Mae Martin is looking beyond the laughs

Music – as Mae Martin has learned – is an entirely different enterprise. So much of connecting with an audience in music isn’t about knee-jerk reactions but about the space in between. Getting comfortable with that shift can be weird, but in the end, as Martin tells me, it pays off in spades.

"The piano Elliott Smith played on 'Baby Britain' and on that album [XO] is at Largo, a historic venue at L.A. that I do a monthly show at. I started doing Elliott Smith covers, one per month, with whoever the musical guest was," Martin explains. "I started to get addicted to the energy shift that would happen in the room between the stand-up audience and the musical guests coming out. It was like, suddenly, you could hear a pin drop. It’s such a luxury as a comedian to not have to fill every silence and be able to not look for a punch line and just trust the audience to connect with it emotionally."

In 2023, after over a decade spent in London – and a significant portion of their adolescence spent in Toronto, where they grew up – Martin moved to L.A. and caught the music bug. In a sense, it had always been there. But something about the new environment, new routine, new everything made that itch easier and, perhaps, more necessary to scratch. What had been a lifelong private practice turned into a new, public-facing creative experiment. With the encouragement of friends, the 37-year-old Martin got in the studio to play around. Eventually they realised they had an album on their hands and after almost two years of work, I’m A TV, was finally released last month.

"I think if I had known while making the album that I would definitely be putting it out, I might not have made it," Martin explains as we chat. They’re sitting on the floor in their living room, in a new-ish house in L.A., where they moved during the writing of their upcoming show, the Netflix miniseries Wayward. "I kind of made it in a bubble with friends. It’s daunting and exciting," they tell me.

Martin grew up in Toronto to a set of creative parents - a British writer father and a Canadian teacher mother. They went to a school uptown, going through the normal high school motions until eventually leaving to pursue a career in comedy full-time. As Martin and I talk, we realise we went to schools less than 20 minutes away from each other, reminiscing about the weird world that grew around that scene and the oddities of figuring yourself out as a teen in general, a theme Martin has returned to time and again in their work. "It was a lot of private school boys going to semis," Martin says and laughs. "Just to take the pressure off being asked to slow dance, I would wear, like, a comedy outfit. I’d wear a beanie with a propeller hat on it or something and try to be like, 'Oh, I don’t even want anyone to ask me to dance,' even though I was desperate."

Martin’s musical roots started the same way many do. Their father James was obsessed with The Beatles, which eventually got the young Martin hooked, too. From there, they ventured deep into The Goo Goo Dolls, Third Eye Blind, Radiohead, Pink Floyd, and, of course, Elliott Smith. At eleven, Martin's parents bought them a guitar, and they started taking lessons, obsessing over practicing and writing little songs in their bedroom.

"Those are very happy memories," says Martin. "My Dad and I used to play The Beatles in the basement. He’d play the bass. … I always think about how privileged I am, and what an impact your parents have on the skills and interests you’re able to develop. If they hadn’t encouraged me to get a guitar and get guitar lessons, would I ever have done it on my own?"

Though music was seminal to Martin’s childhood, it was quickly put on pause in the face of other pursuits and other challenges. In their mid-teens, shortly after going all in on comedy, they got getting kicked out of home and were left to make it on their own as a performer. After bouncing around the Toronto scene, they moved to London at 21, where their world opened. More than 200 comedy clubs were on offer on any given night, and the twelve years Martin spent in the city, they tell me, were defining.

"London was very good to me," they say of that period. "Man, it was high drama and fun and my 20s. I was going up to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival every summer for, like, nine years in a row. I never went to university or finished high school, so it felt like I was getting my university experience up at this comedy festival for a month every summer. Yeah, I just had a great time."

Snippets of that period – and the hardship that preceded it – made the basis of Feel Good, Martin’s standout autobiographical series, which rans for two seasons between 2020 and 2022. The show Martin was vaulted into international acclaim and was, in many ways, the culmination of all their work to date at that point. Getting Feel Good out was like putting something to rest and being able to move on to the next.

With songwriting, Martin realised they had a form to express themselves that, in some ways, was less draining, allowing them to show up exactly as themselves without the burden of looking for a laugh or standing exactly behind their story in vivid detail. For processing a period of their life in which change was abundant, this realisation was both exhilarating and therapeutic. If in standup, for example, narrative turns must be calculated and precise for the joke to hit and the audience to understand, in songwriting, those turns can be vague and veiled, precise enough to only convey shreds of meaning but still be enough for a listener to see themselves reflected back.

"You can bare even more of yourself in songwriting," Martin explains. "You don’t have to be like, ‘I’m Mae and this thing happened to me and this is how I feel about it.’ You can almost – because there’s a slight veil there – be more vulnerable."

"You have to unlearn the muscle in you that wants to lift people out of that reverie and release the tension with the punch line," they continue. "I had to get over the muscle memory that says if it’s quiet it’s bad. With comedy, you have to be specific and clear about what your point of view is and what you’re trying to say, and the rhythm and structure of it dictates so much. But there’s something really freeing about being able to use metaphor and not have as clear a point of view and people let people project their own shit onto it, because life is so nuanced and complex like that. Sometimes it can’t be distilled into a couple of phrases. You can express it much more clearly by talking around it."

At first, as when they were younger, Martin’s songwriting process mostly occurred alone. Generally, songs would come to them – as they describe it – at night and all in one piece. Maybe it was a dinner, a date, a movie they’d just watched – something that triggered a feeling that almost had no choice but to fall out of them in a song. Occasionally, they’d play these songs for Charles Watson – Rebecca Taylor's ex-Slow Club bandmate – with whom they collaborated on the Feel Good soundtrack, or close childhood friends Jason Couse and Wes Marskell of Canadian indie-rockers The Darcys.

With Watson, Martin had their first taste of musical control. Sitting in the studio with him to produce the score for Feel Good, they witnessed firsthand how music could change the whole emotional texture of a project. Watson rightly recognised a sharp ear in Martin, encouraging them to follow their instincts wherever they went.

Couse and Marskell were similar musical safe spaces for Martin. "Jason went to camp with me in Northern Ontario, and he was the cool kid at camp," they recall. "He doesn’t feel like that because no one ever feels that. But to me, he was this blonde, tanned guy, and he’d play like Ben Harper by the campfire."

When Martin had their first real batch of songs collected in that early L.A. period, Watson, Couse, and Marskell were their first calls. Quickly, the three of them banded together – with Watson even flying over from England – and recorded six tracks. "I’d written one song called ‘Big Bear,’ and I played that to my friend Charles, and then I got to L.A., and I wrote four or five other songs. Once I had those, I played them for friends, and then we flushed them out. So, most of the songs came in a really intense period around two years ago."

"I thought maybe I’d put like one out on Instagram six months from then," Martin admits. "But then at the end of that process, we felt like maybe it could be an album."

The project, though at this point an ‘official’ joint venture with Universal Music Canada, grew organically and at Martin’s own pace. They were in crunch time in the writers’ room for Wayward, so their only option was to record in the evenings and on weekends. In the end, it was the best way the process could have come about, allowing it to stay organic and keep its integrity. "We managed to keep that intimacy," Martin tells me. "I really wanted it to stay fun."

"I always think, with comedy, I write best when I’m trying to make a specific person laugh," Martin explains. "With music, it’s similarly gratifying when you are writing with someone’s ear in mind." Really, Martin just wanted to make something that they and their friends would like.

From its inception to its final edits the record was really the joyous creation of friends. The bulk of it was done in Couse’s home studio in Echo Park, a place the group could unwind and relax. "I guess I didn’t realise that with singing, there’s an emotional element to it," Martin tells me. "You’ve got to feel comfortable. And sometimes, being thrown into a professional studio was intimidating to me. I sing a lot better when I’m relaxed and sitting down and having a tea, talking about relationships in between and getting to mess around." Working with such close friends and peers, Martin was allowed to wrestle with the learning curve of picking up a new skill. As with any new task, when they started, their ambition sat far below their abilities. But with the shepherding of Couse, Watson, and Marskell, those abilities started coming to the fore. "They just encouraged me to push myself."

Above all else, making the record was really yet another journey of Martin figuring out how to be comfortable in their own skin and in their own brain. "I think that’s why I called the album I’m A TV," Martin says. "I think a lot about how we tend to define ourselves in relation to other people and the way our heartbreak kind of marks us and defines our worldview. I always think, if you untangled all of that and if you’d never met another person, who would you be? I’m A TV was meant to be about all that static electricity of other people’s projections."

So much of Martin’s experience as a performer has been presenting their selfhood in a way that was appealing and interesting to others. Packaging oneself under the guise of relatability, they tell me, could ultimately end up very limiting. "Life is not tied up so neatly, and our experiences don’t have a beginning and a middle and an end," they said. Choosing to call this era I’m A TV, then, was almost a pushback on that mode of operating, labelling Martin’s historical modes of operating by name while also flipping them on their head.

Sonically influenced by the singer-songwriter idols of Martin’s adolescence, the record is a plush and earthy collection of ten earnest, compelling tracks. Cuts like "Brought Me Round" and "Stowaway" invite listeners into dreamy soundscapes worthy of rainy days and long nights, while others like "Try Me" and "Big Bear" feel expansive and triumphant.

"I was kind of worried it would be all break up songs and love songs," Martin jokes. "But, there’s a real mix on the album. There’s a lot of nostalgia. Similar themes that come up in lots of stuff I write, just about nostalgia and memory and identity and not being sure about anything."

On one cut, for example, Martin describes the aimless summer of the Toronto Garbage Strike in 2002. It’s a period forever etched into the psyche of the city, a weird moment in time memorialised for all that lived through it. In addition to being a personally significant period, it’s a nice touch for a Canadian act who hasn't forgetten their roots. Often, artists leave Canada and almost hide their nationality like a taboo secret. But for Martin, it’s the opposite. Toronto features prominently across Martin’s projects, and everywhere they work they cite Canadian artists and performers as invaluable influences. "I think that the infrastructure there is slowly building up so that hopefully Canadian talent won’t feel like they have to go elsewhere," Martin says. "And as I get older, I just seem to have a lot more love for Toronto."

"That was just a really visceral summer for me," Martin recalls, returning again to their memories of that sweaty, liminal month in the late-aughts. "I was sixteen, and there was the garbage and it was so hot, and the streets were covered in these piles of garbage. That was the summer I got kicked out of my house, and so I was running around, and it felt like a dream. Everything felt so intense. And so the song is looking back and being like, did that even happen? Whas that even real? It felt like a fever dream."

As they say, there were a lot of sofas and a lot of messes. But writing about that time musically meant not shying away from it, not being embarrassed by it, and embracing the fact that maybe that was the time when Martin truly knew themselves best. After years of commercial successes, returning to those cornerstone moments also brought an unexpected sense of freedom.

That freedom was something Martin had to lean on in the final analysis of the project. Recording themselves was one thing, but releasing was another. Being earnest, they say, was never really on their comedic path. "Funny enough, the thing that was most daunting for me about putting music out was not the audience reaction but the reaction of other comedians or musicians," they tell me. "I’m such a fan of music, and this is definitely new for me, and I have so much to learn. I’m also scared that other comedians will be, like, weird about it."

So far, the reaction has been promising. Martin tells me that just before our chat, they were exchanging messages with one of their childhood icons, Margaret Cho, who told them to lean into their earnestness. That kind of encouragement, they say, is the kind of thing they plan to lean on to lift them up as they hit the road for a short tour of the album.

With just four stops, the run is almost like a live victory lap for the project, and also an opportunity for Martin to truly see how their latest act has landed. "Playing stuff live is a totally different beast," Martin says. "I really thought that my hours as a standup would mean I would just slip into it with ease. But I found that my voice would shake. It just felt so vulnerable. It was like when I first started doing standup. My fingers would turn to sausages on the fretboard, and it was like, ‘Oh, man this is a new skill that I have to practice.'"

But even in the face of the nerves, Martin tells me that what keeps them grounded is knowing that this record and these shows are, really, just meant to be extensions of everything they’ve done all along. "I’m not trying to reinvent some identity. It is hopefully very me, and so people who relate to my stuff will tap into this as well," they say.

"If even one person plays [the album] on a road trip and cries, like, a single tear, then I’ll be thrilled," Martin says. Even when they’re not looking for it, they somehow always have the last laugh.