Live Music: Bella Dagdagan + Maita

Bella Dagdagan is a musician from Yakima Washington; recently, they have been writing songs and performing them around the Yakima Valley, both solo and with their band ‘Crone’. Their music, leaning towards the style of alternative folk with a touch of indie rock, is a tapestry of melodies and nostalgic story-telling weaved with the heavy thread of longing.

When Maria Maita-Keppeler was in college, she studied the ancient art of Japanese woodblock printmaking. “By the nature of the medium, you have to be bold,” she says — but, you also have to be delicate, deliberate, exacting. All those little cuts on their own add up to the whole — to a picture, a story, a life. 

The Japanese-American singer-songwriter applies that same approach to her band, MAITA; she only writes songs she intends to finish. She only makes cuts in service of the whole. And once the debris has been blown away, the melodies remain — vibrant, sharp, and often heartbreaking. The band’s latest LP, want, out July 25 via Fluff & Gravy Records, is all of the above. A razor’s edge look at a relationship in turmoil, the record serves to strip away everything undesired in Maita-Keppeler’s life, leaving behind only that titular word: want.

“The album allowed me this opportunity to be a little more courageous about my feelings,” Maita-Keppeler says. “I grew up feeling very much like the peacekeeper. Now, I have to be really assertive about what I want for myself.” 

Recorded at Echo Echo in Portland, Oregon in the winter of 2022, the record serves as the most crystallized of MAITA’s works thus far; like Maita-Keppeler’s screen prints, which she does for each song she writes, it’s a stark, arresting image of a place in lost time. “We felt like the songwriting had a kind of visceral quality to it,” she says. “I love high highs and low lows.” Through it all, though, runs the theme of wanting. “These songs all explore desire within the framework of a long-term relationship where you’re just trying to push and dig deeper,” Maita-Keppeler says. “I feel like not a lot of songs really get to the core of those struggles and how nuanced they actually are.”