"Missing Out" by Maya Hawke // Song Review
Her songwriting is deeply specific and diaristic, not necessarily focused on being too relatable for the listener. Maya doesn't shy away being honest about her privileged, unconventional life and experiences growing up. "But I was born with my foot in thе door and my mind in the gutter and my guts on the floor", she sings.
Despite that, parts of this song are definitely very representative of the universal experience in your 20's and having disorienting feelings of imposter syndrome in a new environment. Lyrically it is self-depricating and funny as she sort of spirals within her own mind about this night. "Didn't think I'd get in, so I didn't apply, now I'm a drunk hanger-on, hittin' on the younger guy, I buy booze for the Ivy League with my television salary, they think they look up to me". It's poignantly written with a level of self-awareness that serves as a clever snapshot of someone feeling caught between words trying to make sense of where she fits in with it all.
"Lucy wants to write the next great American novel, and she can't even read the bottle," Maya sings in the opening lines of the song, as if she's bracing herself for the night ahead. "She says 'I might be a genius', well, she could be a model". It's observational and personal, coming off as something you might overhear in a conversation at a party that sticks with you.
In an interview with Stereogum, Maya shared the real-life moment that inspired that lyric specifically and ended up therefore shaping the rest of the song as a whole. She said, "There was actually a girl who went to Brown, where my brother goes to college, and we were all going around saying what our wish was for ourselves. She said, 'I want to write the next great American novel.' It was the moment where I felt older than everyone because I laughed so hard. I was like, 'You are so far down the wrong track!' Wish to write a novel. That would be a miracle. Don't wish to write the next great American novel, that's a nightmare! It made me feel I actually am a different place in my life than these people I was around. It totally inspired this whole song."
From that point on, Maya begins to have this personal realization throughout the rest of the song where she recons with the fact that she may have already outgrown a part of herself that once longed for traditional milestones and including romanticizing writing her own version of the next great American novel, whatever that may mean to her now. "Missing Out" traces back the emotional distance between who she is now and who she might have been if she had gone a more traditional route in her life.
Check out more from my song of the week series here. ☆ Thanks for reading!
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