Maya Goldblum, (a.k.a. Queen Bonobo) is a North Idaho native whose primary goal in relocating to Ireland in 2016 was to study the music of her ancestral roots. She lived abroad for three years, all of which lent to the creation of her latest EP, Sail From This Life, recorded a week before leaving Ireland. The EP portrays the tumultuous transformational side of her time abroad and the ways she learned to shed her fears, doubts, and self-judgement, in order to get out of her own way. Northern Ireland, specifically Derry, was where Goldblum built the foundations of her music career, met a love of her life, and built a community of exceptional weirdos, one unlike she had ever experienced before.

Throw Me In, the first track on the new EP, was birthed at the start of her time away at University - a time when she felt estranged and overwhelmed with being alone on her twenty first birthday in a new country. That month, she met Jack Kelly, a young local jazz musician. In Maya’s words, “I want to describe the years I spent with Jack in order to voice the impact he had on my heart and music, but I’m afraid words would only scathe the surface of our love’s depth.”

Track two, ‘Octopus Lady,’ emerged sequentially, on Maya’s way back home, visiting America. While out dancing at a Seattle music venue called ‘The Sea Monster,’ a mural of an octopus wrapped around a lady caught her eye. In that moment, she was filled with the anxiety of being exposed and alone on the dance floor and knew that she needed to either step off or overcome her worry of judgments and dance freely. The chorus (‘Octopus lady, you’re not an octopus, wrapped up inside your fears, taken over by a sea monster’) along with the complexities of the rest of her lyrics, capture her ability to relate what she sees to how she feels in a universal yet distinctive manner. The final track, ‘Summer Drift’ leaked out of her musical subconscious in the winter of 2019, after watching world-renowned drummer, David Lyttle perform his piece, 'Summer Always Passes” - a song about accepting change.

Discovering it was her last summer due to the inability to acquire another visa, Maya decided to orchestrate a closing project. Her music had radically evolved since the making of her debut album, Light Shadow Boom Boom, in 2018, and she wanted to curate her most relevant work before leaving.

Sail From This Life encapsulates her anxieties and the surrender of her Irish love’s inevitable end. These songs examine the process of her accepting the trajectory life put her on, whether sweet or bitter, and transports the listener to a moody, dark, oceanic landscape. Each song shares a common theme of uncomfortable lessons of change; they move through weighted burden, sadness, the rattling depths of the ocean, and, finally, up towards the light and freeness of "getting outside of yourself" at the surface.

Together, Jack Charles Kelly (double bassist & co-producer), Andrew McCoubrey (drummer, percussionist, co-producer, & mixing), James Anderson (drummer & percussionist), Joleen McClaughlin (harpist), Neil Burns (Rhodes), Peter Baldwin (sound engineer), and Fergal Davis (mastering) all brought their own unique voices to the production of the EP.