Biography Many people asked me if I couldn´t write a biography on my website. So here´s a few lines about me. 6th Nov 2009 I started write music quite late. I think I was about 21. I wrote mostly jazz songs in Swedish ´cause that was the kind of music I was singing back then. But after a while I wanted to learn to play the guitar. Before that I had only been singing and other musicians had back me up. But there was something inside of me who wanted to be more independent. I started learning the guitar on my own and suddenly I had loads of new pop songs coming out. I think that was the beginning. I felt I had found something. Something that was me, something that was Maia. Then there was a couple of years with loads of hard work. I didn´t know any cool club manager so it was very hard for me to get any gigs at all. The turn started when I met Annika in Hello Saferide. She was a friend of a friend and she asked me to join her band. Annika showed me how myspace worked and I got also the opportunity to open for Hello Saferide on my own, with my guitar, Many people think that everything went so fast for me, but it din´t and in general it never does.  It´s almost always years and years of hard work that no one sees. They only see the result of course. I also got inspired of another friend of me; Emil Svanängen aka Loney Dear. He recorded all his music on his own and I wanted to be like him of course. So I bought a computer, a firmware and a mic and started recording my music in my small apartment in Stockholm.  I also found an old love coming back to me; my piano. I did my first EP 2006. After that I thought it was so much fun doing everything on my own so I recorded and produced my first album the same way. Hmm I guess this is it for now. I could go on bragging about my Radio Award, Grammy nomination, No 1-hit, gold record and so on, but I don´t think that´s very interesting. :) And some short info: Born: Stockholm, Sweden Family: A big one. My mom is from south of Sweden, my dad from Tokyo in Japan Lives: Gothenburg, Sweden Albums:  "Though I´m Just Me" - 2007, "GBGVSSTHLM" - 2009(not US released yet...) 3 Music favorites: The Beach Boys, Rufus Wainwright and Radiohead xxx Maia Maia Hirasawa - Pressrelease We're heading for Glasgow, in October, to a noisy bar where everyone had a bit too much to drink, and the band on stage this particular evening, the Scottish band “the Poems” with members from the Bluebells, can’t really get the audience's attention. A completely unknown Maia Hirasawa enters the stage, with a guitar, a crappy keyboard and pretty bad sound. Everyone becomes silent. "Though I’m Just Me", is the name of Maia Hirasawa’s solo debut album. It is a logical name for the album, originally a phrase from one of the songs that didn’t make the cut, because this album is Maia Hirasawa, all the way. She didn’t just write all the songs by herself, she also produced, arranged and recorded them in a terrace house in Sollentuna and in a cottage in Skåne. Maia thought long and hard about with whom she wanted to record her debut album, before she realized that the most logical choice was to do it on her own. She had to teach herself how to record in the midst of the process of recording but already had a flair for arranging. Miss Li, Anders Göransson, Josefine Lindstrand from the Danish grammy winners “Sekten”, members from “Loney Dear” and “Vapnet” and the string duo Linnea Ohlsson and Hanna Ekstrand are friends of hers that helped out. And the Hirasawa family contributed with handclap. The result is the finest of pop, but “with quite a lot of stage musical influences, perhaps a bit like Björn and Benny”, a vague feeling of classical music and melodies you love the first time you hear them and that you’ll never grow bored of. She’s “always” been writing, but: – Earlier I always had too high demands on myself, to play well technically. But this year I realized that you don’t have to be best piano or guitar player in Sweden to be entitled to play it. Maia plays most of the instruments on the album Maia Hirasawa has been singing in a million different bands – we most recently recognize her as the backing vocalist and multi instrumentalist in Hello Saferide, but she also played support to HS the entire of last year and sold every copy of her demo that she had the energy to burn on her Macbook. She won the Roland/Sami price for the best un-signed act of 2006. She’s in fact a skilled jazz singer, has a background as a brit-popper and listens to Loney Dear and Rufus Wainright, but not to Regina Spektor, simply cause everyone says that they bear resemblance. She is half Japanese. You have to go and see her play live. Though, I’m just me. Here it is, it’s yours to keep. It will hit you right in the heart.