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Photo by Jamal Peters

Mai Anna might be one of the greatest songwriters you don’t know about. I’ve always been such a sucker for a strong song and the former English minor in me really loves the way Mai Anna shows us the way a song isn’t finished until it’s released. So many songwriters capture a single moment or time in a song, but Mai Anna tries something even bolder by showing us how her songs can change over time across languages and with a new perspective. 

On her new EP, Baby Blue, the Queens-born, Los Angeles-based R&B singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist breathes new life into three of her songs and gives them a second life. Have you ever listened to an artist, maybe there was an album or EP you liked, and wished that there was a prequel to it? Well guess what, your wish just came true! Baby Blue is the prequel you’ve always wanted for Mai Anna’s debut album, Sleepy Eyes, and it’s a great way to get a peek into the mind of Mai Anna. 

If you’ve never heard of Mai Anna before, let’s change that. She’s signed to Epic Records / Not So Fast, and her rise has already come with a co-sign from SZA and praise from Billboard, VIBE, COLORSxSTUDIOS, and The Joe Budden Podcast. She’s landed on playlists like Spotify’s R&B Weekly, Apple Music’s R&B Now, and Amazon Music’s Breakthrough R&B, and she’s also earned a TIDAL R&B Rising cover if that wasn’t enough. “Sugar High” even landed a spot on the FIFA Heroes videogame soundtrack, and she’s a classically trained figure skater, which isn’t something you hear about every R&B artist (or even person), which she brought into the “Baby Blue” visual by skating with her longtime collaborator Solomon Fox playing piano alongside her.

Identity is kind of like a cube on this EP, and Mai Anna has decided to show us more than one side of herself. That idea, of there being multitudes in any one person, is what flows through the ventricles of Baby Blue. Even though Mai Anna has felt a real wary attitude towards being understood in just one dimension, the music is where she really gets to explore the different versions of herself. Each song shows a different layer, and revisiting them, she lets her push those layers further before the full world of Sleepy Eyes arrives. 

We begin this EP with “Baby Blue (Acoustic),” and it’s the most intimate way to start. It’s built around the very first version of the song that she and Fox made together right after she arrives in Los Angeles, which puts the bittersweet mix of relief, joy, and melancholy right on center stage. It’s an opener that couldn’t possibly show you any clearer why Mai Anna has an undeniable, commanding voice in R&B. Even if it’s built around an early demo, this is such an energized way to kick off an EP that’ll make you put on your stank face wherever you’re listening to it, whether it’s on the subway or just at home while you’re working. Her vocals sit so well in the stripped back arrangement, I don’t know how much more I could say about how well this track epitomizes her vocal prowess, it is seriously a must listen can’t miss track. 

Following the opener, one of my other standout moments is easily “Sugar High (シュガーハイ)” because it takes things in a new direction entirely. Mai Anna takes one of her most playful and experimental songs in Japanese and she changes more than just the language. The rhythms, the syllable structure, and even the wordplay of Japanese reshape how the song moves, and how she writes and sings it too. This experimentation with language and wordplay and structure is just such a cool idea that I’ve never seen pulled off in this way and truly think everyone needs to check it out because what Mai Anna is doing on this project is so incredible and few tracks make it more clear than this one. 

Taken together, Baby Blue really works as both a recap and a promise. Instead of just stacking singles, it asks you to hear the same songs from different angles, which makes it feel like a continued worldbuilding for an artist you’ve already fallen in love with. Baby Blue is an incredibly exciting statement from an even more exciting artist, and you won’t want to miss a second of it. If this is just Mai Anna getting started, we can’t wait to see where she goes. 

Listen to 'Baby Blue' below: