Maeve Aickin

On November 13, 2020, seventeen-year-old singer/songwriter Maeve Aickin released her debut album, Waiting Rooms, through Corkscrew Records. The record was written between 2018 and 2020, preceding and following Aickin’s diagnosis with Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome. Aickin’s chronic illness has cast a shadow over nearly every aspect of her life, and the lyrical content of Waiting Rooms grapples with the process of accommodating change as one becomes alienated from their body. She recorded and produced the entirety of the album between her bedroom and bathroom early in the quarantine with borrowed school equipment, and enlisted former collaborator Adam Tucker of Signaturetone Recording (Blue Ox, The Crinn) to mix and master. Waiting Rooms is an expansion of Aickin’s 2019 EP of the same name, which was described by For the Rabbits as “the start of something incredible.”

Maeve has spent the last nine years in Mumbai, India, and was recently transplanted to her birthplace of Minneapolis, Minnesota due to the pandemic. The circumstances under which the album was recorded are ever-present, and made explicit in standout track “Harriet.” As Aickin reflects on her transitions both to suburban living and solitude, she comes to the conclusion that times of upheaval elevate and complicate the most base emotions. This idea recurs throughout the record as Aickin deals in the language of extremes, navigating the spaces between faith and doubt, sickness and health, solitude and overstimulation. The lead single, “Temple,” cements Aickin’s internal conflict in a single phrase: “I never know who I’m praying to.” While many of the tracks deal explicitly with the consequences of chronic illness, songs like “Park” take on classic teenage experiences through a self-aware and earnest lens.

Aickin was inspired to teach herself the guitar two years ago after seeing Julien Baker in concert, and can directly trace the impact of watching an out lesbian woman sing about faith on a major stage to the conception of Waiting Rooms. Taken in totality, the work comes off as a young woman who has spent her life suppressing her emotions through guilt finally articulating the contours of her experience. Aickin even goes so far as to open a dialogue with her future self, initiated within “Noël” and culminating in the haunting acapella closer, “Boring.” Directly riffing off of The Pet Shop Boys’ “Being Boring,” Aickin takes the ethos of the seminal track and uses it to parse her anxieties and hopes for the future. She implicitly speaks to her generation’s existential fears due to climate change and global capitalism, presenting an idealized future with the tragic awareness that it is unlikely to materialize.