New York-based duo Maya Bon and Ryan Albert are the minds behind the beautifully composed indie folk music that Babehoven is known for. Their recently released LP Water’s Here With You captures the warmth the duo felt as they watched the snow flurry past their window in their candlelit room. It’s a guiding light through the difficulties of life, grounding you and giving you strength when you need it the most.
The duo are set to perform at Rickshaw Stop in San Francisco on June 10. Their loving fanbase has already made this tour their most memorable yet. Learn more about Babehoven and the community they’ve created through the interview below.
Babehoven was created as a college project back in 2017 and has evolved into a beautiful folk collaboration that is steadily gaining more and more attention. What was the initial vision for this project? Did working with Ryan Albert with songwriting change this trajectory or has it helped Babehoven flourish?
The initial vision for the project was that I wanted to shift gears from being a more singer-songwriter solo project to having a full backing band and more of an indie rock sound. In 2017, I asked a couple of friends to connect me with a drummer and bassist at my college (Elias Williamson and Skyler Pia) and we began playing together and recorded our first two EPs in our friend Jesse Robertson’s basement. Ryan joined the project in 2018 shortly after I met him and moved back home to LA, leaving my other bandmates who stayed in Portland.
Ryan and I have collaborated on many EPs and albums, he’s played almost all of the instruments on the recordings. There have been many iterations of our music life but collaborating on the songwriting process is an entirely new one. We still have fairly steady roles: I’m the main songwriter and rhythm guitar player (I write the lyrics and melody and have the final say when it comes to chords, phrases, and structure), and Ryan is a multi-instrumentalist who has an amazing ear and a brilliant way of exploring the sonic structure of a song. On many of the new songs on the album, Ryan wrote guitar chords that I liked that we turned into songs together, a process that helped us explore entirely new dimensions together.
Congrats on finishing the first week of your first headline tour! While it’s still early, what has been the most rewarding thing about this tour so far?
Thank you! This tour has so far been life-affirming, nourishing, and uplifting. Playing in a room full of attentive and thoughtful listeners in every city has been a gift I hadn’t expected to receive. We have real fans now! They know our lyrics, they believe in us, they admire us! I am so moved by it and feel beyond grateful.
In Chicago, I was struggling with a cold that completely wiped my voice out. I considered canceling the show but decided I could power through. Thirty minutes before our set, I couldn’t make any noise with my voice so we decided as a band to have a karaoke set, inviting our friends who had opened the show, Mia Joy and Greg Mendez, to sing a song, our friend Carolina (Hemlock) to sing a couple, and to invite audience members to come up and sing songs they love. It was a momentous evening that changed my life forever.
The audience members, in particular, who came up with no preparation and sang songs from their hearts in front of so many people blew my mind! They were so brave! One person sang “Ella’s From Somewhere Else,” a seven-minute song we’ve only recently released with no lyrics at all! She knew the whole thing! I was blown away and very moved.
You’ve had many friends and family members help bring your vision to life. From the members of Gal Pal featured in the music video for “Birdseye” to clothing maker Marieclaire Wyntreaux designing the stunning outfit featured in “Ella’s From Somewhere Else”. How have your friends influenced your work?
It takes a village to raise a band! I am so grateful to have creative friends who inspire me. I love to collaborate. I’m always eager to work with people I like and I glean inspiration from work that I see.
What was the process like creating your 71-track mega-comp album? With the proceeds going towards eSims for Gaza, it’s beautiful to see so many artists take a stand against the atrocities happening to Palestinians. How did you and these artists feel while working on this album?
We met with a group of musicians focused on Palestinian Liberation on Zoom once a week starting on October 7th and, in these meetings, the idea of a compilation album came up as something that could be a useful tool for fundraising. I self-elected to spearhead the compilation album and Andy and Raquel decided to join too.
We worked over the winter to gather songs from interested musicians, not realizing that the comp would wind up being so large! Thankfully, many people were interested and the list grew and grew. Bandcamp doesn’t have a time limit for how long an album can be so, really, we only decided to reel it in once it became a lot of work for Ryan to master all the songs together. It wound up being a fantastic list of artists and we feel very proud and honored to have been able to raise so many funds (last week, we had already raised funds for and purchased 385 eSims!).
eSims are still very necessary and we are continuing to push the comp as much as we can! If you haven’t purchased it yet, please do so! You will not regret it!
What are you looking forward to the most in the year ahead?
I am looking forward to continuing to tour, recording new music (we demoed lots of new music through the winter and are super excited to jump into recording it properly!), enjoying the beautiful upstate summer months, working on pottery and knitting (these are other passions of mine that I work on between tours), hanging out with my three beautiful cats Trilobite, Alvin, and Zorza and my dog Woody. Lots to look forward to! Feeling very blessed!
Images by Windham Garnett
