Earlier this month, Stranger Things star Maya Hawke teased upcoming music on her Instagram. Now, the singer-actress has released a music video for her song "To Love a Boy." When it came to writing the song, Maya told Pitchfork:
After seeing the movie Call Me by Your Name for the second time, I left the theater and I was walking home to my apartment in Brooklyn, and I just started thinking about the images of water and the romantic feeling in that movie. I was just filled with this intense jealousy and desire be in love and feel that way. Then I wrote the lyrics to “To Love a Boy” as a poem, and I sent them to Jesse Harris, and he wrote that melody, and I loved it. It’s about this dream reality where you could love somebody in an all-consuming way, where it feels like when you’re swimming in the ocean on a hot summer day.
In her music video, Maya plays a mermaid who washes up on shore and gets picked up by two men who are part of a "Mermaid Collection Agency." The video follows the mermaid as she spends some time on land, but the more time she spends away from the ocean, the more she longs to be back in the water. From the costumes to the aesthetics, the video is very lo-fi and has an underlying comedic vibe. On filming the video, Maya said:
When I was brainstorming about the video, I started thinking about a mermaid coming ashore and wanting to love a boy as much as she loved the ocean. Then I decided the video would be more interesting if the love interest of the video was the ocean, and it was about her pursuit to get back to the ocean. I’m a professional actor, but I’m not a professional musician, so I wanted to do the whole thing really not professionally. So I spent all my own money to make the video and I had to rent the mermaid costume, which ended up being incredibly sh*tty, but in a way that I think is really funny.
Watch the video for Maya Hawke’s "To Love a Boy" above and listen to her other single "Stay Open" below.
In case you missed it, did you know that Rihanna is finally coming out with new music?