Pop Smarts

Maiysha Sept. 11, Joe’s Pub, 425 Lafayette St., 212-539-8777; 7:30 & 9:30; $15

Maiysha doesn’t have a sob story. She didn’t grow up in an impoverished home struggling to make ends meet. In fact, her father earned a good living as a lawyer in Minneapolis, while her mother worked as a TV producer in Chicago (they divorced when she was three), where Maiysha grew up admiring Natalie Cole, Chaka Khan and Diana Ross, all of whom her parents also admired.

“I don’t have a musical family, I have a family of music lovers,” she stresses from her Brooklyn home. “My parents were both instrumental in kind of forming my musical tastes, so I grew up on the music that they loved. Both of them would always take me to musical theater, so I got bitten by that bug really early—and they ended up with this little performer.”

Though she participated in numerous school musicals—she was the lead in a production of The Wiz when she was 12—her musical career didn’t truly begin until after she graduated from Sarah Lawrence, where she studied vocal performance, creative writing and race and gender studies.

“I actually went there thinking I was going to be studying writing and theater,” she explains. “I did a ton of musical theater when I was there and I did a lot of jazz performance study. I wasn’t a music student, I was there to do writing and social studies—I got really interested in women’s and African-American studies—and that informed a lot of what I was doing.”

Her years at Sarah Lawrence did not go to waste. Though the songs on This Much is True (her debut album, out in August) don’t feature any Afro-centric or direct feminist references, her writing education is clearly evident in her lyrics, which alternate from personal reflections on romanticism to third-person storytelling. One example is “Gods,” which tells the story of a man who dreams of becoming a celebrity but “just can’t find the beat.”

It was a long road between college and a career in music. After ending her studies, Maiysha briefly taught at a Manhattan private school and built a successful modeling career, which continues to this day. “I’m not actively at it, but technically I’m still under contract with Ford and very much in contact with my agents.” 

The path to making the disc began taking shape after she met Grammy Award–winning producer Scott Jacoby. “The disc started as a series of demos,” she recalls. “I met Scott Jacoby almost seven years ago, and we started a working relationship.”

Despite the recent attention of the music industry, the singer still considers her upbringing and years in school essential to her development as a musician.

“It’s not so much what I studied but the way I studied which probably informed the way that I write now, because it really helped me to develop a really analytical mind,” she says. “When we were shopping around for deals, one of the things that I ran into were comments like ‘this is pretty smart for pop music.’ I refuse to dumb myself down, because I don’t think that people are generally stupid.”