Folk music is often defined by what artists draw from their experiences. Maja Presnell’s worldview is arguably her greatest strength, having called places like New Zealand, Canada, Berlin, Arkansas and now Nashville home. As a singer-songwriter, Presnell aka Mynolia, blends her experiences and observations of life with her love of spectral folk, where rich harmonies mix with guitars and other textural soundscapes, evoking a haunting, atmospheric and at times otherworldly experience. Listeners who enjoy the acoustic leanings associated with folk will always be interested in what musicians have to say. It is one of the reasons by Mynolia speaks to me. Her balladry is nothing short of brilliant. For instance, her 2022 debut album All Thing Heavy is brimming with dark acoustic instrumentation and melancholic lyricism worthy of a veteran musician. Earlier this year, Mynolia shared her first new track Needle, taken from her forthcoming album Salt Around My Bed (out in mid-January, 2027), followed by Run Like Hell, Holy Line and more recently Take the Mountain by Surprise.The interplay between lyrics, music and Mynolia’s ethereal vocals on these tracks really moves me. So let me introduce you to Mynolia. Here is some of what we talked about.
Maja, I understand you are based in Nashville. But that’s not where your journey began, right? What was the spark which motivated you to a career music?
I can’t remember there ever being a spark moment actually, more like an ever present compulsion, as far back as early high school in Victoria, Canada when I would upload my rough teen songs to a website called unsigned, or write and play with my friend Claire (who now conducts a 200+ person choir, with which I got to perform some of my released songs last year). I’ve always made music but I’m a slow cooker, it wasn’t until years into living in Berlin that I made recordings I finally wanted to release as an album, so my debut All Things Heavy was truly a long time in the making.
Could you share how your personal experiences have shaped your songwriting?
My songwriting is completely shaped by personal experiences and personal observations, but I love to write about both personal and collective themes. I like to watch the world happening around me and see how it reflects back what I, just one spec of dense experience on this planet, see and feel. I’ve always been fascinated with the way natural shapes can be found at every scale; an artery, the lines of a leaf, lungs, trees, the branching out of a river etc. I think our thoughts and emotions are much the same and zooming all the way in to microscopic detail and then zooming out for the fully collective experience can really snap things into perspective, not just in a humbling way, but as a loneliness antidote.
As a musician did you always lean towards psychedelia folk or spectral folk as something you wanted to do?
I guess so, but it wasn’t a conscious decision in a genre direction. I like music with space in it. I like slow and melancholic melodies. I love picking patterns and choral vocals. That’s just the stuff that comes out of me naturally and I’ve never felt I had much control over it.
What are the little things that you hold dear in the way you approach making music?
Tuning out external noise, tuning in to what really needs to be written about, collaborating with musicians who inspire me.
For better or for worse, I can’t rush the process, so I hold dear the act of patience and quiet, usually the songs are there just waiting to be discovered. Lots of sitting on the porch with a guitar. As for the recording process, it takes a bit more grit, I can lose steam quickly, but especially with this last record, I was on my own schedule and that was a good lesson in finding the balance between self discipline and just letting it unfold. Usually the good takes and good ideas would come when I had some internal peace, a huge cup of tea and lots of time.
Which guitars, pedals or other gear help shape your unique sound?
Two guitars gave way to almost every song on the new record, a 1939 Supro Spanish Electric and an undated (but ancient) hand/homemade classical, that I got from a dear friend in Sardinia, Italy. I used a Memotron (a Berlin made keyboard, with samples from 100s of legendary Mellotrons) for many sounds. I used a Nelson Bass 6 for a bunch of the bass lines. I’ve always enjoyed implementing reversed elements so that continues to inspire me. When I brought my recordings to Rich Ruth to finish the record, he jumped in as co-producer, and together we fleshed out the songs further, he brought some epic synth and guitar looping elements to the tracks and fun items like pangi nuts and clunky bells and chimes made of house keys. Cool DIY stuff. Similarly, Pete Petelle, the drummer for Run Like Hell, Cool Night and Surrender & Ash, used wild metallic percussion and a thunder tube, which was really fun.
I’ve been obsessing over your 2022 album All Things Heavy. All the different things that hold it together weigh perfectly across ten tracks. It really is an engaging listen. Is there a song on it that you still hold close to your heart and why?
Thank you. The two that have stuck close to my heart are Goldrush and Train of Thought, the latter being a reimagining of an Armenian tradition flute song called Erzrumi Shoror which has an incredible melody, a version I really love is by a modern band called Arax. It holds some strange magic in it that I still haven’t gotten over even slightly. A real arrow to the heart.
What would you say are the differences between All Things Heavy and your upcoming release Salt Around My Bed? Do you feel that you, your ideas and your music has changed a lot since 2022?
I’m so deep in these songs that it’s hard for me to say. I think much is the same because my taste and motivations and inspirations haven’t changed much, but in 2023 I was calling All Things Heavy a debut mixtape, because it was a blending of singles and an EP I had made, not really an album with a throughline. I think Salt Around My Bed is a more thought out body of work and I’m excited for people to hear the tracks all together.
You announced your return (so to speak) earlier this year with your song Needle? What is the story behind it?
Needle is a letting go song, bursting a bubble of delusion like popping a balloon at a party. I had some potent images from my life collage together to form a retrospective on pivotal moments of change and the expiration of certain beliefs and standards.
What new ideas or experiments did you bring to your single Holy Line?
It’s the only song on the record that features Patrick McGonigle on violin, and I’d say the melody he brought to the track was the breaking open of a new sound I immediately fell in love with. In terms of writing the song, I always enjoy following the idea rather than a classical structure of verse, chorus etc. All structures are valid but I just do what the song tells me to, and this one told me to ramble and be as unstructured as the dream that the lyrics are about.
Alright, last question: Your new batch of songs leads me to believe that your forthcoming album Salt Around My Bed is going to sound very textural, very conversational. I can’t wait for it to drop early next year. Is that a fair assessment? Can you reveal something surprising about it?
It definitely is very textural, especially with the blending of Rich Ruth and my shared tendencies, we layered sometimes delicately and sometimes noisily and I’m so glad we took some sonic risks. I think Spencer Cullum’s pedal steel throughout the record brings in a warmth that I hadn’t experienced before. Also, there’s a track called Groceries that is quite direct and conversational I guess, and we wanted the tension of its topic to be reflected in the production, so underneath the simple guitar and vocals, Rich Ruth played in a one take of living noise on a Lyra 8 synth, adding in wild swells and a lot of attitude to the track.
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