I just spent all of my days in this room getting the tracks down, so I’m really excited about what that means to me,” said Waters.
“Obviously it was a really hard time, not just physically, but emotionally of being in a place where you just kind of feel useless and taking up space, then being able to turn that around in some way.”
Waters got the three tracks recorded, sent them to a friend to record some pedal steel for the EP, then gave it to local Victoria producer Julian Marrs of Marrs Audio for mixing and mastering.
She says that she was really inspired by classic folk music for this recording project, but as a female singer-songwriter, flipping the patriarchal roots of that genre on its head.
“You know how men’s folk songs can be, like, a murder ballad, and it feels like as a female artist my options are to basically go really against that, but I really wanted to put myself in that same story line,” explained Waters.
“Like, what is that same narrative, but from a female perspective… I want to own it as well.”
Ruthless and Tender was released to the world on September 7th.
As a highlight track for this week’s New Music Monday, Waters wanted to talk a bit more about the final song of the EP, “Good, but at what cost?”
Waters says that “Good, but at what cost?” was definitely the most personal of the three songs.
She explained that this song is about noticing the women around her and in her life settling for what they have, even though a situation might be less than ideal.
“A lot of it is definitely, seeing a couple women I am close to settling or not settling and feeling bad about that,” she said.
Additionally, and on a very personal note, Waters says that this song is about feeling like she has to stifle her passion in order to meet the expectations of those around her.
“In the chorus, when I say, ‘this passion f*cked me up, cause it doesn’t come with any grace,’ it’s about feeling like you’re too much.”
Waters says this feeling comes about in many ways, because she considers herself a very passionate person, but it is especially present for her when in music scene spaces.
“As a female musician, it feels like you have to be really nice and supportive, and even on stage,” said Waters.
“A guy can get up and be really funny on stage and then it feels like women have to get up and be like, ‘thank you so much,’ like there’s a way to do it where you are full of grace, gentle and non-threatening.”
She added that she is driven by the passion to be understood and heard without having to stifle that same passion.
Listen to “Good, but at what cost?” below:
To listen to the rest of Ruthless and Tender, find Maita Waters on Bandcamp, Tidal and Apple Music.
Maita Waters will be playing a couple of solo shows in Victoria over the next couple months: one being a house show on September 27th and she is also doing CFUV’s Basement Tapes show on Halloween.
She is also looking to book a few more going into the winter, which she says to keep an eye out for.
To follow along and stay up-to-date with Waters in all her musical endeavours, follow her on Instagram.
Related:
- New Music Monday: shark bite spite evolve indie-folk sound on ‘dreaming of wild horses’
- New Music Monday: AHRF teases upcoming album with first single ‘Cave In’
- New Music Monday: Small Pleasures embrace vulnerability on ‘Songs For Lovers’
CFUV is a non-profit campus and community radio station that plays a ton of local music of all kinds across Vancouver Island. If you like to support local music they are an amazing resource with a plethora of new local tunes in their arsenal.
“[CFUV] has been a major supporter of all my bands and all my projects,” said Waters.
“This is like my fourth music project in Victoria including Folk Night and all of them I’ve gotten to do a show at the Basement Tapes for… It just feels like an accessible place for artists that’s free of elitism.”
Tune into CFUV 101.9 FM on air or online!
Let us know what you think of Maita Waters in the comments below!
