In recent years, more and more artists have sought to revisit their older songs, breathing new life in them. That often coincides with an artist getting better at their craft. That includes Chicago singer-songwriter Jake Hawrylak, who performs under the moniker Maiden King (you can find our previous interview and session here).
In addition to the band, he’s the “bass guy” for REVERB’s video channel, the owner and operator of the studio Space Cowboy out of the Audiotree building where he records, mixes, and produces music, including for Leroy Bach (Wilco) and Christian Wargo (Fleet Foxes). As a frequently hired bassist, he’s worked with Reno Cruz (Lala Lala, Sen Morimoto), Alicia Walter, Claude, and more.
Today, we’re excited to premiere Maiden King’s single “Piece of Mine,” the first of many older written songs that he’s revisited recently. Fresh off his latest album Who Else Were We Supposed to Become?, he decided he needed a different kind of challenge. He wanted to challenge himself by revisiting his older songs and apply the expertise he’s gained as a producer and songwriter.
The new version of the song still fits comfortably in the indie-folk Maiden King has become known for, albeit with a build that explodes into a psychedelic climax.
“The song sat for years as more or less what you hear in the first 40 seconds or so before the drums come in. I had played a version of it for years with some found-sound tape loops and an acoustic guitar, but it wasn’t until I had the new equipment from the grant that I started to be more reckless in how I approached it,” says Hawrylak.
“The first big breakthrough came in writing the drum groove for the choruses and finding out that with that in place there was much more of a belt-able hook than I had initially thought. The rest of the song gradually grew out of this same sense of ‘what kind of mess can I make?’”
“The vocals were recorded with two mics and a line going to a guitar amp, a lot of the sonics were reamped through synthesizers and other audio manglers that ‘weren’t supposed to be used that way’ and in general I tried to find sustenance in the tinkering and the trust that something cool would manifest if I stayed patient. One of the most difficult things about having a studio space is what it does to your sense of time and deadline, so I gave myself all of January to track this one and one week for the mixes in the fall.”
The fresh approach to the song’s sound further boosts the song’s emotional lyrics. Hawrylak says the song is about “finding your way down to those unanswerable questions that carry us all forward in life.” That includes questions like “who am I?”, “why am I here?” and “where does this wound come from?”. He says those questions were “so potent at the time when I was first writing this song some six years ago.”
“The barren imagery was more or less a literal depiction of something that came to me during sitting meditation when I was in a prolonged period of picking at old wounds for too long for the sake of trying to understand something deeper about myself,” says x. “The truth I found was that sometimes when you circle the drain too long you are doing just that and the ‘depth work’ or whatever you want to call it is just trying to control the answer to a question that doesn’t have one.”
“Ultimately the song is about letting go of the need to have the answer and the realization I had that sometimes the answers are a salve that keeps me from facing a bigger feeling underneath. The (hopefully not too) heavy-handed pun in the title comes from the yearning I had not for ‘peace of mind’ but for a ‘piece of (something) mine’ that felt like ground I could stand on and grow from.”
Maiden King will have a few tour dates this month. You can find the dates below:
April 17th – Ope Brewing Company (Milwaukee WI)
April 18th – The Lakely at Oxbow (Eau Claire WI)
April 19th – Pilllar (Minneapolis MN)
You can follow Maiden King on Instagram and listen to his music on Spotify and Bandcamp.
Joshua is co-founder of Scummy Water Tower. He’s freelanced for a variety of newspapers, magazines, and websites, including: Rolling Stone, The Boston Globe, Chicago Sun-Times, Guitar World, MTV News, Grammy.com, Chicago Magazine, Milwaukee Magazine, MKE Lifestyle, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, A.V. Club, SPIN, Alternative Press, Under the Radar, Paste, PopMatters, American Songwriter, and Relix. You can email him at josh@scummywatertower.com.
