The pure pop sound, the striking platinum blonde hair, the outsize persona, the flashy stage name-it all recalls, well, a certain pop-star icon. I think it’s important, again, to give people an experience on a red carpet or a performance.” And I’m not afraid to wear something crazy and ridiculous. I want to find a designer that maybe no one’s paying attention to. I don’t want to go to the designer that everyone is going to. When asked about her personal style, she said, “I think about it like, what can I do against the grain? I don’t want to do what anyone else is doing. “I wanted something with the feminine that Ava has, and Max has masculinity, so I added those two together.”Īgain and again, Max spoke about how success for her means standing out, visually or otherwise. “Max came about because it felt very masculine, and I feel a little masculine sometimes, like 50/50, like my hair,” she said. When she was signed by a record label, she decided she wanted a last name to go with it-and thought carefully about what exactly she wanted that last name to represent. When she was 13, she had come up with the middle name “Ava” for herself, which she eventually started using as a first name. ” Over the past year, Max has sung on David Guetta and Jason Derulo tracks, and released some one-off singles-including the bombastic, effervescent “Salt” and a re-interpretation of “Barbie Girl” titled “Not Your Barbie Girl”-but none gained traction until the Cirkut-produced “Sweet but Psycho” was unleashed.Ī successful pop star needs more than just the music, though, a fact Max seems highly aware of. “I’m not even kidding you,” Max said, “We got e-mails from record labels wanting to talk. Though Cirkut and Ava Max recorded a bunch of songs together, it was a modern-day cosmic event that spurred her ascent: a song that the two uploaded to SoundCloud. Luke), among other titanic hits that shaped the 2010s pop sound. Luke, was responsible for Katy Perry’s “Roar,” and Miley Cyrus’s “Wrecking Ball” (with Dr. That friend was the producer Cirkut, who, alongside Max Martin and Dr. She started making music with a friend of her older brother (one of the few members of the family without musical inclinations Max said he’s an “entrepreneur”).
She eventually moved back to California a few years later, in hopes of igniting that career. She was a Britney Spears fanatic who wanted to pursue pop music. Her mother was an opera singer her dad played the piano her uncles were in bands. When she was eight, her family moved to Virginia. While it may seem as if Max appeared out of nowhere, she worked tenaciously in order to arrive at this moment, and “Sweet but Psycho” came after years of attempts to break through.Īva Max was born Amanda Koci, in 1994, to Albanian-immigrant parents in Milwaukee. This doesn’t happen to an artist that no one knows from nowhere, right?” she said, folded up on a sofa in Manhattan this January, a few hours after performing on the Today show and a few days after appearing on The Late Late Show with James Corden, her first late-night-show performance.
She seemed well-aware of the improbability of the song’s meteoric rise: “We knew the song was special, but we didn't know it was gonna take off like this, obviously, because this was a phenomenon. While that almost cheesy “pump it up,” perfect-for-the-treadmill sound would be considered outré by some in 2019-when more languid, melancholy, and R&B-infused tracks dominate popular music-Max didn’t seem to be too concerned. The song is unabashedly pop, reminiscent of Lady Gaga or Katy Perry’s early output.
I literally tilted my head, like, why does this feel like me? It felt like me, like I had found myself.” “I run downstairs, and then I’m like, ‘Oh my God, almost burnt.’ As I’m going upstairs, I see in the mirror my reflection and the haircut, and.
And I run downstairs without cutting the other side.” As she recounted the anecdote, it was easy to imagine her telling this story again and again over the next five years. One day I cut my hair, my actual hair, cut it on the right side, and I remember I had something in the oven-I think they were chocolate-chip cookies. “It was funny, ’cause I was actually experimenting with different haircuts and colors, pink hair, blue hair, all that kind of stuff,” she said. She was in the middle of cutting her hair, while at the same time baking cookies, when she caught a look of herself in the mirror. Two years ago, Ava Max made a mistake that ended up becoming a defining signature.
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