Culture Cabinet

For Ava Maybee, music isn’t just about melody. It’s about emotional release. The rising artist behind the new debut EP Orange Drive has built her sound not around perfection, but around vulnerability, chaos, and the courage to be unapologetically expressive.

Maybee’s journey to this moment hasn’t been traditional. In fact, she considers herself a late bloomer. Raised in a house steeped in music (her father is Chad Smith, drummer for the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and her mother is a Motown devotee) Maybee was surrounded by creativity early on. She sang in choirs, did musical theatre, and had a natural affinity for putting her thoughts on paper through journaling. But, it wasn’t until her college years that she began to try her hand at writing her own music. 

“I started writing music kind of late in the game. I started writing music when I was 17,” she says. “I got to college. I went to music school at NYU, and I got there and was just like, ‘I am so behind, everyone is so fantastic.’ Then COVID hit, so I got sent home, and I had all of this time, so I just started writing and going into the studio.”

Out of that quiet chaos, a voice began to form, and not just sonically, but personally. “I grew up with so many different musical influences, so I think it took me a long time to really find sonically where I wanted to go,” she says. “So that was really beautiful to discover for Orange Drive. This project was really the culmination of being exactly where I want to be sonically, and feeling very confident in my artistry and what I stand for.” 

That confidence didn’t happen overnight. Maybee’s sound is the result of slowly layering influence, experimentation, and evolution. “I started making R&B pop music, which kind of made sense, I did gospel choir growing up, and so I’ve always had a very low voice for a woman. So I think that I always gravitated towards soul music because that was what I loved to sing,” she explains. “But, I also really loved indie pop and indie rock music, so I kind of slowly but surely incorporated that into my own sound.”

Her influences range widely, from alt-rock mainstays to confessional lyricists like the Strokes, Phoenix, Two Door Cinema Club, and even SZA. “I journaled a lot growing up. So I love the idea of music that sort of feels like you’re reading someone’s diary,” she says. 

That diary-like intimacy comes through in the way Maybee approaches songwriting. But despite her daily journaling practice, the lyrics come separately. “When I make music, I don’t come in with any type of lyric idea or what I want something to sound like. It really just happens in the studio. I like to come at it without any type of preconceived notions.”

Still, for Orange Drive, the songs began forming a cohesive whole before she even realized she had an EP on her hands. “I’m somewhere in the middle,” she says, when asked whether the project was planned from the start or the result of sporadic songwriting. “I didn’t think about it in terms of a project until the second single we put out, where sonically, it just all made sense. And then I realized I was also writing kind of a similar story arc of the last four years of my life.”

That story arc includes a theme not often explored in pop music: the pain of friendship breakups. “There’s so many songs written about romantic love. And yet, I think the thing that plagued me the most in my life was my difficulty with platonic love,” she explains. One standout track, “Gold Star Sticker,” strikes an especially raw nerve. “I write songs about things that I’ve already healed from,” she says. “So I was ready to talk about it, and so I think that’s why, just it ended up all being about that.”

Live, those emotions take on a new life, especially now that Maybee has found peace with the stage, which she credits in part to her time on American Idol, where she placed in the Top 14. The pressures of the live performances, while intense, helped her conquer the fears she had around being onstage. “Before American Idol, I was very afraid of performing. I did not really enjoy it. I enjoyed it when I was on the stage, but I did not enjoy everything leading up to it,” she says. “I would get really bad anxiety attacks and panic attacks, and once I was off the show, I felt so free, and now I love performing, because it will never be as scary as that.”

Her first headlining tour, which just wrapped, was a full-circle moment. “It was so wild. I was so shocked that people were coming,” she says. “It’s so incredible to hear people’s stories of people saying, ‘Colors’ got me through a breakup,’ or, ‘Gold Star Sticker, helped me when my best friend and I got into a huge fight.’ That’s what music does for me. So the fact that I can do that for someone else is the best thing in the world.”

Looking forward, Maybee is continuing to write, and for the first time, experimenting with a reverse approach. “For this new music I’m working on, I’ve written out all of the song titles, and then I’m going to write backwards,” she says. But, she’s happy with the now. “I am so dramatic and so deeply emotional, and I hope that that comes across in my music as well,” she says. “I want people to be unapologetically expressive, that’s what I always encourage for shows. Don’t worry about what other people are doing. If you want to dance, if you want to scream, if you want to cry, this is the place to do it.”

What remains constant is her message, and her mission. “I have no interest in keeping it together ever,” she declares. “And I hope to encourage people to just really let loose and express themselves, even when it comes across, like, I don’t know, abrasive. I’m all about just expressing yourself in the way that you see fit, and not worrying about what other people think.”

In a world that often demands composure, Ava Maybee is building a discography, and a space, for the beautifully undone.