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Maylee Todd does not shy away from spectacle. During a video conversation last September, the singersongwriter, producer, and multimedia artist tells me about the setup for an upcoming show in Los Angeles, where she is currently based. “I have this big inflatable mouth,” she says, laughing. “It’s seven feet by seven feet and, as it turns out, quite heavy—I think it’s going to have to go into its own luggage.” Todd has long gravitated toward playful, large-scale world-building in her music. For a string of Toronto shows, she hung up a giant fabric vulva installation that audiences walked through to enter a projection-filled concert space she dubbed a “virtual womb.” Later, during the COVID -19 lockdowns, she taught herself 3-D modelling and body tracking to create Maloo, a virtual avatar of herself that she performed alongside via projections and in virtual reality. Todd’s recorded output has also moved in wide-ranging directions: Her earliest releases drew heavily from soul and funk and featured harp and warm vocals, while her more recent work experiments with a softer, synthforward sound and delves deeper into new technologies. She has taken her all-embracing creative work on tour across North America, parlayed it into interdisciplinary performing and curating opportunities at NPR and Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, and garnered accolades from entities like Women in Music Canada, SOCAN, the Canadian Screen Awards, and the U.K.’s AIM Awards. But for all the unapologetic genre-jumping in her music, Todd maintains a singular presence. Hers is not so much a signature 30 musıc works #150 | winter 2024/25 Maylee Todd in her home studio in Los Angeles, surrounded by instruments, wearing custom top by Caroline Mangosing's VINTA and skirt by NorBlack NorWhite, both Canadian fashion designers.
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G O V E A J O S Ė Í A M A R B Y P H O T O sound as it is a signature spirit: a throughline of playfulness and an experimental ethos that delights in the possibilities of the strange. “Basically, the approach is: How much frickin’ fun can I have, moving forward?” she says. “Also, what are some of the weirdest sounds that I could use—the oddest sounds I can make musical?” Todd grew up in the small community of Oak Ridges, north of Toronto, with two older sisters who played in bands and dabbled in fashion. Her mother was an avid quilter, and her father—a locksmith by trade—moonlighted as an Elvis impersonator. Her grandfather, also a locksmith, was known for his zealous interest in UFOs, and for his performances as an escape artist under the alias The Great Toddini. “At a young age, I had this video camera I would not part with,” she says. “I was really into comedy, so I would remake films like Scrooged, the Bill Murray movie, with Barbies. All my school projects were in video form, but it wasn’t ever about the project, it was about the commercials I injected into the project that no one asked for. That’s really where it started: rascalling around with video.” Todd moved to Toronto in her early twenties and dove into as much music and performance as she could. She studied comedy at Humber College, and picked up the Paraguayan harp, an instrument that would eventually become a characteristic part of her sound world. She joined Henri Fabergé and the Adorables, a self-described satirical “sprawling indie rock collective” that formed in the mid-2000s, a time when the city was flush with a flurry of DIY music-making. “That was such a freeing time for me,” Todd says. “It was the indie-rock days—bands that [had] like a hundred people, everyone also doing their own projects, and everyone supporting each other.” Her first three albums—Choose Your Own Adventure (2010), Escapology (2013), and Acts of Love (2017), all released on Toronto’s Do Right! Music—along with the solo musical and multimedia projects that followed, serve as a statement of her refusal to be locked into a particular genre or style. Riffing on her day job as a personal trainer, Todd developed “Sweatshop Hop,” an interactive aerobics series that was equal parts comedy and performance; it gained a cult following and eventually aired as segments on the cable channel MuchMoreMusic. The idea informed her elaborate, comic-book-inspired video for “Aerobics in Space” (a playful single from Choose Your Own Adventure), which featured Todd in the role of cosmic superhero. Other tracks from the same album further broadened the scope of Todd’s songwriting: “Summer Sounds” opens with soft, breezy vocals over what feels like a standard bossa nova groove, but by the two-minute mark it reveals itself to be a distinct diptych, with the initial beat unravelling into a more densely orchestrated, funk-influenced second half. Casting a similarly wide net, Todd’s selfproduced Acts of Love, the final release of her Toronto years, coalesces around an intimate, soulful sound; she describes it as a “bedroom record,” both in terms of production and aesthetic. Across seventeen tracks, it treads a meandering line between stripped-down R&B and dancier, upbeat synthpop. Earlier versions of some of the songs first appeared on Virtual Womb, a multimedia concert-installation she toured from 2010 to 2018. Audiences arrived at the performance space by walking through a large-scale, hanging textile sculpture of a vulva, created by Toronto artist Roxanne Ignatius. Upon entering a darkened space filled by live visuals projected on the ceiling, they were encouraged to lie down and observe as Todd performed live arrangements of her music—a psychedelic, ego-less space that Todd describes as “just gestation.” Film producer and fashion designer Caroline Mangosing met Todd in 2007, while running the Kapisanan Philippine Centre winter 2024/25 | musıc works #150 31

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Maylee Todd does not shy away from spectacle. During a video conversation last September, the singersongwriter, producer, and multimedia artist tells me about the setup for an upcoming show in Los Angeles, where she is currently based. “I have this big inflatable mouth,” she says, laughing. “It’s seven feet by seven feet and, as it turns out, quite heavy—I think it’s going to have to go into its own luggage.”

Todd has long gravitated toward playful, large-scale world-building in her music. For a string of Toronto shows, she hung up a giant fabric vulva installation that audiences walked through to enter a projection-filled concert space she dubbed a “virtual womb.” Later, during the COVID -19 lockdowns, she taught herself 3-D modelling and body tracking to create Maloo, a virtual avatar of herself that she performed alongside via projections and in virtual reality. Todd’s recorded output has also moved in wide-ranging directions: Her earliest releases drew heavily from soul and funk and featured harp and warm vocals, while her more recent work experiments with a softer, synthforward sound and delves deeper into new technologies. She has taken her all-embracing creative work on tour across North America, parlayed it into interdisciplinary performing and curating opportunities at NPR and Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, and garnered accolades from entities like Women in Music Canada, SOCAN, the Canadian Screen Awards, and the U.K.’s AIM Awards.

But for all the unapologetic genre-jumping in her music, Todd maintains a singular presence. Hers is not so much a signature

30 musıc works #150 | winter 2024/25

Maylee Todd in her home studio in Los Angeles, surrounded by instruments, wearing custom top by Caroline Mangosing's VINTA and skirt by NorBlack NorWhite, both Canadian fashion designers.

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