About

Maya Dorn is a Bay Area based singer-songwriter.  Apart from her solo projects she is a member of the electro pop futurists Sweet Snacks, and long time member of the 10 piece Afro-beat ensemble Aphrodesia.   Maya has toured internationally and worked with such luminaries as Rob Garza from Thievery Coorporation, Jerry Casale of Devo and has been the singing vagina in Sarah Silverman’s ‘Jesus is Magic’ show at Joe’s Pub in NYC. Her band Sweet Snacks was nominated for an Independent Music Award in 2010 for their song ‘Shanghai’ which they wrote for their tour in China last year.

••••••••••••••••• Alternate biography by Lila Nelson••••••••••••••

Maya Dorn has a voice like a great big sail:  a wind inside, carry you away to beautiful unknown places, kind of voice.  She is sitting in my living room, lucky me, singing ragas. “In Boston, when I was really down n’ out I had a friend who told me to sing one note—to ground—just one note.  I did, I sang one note for a whole year.”
Ragas are her morning practice.  These are the scales in Eastern Indian music that make the “songs.”  Why Ragas?  Because Maya is life-long friends with her true voice.  No, I mean it.  This is the stuff she was meant to do.
Maybe it was growing up to the coo-ing sounds of her father, poet Edward Dorn.  Or perhaps the spaces in between his words, that gave her room to find her own.  But something about her voice, even as she sits across from me speaking, fills in the spaces of the room with honest, clear resonance.  (I have instruments strewn all about my living room and when they are sung to, they know.)
And this is the great oxymoron  when it comes to hearing an artist who makes things sound beautiful and easy (because they ARE easy, for them)—you will never see the hours and hours spent simmering in what’s the word, MUSIC?  VIBRATION?  IT.  Every great artist I know has this in common:  THEY KEEP DOING IT.  THEY CAN’T NOT DO IT.  IT IS WHAT THEY DO.  “It’s all one note!”
It would follow that from that one clear, resonate note, you could go anywhere.  And Maya has done that.  She’s toured internationally with her “1st world nano-tech pop from the future” trio, Sweets Snacks.  Before that she was with the 10 piece afro beat ensemble Aphrodesia, of which she toured extensively including a tour in West Africa where they opened for Femi Kuti at his New African Shrine in Lagos, Nigeria.  More about that here.
This is what we all strive for.  An integrated life.  Where art meets the spiritual, meets the social…and so on.  And they are all sailing briskly together across a somewhat tumultuous sea.  And if you are lucky enough to have the wind of your muse fill the sail of voice, on the boat that is carrying all that cargo, you will take the world places.  Maya is.